The Night the School Gym Opened

Two phone calls and a radio

People ask me why I didn’t just call the owner, and I did.

Mr. Ketterman lives outside Minneapolis and owns six truck stops in three states. His office line rolled to voicemail after five o’clock, and his cell number was in Dwight’s desk, behind a door that was now locked.

I left a message anyway. My voice sounded strange to me, flat and polite, like a person reading a grocery list.

Then I tried my husband. Mark runs a county plow for Alder County Roads, and he had been out since two that afternoon, forty miles north on a gravel grid road where a rancher’s cattle were drifting toward the highway.

He had a radio. He did not have a cell signal. I tried anyway and got nothing but a ring that went nowhere.

I sat in my pickup with the heater running and my hands on the wheel, and I looked at forty trucks.

Each one had a person inside who was about to find out the pumps were off. Some had been parked there since four o’clock and were already down to a quarter tank.

You have to understand what kind of person I am, so you can understand why the next part surprised me. I am forty-one years old. I have been the custodian at Alder School for nine years. I make $17.80 an hour, and I have never once argued with a boss or a relative at a family dinner.

I fix things. I mop what’s spilled. I change the light bulbs that no one else can reach.

What I also have is keys. Gym, boiler room, kitchen, front office, the roof hatch. A ring of them that weighs about a pound and jingles in my coat pocket.

I looked at the lot, and then I looked at the ring, and I thought: the gym is the biggest heated room for forty miles. It’s a mile and a half away.

The thing I couldn’t get past was that nobody had told me I could.

A custodian can’t open a school building to the public on her own say-so. There’s liability, there’s an insurance policy, and there are a hundred other things I’m not paid to think about. So I did the only sensible thing.

I called Janice Hoyt at home.

Janice is our superintendent. She was in her sixties then, a former math teacher with reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she answered on the fourth ring with a television going behind her.

“Nicole? What’s wrong?”

“Janice, the interstate’s closed and Dwight Rooney just locked the truck stop with forty drivers still in the lot. It’s twenty below. I want to open the gym.”

There was a pause long enough for me to hear a game show audience applaud.

“How many people?”

“Forty. Maybe more by midnight.”

“Do you have the key?”

“I have all the keys.”

“Then call Gordon for the fire code,” Janice said. “Get the heat up. Get the kitchen open. And Nicole, if anybody asks who told you to, you tell them I did.”

I will never forget that. She did not ask me one question about cost or permission. She just took the weight, the way a good boss does.

Gordon Gunderson is our fire chief and also runs the hardware store. He answered on the first ring, which told me he was already listening to the scanner.

“Gym holds three hundred by code,” Gordon said. “Forty is nothing. I’ll bring every cot from the fire hall, that’s twelve. Get on the phone to the Lutheran women. They’ve got the rest.”

“How many cots do the Lutherans have?”

“Enough,” Gordon said. “They’ve been waiting forty years for somebody to need them.”