Even in the face of a natural disaster-like, say, Hurricane Katrina-people still cling to the belief that they alone can stop Mother Nature and, in the process, save their homes. Looked at unemotionally, it seems silly: Your life for wood, drywall, and furniture? But people tend to form bonds with places, to the point that it’s nearly impossible to separate a person from their possessions.
So if you absolutely must get people to leave their homes, you have to make it seem like their possessions are actively causing the problems.
Most people don’t know anything about their homes. Oh, they know the address. They know which bedroom is drafty in the winter, which is broiling in the summer; they know that the microwave takes thirty second to melt butter and ten seconds to warm up pie; they might even know how to turn off their gas in the event of a leak.
What they don’t know, however, is what they cannot see or choose to avoid… which is why I went door-to-door in the cul-de-sac where the Banshees’ weed farm was located to let people know that there was noxious fungus growing underneath their over-mortgaged dream homes. In order to appear to be an absolute authority on the topic, Sam and I rolled up in front of the homes in a white van. A van and a clipboard could get you into the Kremlin at the height of Communism.
“Noxious?” the man who answered the door at the house next door to the Banshees’ said.
“Yup. Yup,” I said. I possessed two things at that moment meant to instill perfect confidence in this fine gentleman: I was holding a clipboard and I had on a denim shirt. I also had a red bandanna in my hand and every few seconds I used it to wipe off my forehead. “And flammable, too.”
“Flammable?” The man was horrified.
“Yeah, seems like it’s one of those funguses that feeds off of water-based paints. You probably been reading about that? Yeah, see, what had happened is that, you know, back further on in the day when people didn’t care so much about the environment, well, they just dumped their used paint into the gutter. Come to find, ten years later, that stuff is coming to roost. House on Fisher Island blew just this morning.”
“Oh, my,” the man said. “Well, how much time do I have to gather my belongings?”
“None,” I said. “We found a fester under this street. We gotta get all of you out so we can get a hazmat team down there to spray it all with one of those secret government potions.”
“I have a dog. Can I grab my dog?”
“Yeah, old Fido is probably more susceptible, actually. I’d get him out in the next ten minutes there, buddy.”
“Why wasn’t this on television?” he said. It was a good question for him to ask. He should have asked it about five questions previous.
“Sir, we can’t have a pandemic on our hands. We start telling people there’s a fungus-humongous growing in the ground that will blow them up, we’ll have widespread panic. National Guard would get called out. It would just be like giving Al Qaida a blueprint on terror, you know?”
There was no color left in the man’s face five minutes later when he came running out of his house-a barking Maltese under one arm, a laptop under the other. On the corner, Sam ushered a family of five out of a cream-colored split-level.
That left just one more house on the cul- de-sac to evacuate: the Banshees’ smartly appointed factory. Over the course of the last twenty minutes, while Sam and I flushed out the other six families found on Me-Laina Court, I kept my eye on the house for any activity. I saw nothing. The same Volvo SUV that was depicted in the photo Sam pulled up on his computer was parked in the driveway, but oddly there wasn’t a drip of oil to be found beneath it on the pavement.
I walked up behind the car and acted very interested in my clipboard while I took a basic inventory of what was known.
The back window of the Volvo SUV was covered in stickers. OBAMA