The Fifth Risk(50)

At dinner one night I played a game with Kim Klockow and her friends Hank Jenkins-Smith and Carol Silva, the co-directors of the University of Oklahoma’s Center for Risk & Crisis Management. They’d devoted their lives to studying people’s response to risk. I’d wondered who, and what, was most likely to survive a tornado. If you were a tree, for instance, you’d much rather be a willow than an oak, as a willow tree bends. The risk experts all agreed they’d bet money on a horse over a cow, and on a dog over a cat. (“Dogs are more likely to obey.”) They became less certain when we turned to the more complicated matter of human beings. Because they were intellectually honest academics, they were reluctant to generalize. “People aren’t necessarily good at managing one kind of risk just because they are good at managing another kind of risk,” said Carol. “People will be deathly afraid of one kind of risk and blasé about another.”

Still, they played along, in a hypothetical game of survival. They all agreed that you’d obviously bet money on a rich person over a poor person. (“People who live in mobile homes are thirty times more likely to die.”) They’d take a parent over a pet owner, as animals aren’t allowed in public storm shelters. (“Pets will kill you.”) They argued a bit, but finally decided they’d take a woman over a man, as men tended to be more risk-seeking. “Men go outside and look around,” said Carol. “You see this in the tornado videos on YouTube. The wife sticking her head out the door screaming at her husband,” Hey, git your ass inside!’” Finally, I asked: a liberal or a conservative? Eighty-three and a half percent of Beckham County had voted for Donald Trump. What did that say about their ability to survive a tornado? The liberal has the advantage of trusting the government’s warning, said Hank, but the conservative has advantages, too. It depended on what kind of conservative he was, they decided. If he was a radical individualist, he was a bad risk: you’d bet on the liberal to survive. But if the conservative belonged to a strong social network—a church, say—he might hear a tornado warning, and trust it, before it was too late. “What you need is one person inside the network who is a trusted source, who trusts the government,” said Hank. You need Lonnie Risenhoover.

I had in mind a final game of survivor, but I never got around to asking them about it. Who is more likely to survive a tornado: the person who has personally experienced one, or the person who has not, and why? The advantage of experience is more or less obvious; the disadvantage of not having had the experience less so. But it might be the more important factor. All kinds of things might happen to you in life. By sheer accident only a few of them do. That tiny subset shapes your view of the world, to an alarming degree. If a tornado has never hit your town, you think it never will. You might try to imagine what will befall you if it does. The reality of the thing will still shock you.

In the weeks after the Elk City tornado, Lonnie Risenhoover toured the damage with various government officials. A man from the Federal Emergency Management Agency came through to determine who was eligible for disaster relief. While driving the man around Elk City, Lonnie spotted Miss Finley. Her house was a ruin and her barn was gone: surely she was eligible for relief. Lonnie stopped so the FEMA guy might speak with her. “You know,” said Miss Finley, “for the last ten years I prayed for a tornado to come and take that barn. I didn’t think it would take the house, too.” She seemed to think her reasoning self-evident. The FEMA guy said he didn’t understand: Why had she been praying for a tornado to take her barn? “Every time I pull out of the driveway I’m looking at that red barn,” she said. “And every time I pull into the driveway I’m looking at the red barn.” At which point Lonnie asked the FEMA guy if he was ready to leave. He wasn’t. He was still puzzled: Why did it bother the woman to look at her red barn? “That barn,” said Miss Finley, “is where my husband committed suicide ten years ago.”

And so you might have good reason to pray for a tornado, whether it comes in the shape of swirling winds, or a politician. You imagine the thing doing the damage that you would like to see done, and no more. It’s what you fail to imagine that kills you.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank Graydon Carter for a fabulous decade-long run at Vanity Fair that ended with the second chapter of this book. It was never obvious that anyone would want to read what had interested me about the United States government. Doug Stumpf, my magazine editor for the past decade, persuaded me that, at this strange moment in American history, others might share my enthusiasm. As the material mushroomed into a book and threatened to receive more attention than I expected, I was relieved and grateful that Janet Byrne agreed once again to make me appear to be a better writer than I am. And I’m not sure what I would do without Starling Lawrence, who has edited my books since I began writing them. Podcasts?