Season 2, episode 4: facing the mob // Wednesday, October 28, 2020
This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about coming together in a world that pulls us apart. From Oakland, California to Hamilton, Massachusetts, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.
I didn’t think the day could get any worse.
In the span of 24 hours, we’d said goodbye to the friends and the home we’d never wanted to leave. We’d driven over 500 miles and two state lines before we finally escaped the wildfire smoke. A stranger had yelled in my face about what a terrible mother I was. And the kids had degenerated from griping about their Zoom calls to clobbering each other in the back seat. It felt like we’d hit rock bottom in this Pandemic Odyssey.
And then the bottom dropped out.
Which is a little bit how life feels these days. Here in the U.S. it’s the final week of election season. The battle lines have been drawn, and the mud slung repeatedly. Here in Massachusetts, our temporary home, nearly every yard has a sign pledging its allegiance--to Trump, or Biden, or--my favorite, any functioning adult. It’s clearer than ever that we are a nation divided.
In the month we spent driving from California to Massachusetts, I sought out conversations that would help me understand how we got here. Stories that help me remember that when we get down to it, we’re all just trying to figure out the best way to live--even if we come to very different conclusions. Mostly what I found is that no matter who I was talking to, there was a lot of fear--fear about the future, about what would happen after the elections, about who is benefiting from our system and who’s getting left behind, about what our country actually stands for.
But in the midst of all of that fear, there was something else, too. Something I hadn’t expected. Even in the face of fear, these people were responding by reaching out to others instead of shutting down. By getting more connected with their community instead of more insular.
And so this week, I’m continuing this pandemic Odyssey, but I’m also going to introduce you to some of the characters I met on the journey. None of them offered neat and tidy solutions, and all of them challenged my assumptions. But they also helped to restore my faith in humanity at a time when that faith had been shaken.
Which brings me to today’s episode.
If you’re just joining us, I suggest going back to the beginning of the season. You may even want to go back to season 1, which is full of conversations that have given me a lot of hope during this very discouraging year.
In the last couple of episodes, I shared the story of how our family abruptly left our home in Oakland and set out across the country. It was a move we didn’t want to make--even temporarily--but that felt like our only option.
This part of our story picks up a few hours after we faced the Cyclops of Las Vegas, which I talked about in episode 1. We were feeling sufficiently bad about our parenting, grumpy with each other, sad about leaving our home, and too exhausted to muster hope.
But as we drove through Utah and the skies began to clear, we felt a little clearer, too. We felt some of the grip of what was behind us loosen. We remembered that there were still people and places to look forward to. We’d decided that if we were going to drive across the country, we’d embrace the adventure, see places we’d always wanted to, and visit the family and friends who would have us.
The first of those places was Zion National Park. I spent the first six years of my life in Salt Lake City, but if I ever went to Zion, I have no memory of it. I’d wanted to go there ever since I was a teenager, when I saw pictures of the red rock formations that looked like a painter’s dream.
It was magic hour as we entered the gates of Zion National Park, and even the kids took a collective gasp when they looked out the window at the setting sun lighting up the canyon. I pulled out my phone to take a picture.
And that’s when I noticed the explosion of texts that had just come in. Twenty-four of them. We’d had surprisingly few stretches of reception as we’d traveled across California, Nevada, and Utah. The few texts that had come through had been well wishes from friends.
But the cluster of messages that came through now were not friendly greetings.
While we’d been driving from Vegas to Zion, our first AirBNB guests had shown up and promptly thrown a party in our back yard complete with cases of beer, music so loud that it rattled the walls two houses over, and thick clouds of smoke from cigarettes and weed. No one was wearing masks or social distancing. By the time I got these messages, the party had been going for hours.
Our neighborhood is one of small starter homes packed in close together. Five of our neighbors can see into our yard from their back porch. Most of us have kids, so it’s not unusual to hear a baby crying or--more often than not--one of my kids throwing a tantrum or yelling too loud on the trampoline.
But over the years our neighbors have become friends. All of us enjoy being hospitable, and since our houses are small and the weather is nice most of the year, we do most of our entertaining in the backyard. In pre-COVID times, most weekends you could hear the sounds of music and laughter and clinking glasses floating over our fences. Even so, it was rare that anyone complained about the noise.
But now I had text messages from every single neighbor in the area, including from an introverted bachelor who we’ve only seen a few times. He’d sent texts and left me a voicemail--something he’s never done in twelve years of sharing a property line. If I was hearing from him, then it must be pretty bad.
The original Odyssey begins not with Odysseus on his journey, but with the home he left behind. There’s a rowdy mob taking over his house, and his wife and son Telemechas are panicking, but don’t know what to do about it. It takes divine intervention--the goddess Athena disguises herself and visits Telemachus--to solve the problem.
But in my situation there was no goddess to the rescue, and I was too far away to solve the problem myself.
As we drove through the park, I thumbed out responses as fast as I could. And then my three bars of reception turned to two, and then one, and then zero. All of my messages bounced back.
I looked out the window and tried to breathe. We were driving through tunnels of red rock and some of the prettiest scenery I’d ever laid eyes on--but there was a lump in my throat and I felt like I might throw up. I imagined stained upholstery, cigarette butts left burning, our home forever smelling like an old motel room. We usually clean our house ourselves, but because of AirBNB’s increased cleaning measures and how fast we’d packed up our lives, we knew we’d never make it if we didn’t have help. The two other times we’d rented our house on AirBNB while we traveled we ended up pulling all-nighters to get it ready in time. It cost us $300 to have the house professionally deep cleaned--$200 more than the cleaning fee we were charging. At the time, we’d told ourselves it was worth the cost. Now it felt like a waste.
I dropped off Nate and the kids at the campsite and kept driving. It took me another half hour before I found a place in range. I called our neighbors to get details--yes, the situation was as bad as it sounded, and the partyers were still at it hours later, disrupting everyone around. My neighbors were understanding, but also unhappy. They’d all been trying to work from home that afternoon, some of them with napping kids, and the noise level had made all of that impossible. One of our neighbors was thinking about calling the police. Another was making last minute plans to leave town because she didn’t want to have four more days like the one she’d just had.
But mostly, they felt bad for me. They knew how hard we’d worked to get our house ready, how we were only renting out our place because we needed the money. There was some comfort in knowing that they had my back; whatever was going on, they’d let me know about it.
I sent a message to our guest through AirBNB’s website, and searched online for how other AirBNB hosts had handled this problem. All I could find were a few nightmarish accounts of guests being difficult and disruptive--and in some cases damaging property--and AirBNB doing too little too late.
My pulse raced as I searched again for a way to contact our guest, whose name was Aidan. At last I found his phone number, and when I called, he picked up.
I braced myself for an unpleasant conversation, but Aidan was nice. He sounded young. He called me ma’am. I tried to be as nice as I could when I told him about the messages I’d been getting from my neighbors, and that I was feeling pretty concerned about what I was hearing. I’d stated plainly in my listing that we lived in a quiet neighborhood of families with young kids, and that parties weren’t allowed. Smoking was not allowed anywhere on the property. When I’d posted our house, I’d seen AirBNB’s updated COVID-19 policy right there on the home page. As of August 20, 2020, they weren’t allowing parties either.
Aidan said he hadn’t known about any of this. I found this hard to believe, but I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. He said he appreciated me calling, and promised that he’d stop the partying and smoking, quiet down, and that there would be no more trouble.
When I got off the phone, I was sweating and my stomach was cramped with hunger. It had been over two hours since I left my family at our campsite. It was almost ten o’clock and I hadn’t eaten anything for hours.
Back at the campsite the kids were asleep. Nate was getting ready to go to bed, too, but when he saw me, he sat beside me at the campfire while I ate the chili that was now cold. For a long time we were quiet, both of us too tired and frayed to know what to say.
“I feel so naïve,” I said at last. “Of course I know that these things happen, but I never seriously thought about what I’d do if it happened to us.”
The two other times we’d put our house on AirBNB had gone well. Nice, quiet families had stayed at our house and left the place in good shape. Aidan had one review on his profile, but it was a positive one. Now I felt foolish for accepting the request so quickly.
“We’re not used to assuming the worst about people,” Nate pointed out. “That’s not a bad thing.”
We left it at that. We tried to sleep, to not worry about things we couldn't control.
The next day the weather was hot--nearly a hundred degrees--and most of the hikes were fully exposed, but we were excited anyway. We tried to keep that enthusiasm alive as we stood in line for over an hour to get on the shuttle that would take us up the mountain. We tried to stay positive when we saw a large sign that said that Toxic Cyanobacteria had bloomed in the Virgin River, and that all contact with the water was prohibited. We wondered how bad it could be, if maybe the signs were being a little alarmist.
But when we reached the trailhead for the Narrows, another ranger told us in no uncertain terms that the algae was a big deal--especially for kids. It could cause permanent damage to their central nervous system. He told stories of people he’d seen infected just that week, cautionary tales that involved calls to poison control and trips to the ER.
The Narrows was a trail that followed the river for the first couple of miles, and then required wading into the river for long stretches of time, sometimes in water several feet deep. So we hiked as far as we could until we reached the part of the trail that crossed the river. Rust-colored foam washed up at the river’s edge, and the water smelled musty. We watched dozens of people trudge through the murky, ankle-deep water, watched dogs bound across, even a few kids who seemed fine.
I felt a bit of the magic of being there slip away. We hadn’t even made it to the part of the hike where the rock walls came close together, the part of the Narrows I’d seen pictures of. If Nate and I had been alone, we probably would have just risked it and kept going. It wasn’t like us to let fear of the worst case scenario dictate our decisions. But with three young kids, the situation felt different. Their long-term health wasn’t worth risking just for an adventure.
Later I looked up Toxic Cyanobacteria to see if we were justified in our caution. It’s a blue-green algae that forms in warm, slow-moving waters that have been contaminated by things like fertilizer runoff or septic tank overflows. Everything I read supported what the park rangers had said; ingesting toxic cyanobacteria was serious. Even dogs could get sick from it.
Even though we’d made the right call not to continue on the trail, it was disappointing, to realize how the consequences of everyday life somewhere else could find us even in this beautiful place.
After the hike, we drove down the valley to the town outside the park entrance in search of ice cream. The kids were in good spirits, and we were doing our best to be grateful we’d gotten to see this place at all--even if the experience wasn’t all that we’d hoped for.
But as soon as we’d passed through the gates of the park, my phone started bleeping. My stomach clenched as I opened another avalanche of text messages from my neighbors. Aidan and his crew were at it again. But this time around they weren’t just partying. This time it felt like I’d angered the gods, and now they were out to get me. We’d traveled to Zion, a place named after the kingdom of heaven, but it felt like we were descending into our own private hell.
My neighbor from two houses over had sent me a video of what he was seeing from his back porch. A busty woman wearing elaborate makeup and not much else was bending over the railing on my back porch. There was the sound of a cork popping, and then screams of delight as the woman started twerking while one man sprayed champagne all over her gyrating body and another man with a large video camera crouched behind her to zoom in on her barely visible thong.
Another neighbor wrote, “I think your AirBNB guests are using your house as a film set either for a very racy music video or an adult film.” Oakland was still suffering from a brutal heat wave, but one neighbor said she was afraid to go in her back yard because every time she did she saw something she wished she hadn’t. Needless to say she was keeping her 7-year-old son cooped up indoors.
By the time I received these messages, one of the neighbors had called the police. Aidan and his group had left in a hurry just a few minutes before they showed up, but it wasn’t clear whether this was a coincidence of timing or if they were leaving to escape trouble. My neighbors had filed a report anyway, and while the police were sympathetic, they said there wasn’t much they could do to fix the situation.
For the next three hours, while Nate and the kids ate ice cream and then killed time biking in circles around the parking lot, I sat in the car and made phone calls--to my neighbors, to AirBNB, to a friend who had managed properties for a living and had the experience and wisdom to advise me. It took me nearly an hour just to find a number for AirBNB where I could get a real person.
The first person I talked to was understanding and kind; she advised me to cancel the reservation immediately, which would require Aidan and his group to leave early. She said AirBNB would contact Aidan and handle the details. I wouldn’t lose any money--and because he’d clearly broken house rules, been disruptive, and violated AirBNB’s COVID-19 policy, Aidan would still have to pay the full price.
By the time I got off the phone it was getting dark and dinner time had come and gone. Everyone was hungry. I tried to accept that I’d done as much as I could, to trust the AirBNB rep when she assured me that they had my back.
But as we drove back to the campsite, there was a seed of fear in me that hadn’t been there before. I hated thinking about what was going on in my home, a place that we had loved and tended to and done all that we could to make it feel safe and welcoming. And I also felt nervous about Aidan and his friends in a way I hadn’t before. I’d shifted from giving them the benefit of the doubt to assuming the worst. I wondered who they really were, and why they’d come to our home in the first place. Now that AirBNB was asking them to leave, what would stop them from destroying our house out of revenge? What would AirBNB do if they refused to leave?
Since we were still driving in and out of reception, I authorized one of my neighbors to act on my behalf. I asked AirBNB to call him if they couldn’t reach me, but they never did. For the next few days, my neighbors gave me updates several times a day. AirBNB had contacted Aidan, but said they weren’t able to get through. Meanwhile Aidan and his crew kept a lower profile, but showed no signs of leaving. On the fourth day one of my neighbors knocked on the door. He wasn’t hostile, but he wanted to make sure Aidan had received AirBNB’s message. He had. But still he made no move to leave.
I documented everything and sent daily updates to AirBNB asking them what to do, but the only response I got was from a customer service rep named, of all things, Lemon, who was only available at night or during the hours when I was asleep. Here’s a message she left me at 10:35 p.m. one night.
“Hello Laura,a this is Lemon, a support ambassador from AirBNB safety team. I will send you the email early. Thank you. Have a nice day. Goodbye.”
I sent screen caps of the text messages from my neighbors, the videos my neighbor had shot from his back porch, and a photo of the police report. I never received a single response from Lemon.
Aidan and his group finally left on the last day of their original booking. After they left, the woman I’d hired to clean the house called me to report how things looked. There were a couple of stains on the rug that looked like ash, and a splintered board on the back porch where it looked like someone had been rocking the patio furniture, but otherwise the place was okay.
By the time Aidan and his crew were out of our house, we were heading towards Nate’s extended family in Colorado. An early snowstorm hit the night before we made the drive to Denver, and so as we drove over Monarch Pass we were greeted with trees heavy with fresh snowfall and a world covered in white.
When we pulled into her driveway in Denver, Nate’s aunt Sarah came out to greet us. We did the “are-we-touching?” dance, and then she wrapped her arms around me, and I started to cry. I realized how relieved I was to be there--to be with people I felt safe with, to be taken care of, to know that at least for a few days, everything would be okay.
That night at dinner with two sets of Nate’s aunts and uncles, we recounted the horrors of our Las Vegas Cyclops and Aidan and his unruly mob. The situation took on that comic quality that bad experiences often do when you retell them in the right company. It felt good to laugh after nearly a week of feeling anxious and helpless. We were determined to put Aidan and his mob behind us.
And then the next morning, I finally heard back from Lemon. She said they’d reviewed my case and decided that Aidan and his party hadn’t actually violated any of AirBNB’s terms. They had gone ahead and deducted $300 from my account and paid it to Aidan for the last two nights of his stay--the night that had been cancelled--nights where, just to be clear, Aidan was very much still in my home.
All at once, my rage returned. I looked up my house listing again just to be sure I was remembering everything correctly. It was right there in plain sight: no smoking, no parties. And on AirBNB’s site, there was this: “As of August 20, 2020, AirBNB announced a global ban on all parties and events at AirBNB listings.” And also, “guests who are reported for throwing a disruptive party or violating our rules on gatherings of more than 16 people are subject to suspension or removal from AirBNB’s platform.
While we drove across Colorado and Nebraska, I called AirBNB again. Since Lemon wasn’t available during daytime hours, I talked to someone else, a woman named Judine, who was very nice and very helpful, and said plainly, “AirBNB made a mistake. The guest should not have been refunded $300 if he never left the property.”
She refunded the $300 AirBNB had deducted from my account, but she said there was nothing they could do to get the money back from Aidan. When I asked her if they could flag his profile so other hosts didn’t have to go through this experience, she said they couldn’t do that either. They also couldn’t stop him from leaving a bad review for me, which of course he did, claiming that there was no wifi, that he’d tried to reach me but couldn’t, that our place was filthy when he’d arrived.
These claims were all untrue, of course. There were instructions for wifi right in the 12-page house manual I’d left on the kitchen counter, the one I’d spent hours making so our guests would feel welcome. Since I’d called Aidan the night of his arrival, I had his number in my phone. His name wasn’t in my list of missed calls, and I’d never received any voicemails or texts from him. The morning we’d left, our neighbor came over and admired the job the cleaners did. “Wow,” she said. This place is sparkling.”
I reached out to AirBNB one last time, to let them know that I was going to write about this story and share it with the public. I asked about the stains on the rug, the damage to the back porch. They told me to fill out a claims form, which I did, and which Aidan promptly rejected, denying that they’d been responsible for the damage and rattling off complaints about how poorly he’d been treated by my neighbors during his stay. In the last message I received from AirBNB, they assured me that a customer service representative would be reaching out to me by email to follow up about the damage to our home. It’s been over a month, and I’m still waiting for that message.
That night when I recounted this story to Nate’s aunts and uncles, his uncle Gary looked at me with the kind of sympathy that only comes from firsthand experience. He’s owned and managed rental properties for years. He said he’d learned the hard way that you couldn’t assume that people would behave themselves, and that plenty of people don’t. You had to learn to be on guard, to protect yourself.
He told me about a friend of his named Jimmy, a former Navy Seal who’d formed an organization for the sole purpose of having a community of people to call on when you or your family or your home are in danger. I ended up talking to Jimmy while I was in Denver, and I’ll share my conversation with him in the next episode.
I know Gary is right, of course, that we do sometimes need to protect ourselves, that in desperate times, people do desperate things. Scarcity experts Kelly Goldsmith and Caroline Roux talked about this in episodes 2 and 3. I don’t know Aidan’s story. Maybe he’s actually a nice guy who just made some bad choices. Even so, the experience did shake my faith in humanity. It made me feel angry and afraid, at least temporarily.
There’s a saying that’s attributed to Confucius: “if you seek revenge, you should dig two graves.”
I hate knowing that Aidan is out there $300 richer and gaming the system, probably doing to someone else what he did to me. But I’m not seeking revenge, or buying Google Ad words against his full name, or trying to destroy his reputation.
Aidan isn’t the first person to take advantage of my hospitality. I spent over a decade of my life trying to find a resolution after a close friend stole thousands of dollars from us and then disappeared. Maybe I’ll tell that story some other day, but what I learned from that experience is that you don’t have to be seeking revenge to dig yourself a grave. Years after I’d forgiven my friend for abandoning us and breaking our trust, that sense of injustice still gnaws at me.
It’s been over a month since Aidan was in my home, disrupting my neighborhood. If I had it to do over again, I would’ve never put my house on AirBNB. The little money we got from that exchange was not worth all of the emotional turmoil, or the time it took me from my family. What bothers me most is that the system that was supposed to protect me failed me. Even when presented with evidence that Aidan had broken both my rules and theirs, AirBNB ultimately did nothing to support me or make reparations for the time lost and the property damaged. It’s the injustice of it that still makes my blood boil.
I’m still figuring out how to fight for justice without being angry all the time.
But if I’m feeling that way about AirBNB, about a situation that in the grand scheme of things, wasn’t that bad--no one was hurt or killed, our house was not destroyed--then I think it’s fair to give space to those in our country who have been failed by our systems repeatedly. Maybe the best thing we can do in the face of that anger is to figure out how to be a good neighbor, to do our part in holding those systems accountable.
When Athena visits Telemachus, she doesn’t drive out the rowdy mob. She doesn’t solve his problem with a divine wave of her hand. Instead she talks to him. She gives Telemachus the courage to face his fears, to believe that he can change the situation.
As I cast my ballot this week, I’m thinking about Aidan, and about AirBNB, and about all of the people and systems that are set up to protect us, but that all too often don’t. We don’t have divine power to change them, but we do have power to change things.
We can’t control the things in this world that make us afraid or angry, but we can choose to respond to them with courage. We can hold our elected officials and systems accountable.
And we can hold ourselves accountable, too--by facing fear with courage. By being righteously angry against injustice. By being there for our neighbors when they need our help. By embracing forgiveness, if for no other reason than because we need to find a way to not dig our own graves.
As always, I’m ending each episode with an invitation. If you listen to the end, you’ll be rewarded with some Shelter in Place outtakes.
So today, if you are legally allowed to vote in this country, get your ballot out there. Or as one yard sign said, under a 1950’s housewife cartoon, “Grab ‘em by the ballot.”
And then join me in choosing to respond to fear with courage--even when it’s hard--especially when it’s hard. When you talk to someone who doesn’t share your politics, or when you hear the stories I’ll share this week, ask yourself what you can learn from them, if there’s anything in what they’re saying that can help us grow. Because fear doesn't have to define or defeat us. Maybe, just maybe, it can be the thing that brings us together
If you appreciated this episode, be sure to give it a rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. You can support Shelter in Place, find show notes, and order wine or sign up for mindfulness classes from our amazing sponsors at shelterinplacepodcast.info.
Before I go, I want to thank a few of our newest supporters, some people who have given us courage on this journey.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, what a delight it’s been to become your friend. Thank you for being a champion of this podcast from the beginning, and for welcoming our ragtag crew when we were looking pretty shabby. Walking into your beautiful home and sharing a meal with your family was a delight, and it reminded us that even when life feels difficult, there are all kinds of reasons to choose hope. Finally, thank you for the poetry you release to the world freely every day. I’ll put a link to your work in the show notes for today so others can find it, too.
Angela and Ryan Cochran, I remember thinking when we met that you were the kind of couple and family we hoped to someday be. Your support of us all of these years later goes a long way in restoring our faith in humanity! Also, we are flabbergasted and deeply touched that you’ve managed to support us the same week you had a baby! We are celebrating you and this beautiful new life with heartfelt thanks.
Additional music and sound effects in today’s episode came from Storyblocks.