On December 27, 2033 US
President David Collins met in the White House with his advisers and
a team of scientists to discuss the alarming situation at Yellowstone
National Park. For decades scientists had known that underneath the
huge park was a gigantic chamber of hot molten rock, one that was
growing bigger ever year. A half a million years ago, such a chamber
had erupted, burying North America in ash. Now the geologists were
worried that the same thing might be about to happen again.
“So give it to me
straight,” said the President. “What are the chances that this
thing is going to blow up this year?”
“All the signs are
there,” said geologist Leonard Parks. “The smoke is starting to
seethe out. We see lava bubbling up in places where we never saw lava
before. We're starting to see just the type of seismographic
activity that was predicted to precede a gigantic
continent-burying Yellowstone Park eruption.”
“Give me a simple
probability figure,” demanded the President. “As a percentage.”
“My best guess, is there
is a 50% chance that Yellowstone will erupt in the next three
months,” said Parks grimly. “If if does, most of the country will
be buried in ash.”
The President considered
the possibility of a national evacuation to foreign lands. But he
decided against it.
“We can't evacuate,”
said the President. “It we evacuate and the volcanic eruption
doesn't occur, I'll be the laughingstock of the world.”
But that night the
President had a terrible dream. He dreamed the eruption occurred, and
the whole country was covered in ash. Children were wandering in the
streets, weeping, as the ashes covered their faces.
The dream caused the
President to change his mind. He called in all his main subordinates
to the Oval Office, and announced a dramatic decision.
“We can't risk the
entire population,” said the President. “I order you all to begin
drawing up plans for the evacuation of America.”
The government-funded
evacuation ended up being the craziest chaos the country had ever
seen. America just hadn't been designed with the possibility of a
complete evacuation in mind. One of the citizens who experienced the
worst of it was 70-year old Sally Davis, who lived in St. Louis.
Sally reported to the bus
station to get on one of the evacuation buses. But she told the bus
was full. Sally looked out at the bus station mobbed with hundreds of
scared people.
“It's now or never,”
Sally said to herself. She sneaked into the luggage storage slot
at the bottom of the bus, an area not designed for human passengers.
She stayed there for the entire journey from St. Louis to New York
City.
When the bus got to New
York, Sally thought that the worst of it was over; but it wasn't. She
now had to elbow her way onto one of the ships carrying people across
the Atlantic. Some lucky people got airplanes, but there weren't
enough planes to evacuate so many millions of people.
When Sally got to the pier
area, she found a scene of chaos. Countless thousands of people were
trying to cram into a diverse assortment of boats and ships. The
scene looked like the hasty evacuation of Dunkirk during World War
II, but far more crowded. Sally checked out the lines in front of
the big ships, but they were way too long.
She finally found a small
fishing boat that had been loaded up with passengers. She was told
the boat was full, but after some pleading the crew let her on.
After the boat left to begin its voyage across the Atlantic, Sally
found that it was way overloaded with passengers.
When night came, it was
impossible for Sally to find a place to sleep below deck. She had to
sleep on the freezing deck.
“Please help me – I'll
freeze to death up here,” pleaded Sally.
“There's no room below
deck,” said one of the fishermen. “Too many passengers. But we
have a haul of fish we caught before we were dragged into this job.
We can cover you in those fish to keep you warm.”
It wasn't too bad the
first night – at least being covered in fish kept Sally warm. But
by the third day of the voyage, the fish had started to rot. By the
fifth day, Sally was praying: “Please, God, let me freeze to death
tonight so that I don't have to smell these rotting fish one more
night.”
Finally after days of
great discomfort for the passengers, the fishing boat reached
England. Sally asked a young man: in which hotel would they be
sleeping?
“Hotel?” said the
young man. “Are you kidding? The hotels are all full. So are all
the houses, with all these millions fleeing America. We'll be
sleeping in some field.”
Sally almost froze to
death sleeping in the field, but she finally figured out she could
protect herself from the cold by grabbing trash from trash cans, and
stuffing the trash underneath her clothes.
At the White House, the
President was about to evacuate all of his staff. But then one of
the geologists made a surprising announcement.
“It turns out we
goofed,” said the geologist. “There was a bug in our calculation
software. It turns out that while the great volcanic eruption in
Yellowstone Park will probably occur, it probably won't occur for
another 50,000 years.”
The order was sent out
from the White House: bring back all of the 300 million Americans who
had evacuated the country.
For Sally the journey back
was almost as bad as the journey over. She was assigned a
government-issued ticket for a ship that would sail back to America
two months later. But she had no funds to last her until then. For
days she hung around the piers wondering what to do. Finally she
lucked out. She saw an old man who had been waiting for his place on a ship about to depart, and she noticed the man had died. She grabbed his ticket,
and used it. The ship took her back to New York.
Having no money for the
bus trip back from New York to St. Louis, Sally had to hitchhike the
entire trip. Much of the time she spent bumping around in the back of
various delivery trucks and pickup trucks. She suffered a terrifying
scare when she was harassed by a biker gang that saw her hitchhiking.
At the White House, the
President called a meeting of advisers to discuss the issue foremost
in his mind: his upcoming campaign for re-election. It seemed like an
insurmountable task. How could the President ask for re-election when
he had needlessly subjected 300 million Americans to the horrors of a
hasty forced evacuation? But the President urged his top political
strategist Albert Baker to “do the impossible” by coming up with
a viable re-election slogan.
The next day Baker showed
a proposed campaign poster to the President.
“Talk about turning a
minus into a plus!” said the President. “Now that's what I call
turning a sow's ear into a silk purse! Now that's what I call making
some lemonade when life has given you a lemon!”
The poster read:
Re-elect
President David Collins – the only President who ever gave you a
free vacation.
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