Ten years ago when I was a lowly lecturer in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I took a summer job to help fill the perpetually empty stomachs of our four young children. It was the dirtiest work I had ever done—and no, it wasn’t for a political campaign. It was termite work for my brother-in-law’s pest control company in Raleigh.

If you’ve ever done termite work, you know what I’m talking about. To treat a home for termites, you have to dig a six-inch trench around the exterior of a house’s foundation, fill it with chemicals, and cover it up. Then, if the house has a crawl space—and most houses in North Carolina do—you do the same thing along the interior of the foundation.