The fraught relationship between chocolate and freedom. How an accidentally retained Snickers bar snookered Mr and Mrs Henry’s visit to the Statue of Liberty. New York City.
Whenever Mrs Henry and myself catch an international flight on Institute business we seem to catch airlines that prompt people to ask: “But weren’t they banned?”, or, “Didn’t they crash?” Yes, the Mr Henry Institute runs on the smell of a rag briefly dipped in aviation fuel.
Hawaiian Airlines beat even Mrs Henry’s famous ability for sleep at 35,000 feet. It was unusually cramped, seats were as hard as concrete. They were stingy with food and booze, and what a dump New York is!
It was only by the colour of the taxi that Mrs Henry and myself could be convinced we had not been misdirected through airline error to the capital city of some ‘developing economy’. Sure, the weather (overcast) didn’t help, but the cracked concrete of the expressway, the dirty, tired, sagging weatherboard houses in Queens traversed by that expressway, the rubbish and the tall weeds, it all looked like we had entered a country that had either let itself go or that had never been there.
Our room would not be available until 1.30 pm. Once we had checked in our luggage at our hotel near Union Square, we optimistically set out to kill time before we could have a shower and catch up on some sleep. Then we worked out that it was nine, o’clock in the morning, not eleven as we had thought. We had four-and-a-half hours to get through.
Aimlessly strolling, we happened on The Strand, the famous Manhattan second-hand bookshop, which turned out not to have a patch on Sydney’s Bargain Basement Books near Central Railway. The Strand, I’m afraid, lives on its reputation alone. On the tables outside, it had thousands of books at $1 and $2 but not a single one interested myself or Mrs Henry. Inside it was all literary t-shirts, BBQ-aprons and antique editions of the classics that looked as genuine as Nike shoes in a Bali shop. When I made for a computer terminal to look up if they had any interesting editions of P.G. Wodehouse, I was rounded on by Luddite employees: only they could use the computer! When they did, the Strand turned out to only have new paperback editions of Wodehouse. It was ten past nine.
What next? The Statue of Liberty. One, it was on the to-do list, although it had been placed there reluctantly, because it was such a touristy thing to do. However, we were tourists and this was an opportunity to get it done in time we didn’t know what to do with. Second, it would effortlessly get us to 1.30 pm.
There was a full security check before you could get on the ferry to Liberty Island. Now, Mrs Henry and myself had been subjected to one airport security check after another in the last thirty-odd hours, so we passed this one with flying colours and the flair of old hands.
At Liberty Island, Mrs Henry and I rejoiced in the presence of a sign pointing out where to find the front of the Statue of Liberty. Clearly, management wished to take no chances with lesser intellects.
To go inside Lady Liberty, there was yet another full scan security check. Traffic into this checkpoint was being directed by an earnest young man who looked liked Miles Davis. Aspiring liberty climbers could approach the checkpoint, located behind a door, from two sides. It was Miles’s job to stand in front of this door to make sure that these two streams, or trickles rather, did not collide. He did this by theatrically raising his hand in a stop sign to trickle A, while fantastically gesturing trickle B through. I simply assumed that here was a man painfully aware of the absurd and demeaning job he had to do to work his way through the Julliard School of Music. It was obvious to me that he dealt with the job and the moron tourists by mocking the whole thing with exaggerated execution, so I smiled at him while ignoring his stop sign. Both trickles came to an abrupt halt. A lecture followed. National security came into it.
The security check itself would be a breeze, of course. We had gone through countless security checks since leaving Sydney. Never a problem. Not a hiccup. Unfortunately, Mrs Henry had retained a Snickers bar in her bag, left over from snacks we bought to cope with Hawaiian Airlines’ food stinginess.
“Food’s not allowed, m’am. National security measure, ma’m”
“It’s a Snickers bar.”
“Food’s not allowed, m’am.”
“But how’s a Snickers bar going to affect national security?”, Mrs Henry remonstrated.
“Food’s not allowed, ma’m.”
“You said that, but how …”
“Food’s not allowed, ma’m.”
“Well, if you think this Snickers bar is made of dynamite, aren’t you gonna test it?”
At this point, I whisked Mrs Henry away from the security point, concerned a Homeland Security SWAT team might swoop on an area which had offered safe and vantage viewing of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre.
We reached our hotel in safety just before 2 pm.
Liberty is not as straightforward as you would think.
