Field Notes from the Statue of Liberty

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “Field Notes from the Statue of Liberty” by E Johns Pfeiffer. E Johns holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Montana, where she was a nonfiction editor for CutBank. They worked seasonally for the National Park Service during the second Obama term. Originally from a small North Jersey exurb, she lives in Missoula, Montana, where she appreciates engaging with folks who have thought about decolonizing/unsettling public lands. Their work previously appeared in The Toast (RIP). She lives in a haunted old house with electric burgundy eaves and an aggressively friendly cat.

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She gleams aqua green from her island perch in the harbor. In one of my earliest memories, my parents call my attention away from my backseat daydream. “Look, Em! There’s the Statue of Liberty!” We’d be on the way from our small, semirural town in the greater metro to Manhattan, to play tourist or browse for antiques. Like many with a lifelong affiliation to New York, I no longer notice the enormous statue in quite the same way that I did that morning, when my father told me she was made of the same material as pennies. Yet she remains one of the great wonders of the modern world, and so she draws me in. I decide to defer grad school to spend the summer and fall working for the National Park Service on Liberty Island. It is my fifth such seasonal appointment, following stints at both Yellowstone and the Everglades. It is 2016.

Visitors are my environment. As soon as I step into the July heat, tourists surround me, caring only that I appear to work at this attraction. I find myself explaining on repeat the crowd control policies that were implemented after 9/11. The bureaucracy offers an online reservation system that strands many visitors outside the structure, and I am powerless to help. Meanwhile, sweat accumulates in pools underneath my nearly indestructible poly blend uniform. I remind myself that I’m not doing this job merely for money. I draw on reserves of patience I didn’t think I had. Being an interpretative park ranger is fantastic at most parks, but this job can feel like a chore.

I find it impossible to stop thinking about the election. I must remain nonpartisan in public, and in an ordinary election year, that would hardly trouble me at all. Meanwhile, at morning meetings, we are reminded that there are security cameras all over everything. This surveillance makes me uneasy, but I share my political worries with a select few of my coworkers, anyway. Rational paranoia: to know that the government is watching you. I take comfort in imagining the faceless watchers scanning the rows of live feeds for cute girls taking selfies or fast boats in the harbor. I strengthen my doublespeak with every in-depth visitor interaction I enjoy.

Mostly German and Anglo anyway, I tend to keep my Lebanese lineage to myself. It feels “too political” to mention to American tourists with 9/11 memorial gift shop bags. Yet I think about my immigrant heritage most mornings as the staff boat departs the modern seawall of Manhattan’s southern tip. We cross from Battery Park to Ellis Island before arcing around the front of Lady Liberty. In the summer that my light-skin-cloaked Arab American identity becomes politically volatile, I wonder whether either of my Maronite Catholic great-grandparents passed through New York Harbor. They met in Philadelphia and raised eleven Arabic-swearing, yet assimilating, children. Though my grandmother died of old age when I was six, I have a handful of memories of her adoration that carry me through. Moreover, my outgoing exuberance tempered with a shy sensitivity reminded both of my parents of her. This I know: she had a tenacious ferocity I admire, and she would have damn well told the visitors she was proud of her family.

If either of my Lebanese ancestors came through the Port of New York, they would have seen the Statue of Liberty under construction. They came to the “New World” in the early 1880s, and the Statue was unveiled on October 28, 1886. I picture them marveling at the half-completed Statue, which pioneered the modern engineering principles we use to build skyscrapers.

Many contemporary immigrants visit the Statue, their stories intertwining with my Lebanese and German great-grandparents’. Given how worried I am about the political climate, the thousands of visitors I talk to each day are a welcome distraction. In early June, still new to the Statue, I am guarding the gateway to the security checkpoint when I check the pedestal tickets of a large family, women in hijabs, all with eyes dark like mine. I greet them with a smile, and the same question I almost always ask visitors. “Where are you folks visiting us from?”

One of the men seems particularly confident in his English. “Well, we are living in Jersey City, but we are originally from Syria.”

“Oh, well, welcome!” I say heartily. “My great-grandparents on my mom’s side were from Lebanon!”

“It’s the same blood,” says one of the women, and they all agree. “We are like family.”

“Thanks!” I respond as they walk past me to the checkpoint. “Have a great time, and make sure you look through the glass ceiling to see inside the Statue!” My thoughts swirl, but I must reset to welcome the next family. And the next. Inwardly, I am still thinking about the warmth that these American newcomers showed me.

Late that afternoon, I have an hour scheduled for professional development, and since I’m still learning about the Statue, I change into my commuting clothes early to take the audio tour in camouflage. After the narrator offers historic context for the initial inspiration of and fundraising efforts for this international gift, the soundtrack swells with violins, and the narrator instructs me to turn to face the front of the Statue and think about what she means to people around the world. Recalling my Syrian American visitors, I think of the worsening refugee crisis in the Middle East in contrast to my great-grandparents’ ease at entering the free world. I sob. There are other Americans who would exclude those who look like my grandmother. And I just look like me. Another white American.

I try not to talk about partisan matters with the visitors, but of course the election comes up. I meet another Syrian family on another day, as we are shooing everyone off the island in time for the last boat. One of the men says of one of the women, “She is wondering why she can’t come through Ellis Island.” I start to explain that they arrived too late in the day to have time for both islands, when he cuts me off: “Not to visit the island, to move here, to move to the U.S.”

“That’s a good question.” I’m the only ranger on the brick walkway that faces towards Manhattan, and there aren’t any other visitors right around us. “Personally, I don’t agree with it,” I continue. At this, they begin to open up to me. I mention my ancestry as we chatter on happily. Before too long, I am reciting “The New Colossus,” Emma Lazarus’s famous poem, to them. They point out that the poem, written in the Statue’s voice, states clearly that she welcomes refugees. I can only agree. Meanwhile, we round the corner to the flagpole plaza, and I walk them all the way to the ferry. I show them an old snapshot I have saved to my phone of me with my mother and maternal grandmother. Though they are sad to leave Liberty Island, I feel at least as sad to see them go.

Even as they loom large on my conscience, Syrians are a small fraction of a percent of the visitors. Though people from everywhere come to visit the Statue, when I ask the self-selected group for my outside walking tour where they’re visiting from, the twenty or thirty people are almost entirely Americans. We start with a picture of the Statue surrounded by fireworks, in an artist’s rendering from her unveiling in 1886. At the sculpture garden, we talk about small bronze statuettes of notable figures, and I linger on Edouard de Laboulaye, an underappreciated French thinker, who had the idea to give a statue celebrating American freedoms to the United States. Laboulaye was influenced by Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of Democracy in America, and thought a lot about the great experiment in popular government that this country then represented. Laboulaye, I mention, did not particularly care for the tyranny of Napoleon III. So we talk about France’s relatively unstable government as the U.S. was getting off the ground and its complicated admiration for American ideals.

In the shade of some sycamores, near our resident flock of Canada geese, I point out to them that they can see the Statue’s upturned back foot – that she is walking. Then I pull out my most important slide and show them one of the Statue’s open secrets: the broken shackles and chains around her feet. Lady Liberty, I explain, celebrates the end of slavery in the United States – the idea for the Statue was conceived not long after the end of the Civil War – by walking out of her chains, from slavery into freedom.

Her true full name is Liberty Enlightening the World. As we walk out to the side pier for a three-quarter profile view of her, I reflect that the light that she carries out with her spreads beyond any one place or time. That she represents freedom from tyranny, worldwide.

At the pier, I pause to let them snap some pictures of the Statue up close as I savor the open sky of New York harbor. When I sense that they’re ready, I tell them a little about myself. About thinking of my German great-grandparents coming past the Statue on their way to Wisconsin in 1906. About my own experience as a suburban New Jersey high school junior on September 11th, stressing the ordinariness of the horror. That several of my classmates had parents who went in to another day at the office and did not come home. I show them how to notice the gap in the skyline where the Twin Towers once stood. And I let them know that it has been my honor to be part of the Statue of Liberty in 2016.

I leave the last word to Emma Lazarus. I pose as I recite the sonnet in full—my ranger hat, the crown; my laminated slides, the tablet; and my fluorescent orange water bottle, the torch. I linger on the less quoted final couplet:

“Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Another day, I’m up in the Crown for the busy middle of the day. The visitors gather up here to look out the tiny windows that form the jewels of her crown. My coworker and I greet them and explain what they can see – the tablet below the first windows, and Manhattan way out past her left ear. Straight ahead, we see the historic forts of Governors Island, and Brooklyn’s rapidly gentrifying waterfront, including the Red Hook Ikea. Seven miles distant, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge looks tiny, though it is sixty feet longer than the Golden Gate. The enormous bright orange Staten Island ferry looks like a toy boat, as do tugs and tourist ferries and even the mercantile barges and occasional military ships.

On this particular day, a little boy is among our Crown visitors. When I ask where they’re from, his mom answers that they’re locals, visiting from Brooklyn. “Local tourists!” I exclaim. “Where in Brooklyn? I live there, too!”

She’s a smart dresser, with a chunky necklace and a nice bag, and she has dressed him in a button-down shirt, like a little man. He’s at that maximum cute stage of missing teeth, with a halo of black curls and a big grin. He climbs on top of the central support bar that connects the statue’s forehead “skin” and armature bars to the interior framework just inside her head, and as he looks out the central windows, I point out Brooklyn landmarks, like Coney Island and the Brooklyn Bridge, for a minute or two. When I turn back after taking another family’s picture, he’s still there, still rapt at the window. I think wistfully of my time as an environmental educator at other parks, and before long I am telling him things I learned when I started visitor interpretation seven years ago as a summer intern at Liberty Science Center, just across a narrow channel from this island. We talk about the estuary—fresh water of the Hudson River meeting the salt Atlantic. We talk about the diamondback terrapins and the fish and other creatures that like living in the mix. He’s excited to consider this natural world below the mucky surface of the bay.

I don’t mention the astonishing disappearance of the northeastern salt marsh that was the price of northeastern civilization, nor the slow and unfortunately unsteady process of trying to preserve and restore native spartina grass. We don’t talk about the resurgence of osprey after DDT was banned, either. And when it comes to oyster restoration, I know my own ignorance. Beyond all the ecological details I leave out, I also neglect to tell him the Lenni Lenape name for this historically tidal island, Minnesais, though I mention it to kids his age while reading their Junior Ranger worksheets.

It’s enough that I ignited a sense of natural wonder in this urban little boy. I hope.

When we close the monument, the two rangers who were posted at the Crown for the last hour walk quickly down each side of the double helix spiral stairs after a routine radio call. We join the two rangers at the top of the pedestal and split into pairs to check the two interior staircases. We race, an informal game that is doubtless against the rules. A little more than halfway down, we go outside onto the lower balconies. I relish glimpses of the Statue from below, the harbor a cool breeze for our late afternoon run. As we zip down all those stairs, a meditative calm takes hold, and I am glad to have a job that makes me as tired in body as I am in spirit.

All of that is future – for my memories of the Statue are, like stress dreams, eternally in the present tense. In the Crown as close draws near, any one of my work partners might nap. We might chat or look out at Manhattan or watch the occasional chopper fly round her head, like a fly buzzing her eyes. I can take my time to see things about her that most visitors will never notice. Up close, the Statue’s green surface is mottled with gray spots and other discolorations, and each fold of the sleeve of her raised arm is enormous. But mostly, I just sit and read. If it’s too hot, or I don’t want to chance a conversation with a particularly troublesome coworker, we’ll turn on the fan booster I affectionately call the “aircraft carrier.”

On one such afternoon, I was curled into the staircase, resting my eyes. I heard a scratching sound, and though I thought I might have dreamed it, when I turned off the industrial fan it was louder, more insistent. I leapt carefully up the stairs and over to the platform under the windows. As I looked out, I saw that crows had congregated on her wavy hair. The murder gathered in black swooping darts just outside the panes but did not linger. They flew out to Brooklyn, tracing dark lines across the light sky.