Lady Liberty

The top deck was crowded with passengers waiting for the passing of the big green lady on our way out of New York Bay. Little Mom managed to find a cocktail table to perch herself on, overlooking the sight barriers built forward of the topmost deck, pointing her camera towards the area of interest. I waited with phone in hand. There was such an air of expectation - held in silence by this collection of strangers in a front-faced huddle - that the soft motion of the boat provided a pulse to the shared experience of that short period of passage. The tall buildings strafed our view, and then the old fortress that once guarded the throat of the Bay, and then - a green monument, facing along our course, held her torch in welcome to ancestors past.

Behind her, the endless expanse stretched, and above her, the limitless sky dwarfed the outstretched limb. And yet, her pinnacle confirmed that endless expanse and welcomed whatever the abyss would bring to her. Backwards our course, into the abyss, far from a land of freedom that I felt less free, carrying the children of the desparate to places less desparate than some stolen dreams we never realized we had lost - perchance to find them again. Her torch pointed to the Land Beyond, but our passage only led to the focusing lens of that long-sighted landscape. And so we left to see the Isle of Devils, a chip on the coursing torrent between lands of former hope now escaping despair.