Britical

NYC

 
Red lorry, yellow lorry, red lorry, yellow lorry…..where did this come from? I was thinking it was some sinister children’s skipping rhyme, but just realised it used to be a popular schoolyard tongue- twister. It sprang to mind during the latest raising of the so-called Terror Alert in New York City last week. The amazing technicolour terror alert. Someone asked what the difference was between, say, yellow fear and red fear. Good question. These things mean different things to different people, not to mention that we have yet to be informed of their “official” meaning. To me, yellow connotes cowardice, or perhaps cheerfulness, gold, or, according to some, madness. I have always seen it as a quite subversive colour, gleefully perverse in some quite indefinable way. Although - oops! - it occurs to me that yellow might not even a member of the terror rainbow club, that I am confusing the colours with those of traffic lights or Smarties or M & M’s. Green for Go, for life, money, envy, tree-huggers, decomposition. Red for Danger, for Stop, for blood, for that inappropriate dress Bette Davis wore in ‘Jezebel’. And Orange. What to say about orange? Hare Krishna? Drink your juice? Whatever.

But much has been written about the colour thing: as meaningless mollifier, as fearmonger, as distraction. It has all been said. For any of us, we just want to try and reduce our chances of getting maimed or killed. Surely, then, the best strategy is to assume the worst and behave accordingly until it becomes a habit, that, being a habit, you barely have to think about.

Early in July of 2004 I was on a plane heading to London. Cramped and bored in coach, and reading being hard for me on planes, I usually end up scribbling down this or that floating thought. This time I was thinking about just such risk management habits. For instance, on the subway, even in the stifling heat of the summer, I had abandoned my strategy of hovering in the cooler air by the turnstile (all the better to jump on the middle of the air conditioned train at the last minute as it pulls into the station). Since 2001, I, like every other New Yorker, had assumed that there would be another attack. And there will be. The subway is an obvious target, and ten people to target it perhaps a reasonable number, this being both economical and efficient. Assuming bombs, assuming simultaneous explosions, chaos is created in many places (read: nowhere is safe), and the smaller number of operatives ensures less chance of the plot being foiled beforehand. But being few in number, you’d not want to waste your resources on the relatively empty front and back of the car, especially the back (no driver there either). Operatives would make sure to place themselves, during rush hour, right in the sardine packed middle of the train. More bloodied, screaming bang for your buck that way. Beginnning of the week too, thus creating maximum disorganization in the city, shutting down the workweek, the bridges, the tunnels. Fortress Manhattan. And so it went in London one year and one week after these thoughts, although occuring, inexplicably, on a Thursday.

Are my precautions extreme, or worse, silly..? I can’t say I think about them much. I sit on the subway, like everyone else busy not making eye contact with all the blank faces, and I wonder if they all make these same calculations. I am not sure they do. In one sense I have been trained for such attitudes - Even as a child I remember giving the El Al check-in desk at Gatwick airport a nice, wide berth. Partly this is from growing up in England in the 70’s and being, like all children back then, well trained, in a sense, the by IRA. Ownerless packages in pubs were Semtex with your name on them. Obviously. Duh. This was (and is) an almost ho-hum British fact of life, and in the much touted “spirit of the Blitz”, we British took it in stride. No fuss, no panic. Witness a man being interviewed in the street after the recent July bombings there. He displayed a typical, amusingly British attitude: “Well”, he said, shrugging his shoulders as if he really didn’t know what all the fuss was about, “if you get blown up you get blown up, don’t you?” Fatalistic, philosophical even.

I am also certified as a WFR - a Wilderness First Responder, trained to perform search & rescue operations and deal with everything from anaphylaxis, burns, toothache, sucking chest wounds, and who gets the helicopter in “a wilderness context”. That’s anywhere more than two hours from definitive care; the latter meaning someplace involving, as they say, bright lights, cold steel: a hospital. Generally, mountains, oceans, forests are brought to mind. Still, in the shockingly narrow subway tunnels of London, the floodwaters of New Orleans, the wilderness reigned. I don’t go as far as toting a med. kit, but out and about in the city every day I feel almost obliged to carry headlamp, knife, surgical gloves.

Terrorism or no, at the airport I have always carefully taken the long way around not only any dodgy check-in desks, but also any large group of cheerful, rowdy high school kids. I always hope, guiltily, they are getting on someone else’s doomed flight. We’ve all seen the movies and news reports of plane crashes, and the flight list inevitably contains the names of an unlucky school marching band or rugby team on their “very first trip to Europe”.
On the plane I always make sure to get an aisle seat, irritated by the idea of some fatal delay making my amazing escape when the plane skids off the runway and the person next to me is frozen in place, perhaps muttering to their plastic rosary. (As we all know, God is sure to make an exception in their case, vengefully bitch-slapping down the Grim Reaper to spirit said pious passenger, unsullied, back to the departure lounge. Miracle!) Raging fire is perhaps a good argument in favour of so-called natural fibres, since they are less likely to fuse to your skin; also thick-soled shoes, since pretty flip-flops will almost certainly feel an uncontrollable urge to be at one with the soles of your hot little feet as you sprint winningly through the burning jet fuel and roiling body parts. “Count the seat backs”, I tell all my friends, who, yes, look at me in a particular and pitying way. Count the seat backs to the nearest exits fore and aft, unless you really believe in the fairy lights embedded in the floor. I am either absurdly pessimistic (given the statistics that are always wheeled out), or, if you think about it, quite stunningly optimistic; after all, most likely the plane will, one way or another, simply be blown to smithereeens with you on it.

Yes, that must be it. I am a glass half full optimist. Despite the wary teasing of friends with whom I share, ad nauseum, my strange (to them) survival tactics, I remain somehow convinced of my own survival. Delusions of immortality. I take the subway because it’s fast. I avoid unecessary risk like movie theatres on Saturday nights because I cannot imagine them not seeming deliciously, irresistably tempting as a security-free, dark, crowded, and conveniently symbolic-of-evil-Hollywood soft target. I am automatically on the lookout for Suspicious Packages, inappropriately bulky summer clothing, detonation wires trailing from the sleeves of nervous (but a trickier “tell” since the rise of the I-Pod…), sweating passengers, determined to make my own selfish escape. Yet I still have, sitting a bit incongruously among the lipgloss and Filofax in my fancy designer bag, my headlamp, my knife, my ludicrous rubber gloves. They are habits now. If the worst happens on my train I hope that I’ll be glad to be there. And if you get blown up you get blown up, don’t you?

 

 

Copyright Britical 2005