People keep coming up to me on the street, imploring, “Certainly something humorous must’ve happened at security for your return flight, right?” Why yes, in fact, something amusing did occur….
The setting: John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, California. This is a smaller airport than Newark Liberty International Jingle-Heimer-Schmitt. The security checkpoint does not feature the Smiths Detection Sentinel II (nor the Terahertz Thruvision, which my science-writer pal Nicole says is the industry standard). I was early, there was no line, and I was sailing through.
Not so fast. My Jansport Superbreak backpack (what am I, 18 years old??) didn’t pass muster.
“Do you have a liquid in here?” asked agent #1.
Liquid. Liquid. Think, man. Think. Ooh, wait! From the wedding gift bag which I was handed upon checking in at the Best Western. “There’s a tube of sunscreen in there,” I replied. “I forgot to take it out. You can just toss it.”
It wasn’t the sunscreen.
The agent removed a white paper bag from my backpack.
She had discovered a snow globe from that mildly popular Long Beach tourist destination, the Queen Mary.
Now, I’ve been collecting snow globes since my youth. (I know, I know, you’re incredulous: A 39-year-old snow-globe collector who carries a backpack is still single???) So I was saddened by the thought of losing one.
“It’s not water inside,” explained agent #2. “It’s a flammable liquid.” And yes, later Googling revealed that, in fact, most snow globes contain… glycerin!
Agent #1, sympathetic to my plight, said that the permissibility rules for snow globes had changed more than once. She suggested checking it as luggage. But that seemed like too much hassle. I’d only owned it for a few hours; I could live without this snow globe. Check it? Chuck it!
Just then, a flash of inspiration struck. Those lonely decades of snow-globe collecting hadn’t totally gone to waste. For I knew that the bulk of these cheap, mass-produced, commemorative, plastic, not-usually-globe-shaped objects had a little plastic cork in the bottom. Over the years, I had refilled more than one that had fallen victim to evaporation. (They never quite looked the same afterwards, but how was I to know about the glycerin?)
“Could I… drain it?” I shyly asked.
Agent #1 considered this idea and delivered her verdict. “Sure,” she said. “I’ll have to accompany you back outside the line, and you’ll have to go through again. But it’s not busy; you should be fine.”
And that’s how I found myself shaking water out of a snow globe into a trash can in the John Wayne Airport.
I lost a little glitter, but, the process went as smoothly as possible. As I showed my ID and boarding pass to yet another agent, who was at the front of the line, I felt I owed her an explanation why I was passing through a second time. “I got stopped for a snow globe,” I said. “So I emptied it. I guess it makes sense.”
“No it doesn’t,” she said, with a candor I didn’t expect from a TSA employee. “They sell ’em right here in the airport.”
Jack Silbert, curator