On ferryboats

I wrote this recently and I don’t feel like shopping it around. If you like it, consider contributing a couple of bucks to the Islands Landscapes campaign.

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No journey to an island begins until the ribbed, rusty, steel-plate ramp scrapes along a concrete ferry dock.

Ferryboats are strange beasts. Unloved, but necessary. Step on one and there is nothing like casting off lines to make you feel you are truly abandoning familiar shores. But, you are not quite there yet – wherever there might be. That slight apprehension you feel comes from being in a limbo, a non-place. Maybe that’s why ancient poets depicted poor Charon as a bad tempered, old grouch day in and day out ferrying frightened souls across the river separating us from the Underworld. Unlike his passengers, who have a whole new world to explore, the old man is stuck on his little piece of the river, immortal, but without a destination. What could be worse?

In the old world tales, greed was punished by the eternity of ferrying duties. In the Brothers Grimm version, it is the greedy king who gets an oar handed to him, but in the story collected by Russia’s folklorist Aleksandr Afanasyev it is the rich merchant Marco who is condemned to row travellers across a river until the end of time. It’s the Russian version that resonates here in Newfoundland where rich fish merchants kept a tight grip on small outport communities and where large boat owners threaten the livelihoods of small inshore fishermen to this day.

Ask islanders what is one change that would make the most difference in their lives and ferry service will inevitably be the first thing they mention. Those from away will sagely nod their heads in sympathy and understanding, but they understand only a half of it. To them, a ferryboat is a symbol of isolation. It’s the only way to get to this place that sits in the middle of unpredictable, capricious, ever-changing sea. Of course one would want a better, faster, more frequent crossing of those treacherous waters that can shimmer invitingly one moment only to rise and swallow a man, snatch a child or wash away a home a heartbeat later. And it’s true that when your loved one is ill, when island families gather from afar for funerals, births or reunions, a faster, better, more frequent crossing is desirable. What those not of the islands don’t know – cannot know – is that to an islander the sea is not only a barrier to be crossed, but an open field to be savoured. The ferryboat is not just a lifeline, a beast of burden to carry the ill, the old, and the newborn, but also a guardian of their islandness who allows only so many and not one more to come onto their shores.

And those who come, usually when the weather is fair, are driven by curiosity or nostalgia, by a sense of mission or just dragged along to a godforsaken rock sticking out in the middle of the ocean.

Teenagers, feigning indifference, refuse to leave the deck as the summer storm gathers clouds and pours rain amid flashes of lightning and rumbling thunder. They sit on the deck, hair sticking to their wet faces, inadequately dressed, texting their friends and complaining about boredom while their eyes betray a mix of fear and awe for they just glimpsed their own insignificance.

An elderly couple stares out the window, hungrily. The first glimpse of the island of their youth will ease the pain in their swollen joints. It will make everything bearable again for a little while.

There is that other couple, middle aged and sophisticated. Instead of a red convertible, they have a saltbox house on the island and know exactly how that place should be run. They, like Bosnian folk hero Đerzelez Alija who hated ferryboats and boatmen, would prefer to skip this old rusty boat altogether and, in the absence of Alija’s winged steed, they might settle for a bridge to leap across the water. But a ferry is all they have – it’s the only thing we all have.

On a ferryboat we are all in it together. The three young men who, in preparation for a wild night out, drank a bottle of hard liquor and six litres of beer in two hours it took to cross the sea between their island and a city on the mainland throwing a party to celebrate its patron saint. The older couple whose arthritic fingers contort once more in pain of departure. The bored teenagers. Toddlers bouncing up and down still high on sugar that their grandparents secretly fed them before the ferryboat snatched them away once again. The writer talking to his wife about a story on ferries he’d like to write. “Faeries,” she says surprised. “That’s different for you,” she says while imagining lighter than air creatures full of magic. “Ferries,” he says feeling under his feet the grumpy rumble of this hulking, rusting beast of burden with its crew stuck in limbo, but dutifully taking them all to the other shore.