The ferry that waits for no one

The 6:40 to the far shore has left on time for as long as anyone remembers. What a town learns from a boat that will not wait.

By Ilse Marrow · 2 minutes · Read it on the web

The first ferry leaves at twenty to seven, and it leaves at twenty to seven. I put it that way because people here say it that way, with the same emphasis on the second half, the way you might say of a friend that she is honest and she is honest. The ramp goes up at 6:39 and fifty seconds. If you are running down the quay at that moment, the deckhand will look at you with sympathy and not move.

I have been that person twice. The first time I was furious. The second time I understood that the deckhand’s sympathy was real, and that it was the point.

A boat as a clock

A ferry that keeps perfect time is not a convenience. It is an instrument. People on the far shore set their mornings by its horn, which carries across the water a minute before departure; the bakery opens its shutters when it hears it, and the old men who swim from the rocks in every season use it to decide when they are cold enough to come out.¹ Nobody planned this. The boat was punctual for long enough that the town arranged itself around the punctuality, the way a garden arranges itself around a wall.

If the ferry started waiting for latecomers, it would not become kinder. It would become vague. Every person on the quay would be negotiating with every other: a minute for the woman with the pram, a minute for the boy who is always late, a minute for me. The horn would sound at 6:41, then 6:43, and the swimmers would stay in the water too long.

The kindness of not waiting

What the deckhand is protecting, when he does not lower the ramp, is everyone else’s morning. His sympathy is for me; his loyalty is to the timetable, which is to say to the forty people who were on time. I find this more moving the older I get. Most institutions bend for whoever is in front of them and call it service. The ferry bends for no one and calls it nothing at all.

There is a second boat at 7:20. Everybody knows that too.² Missing the first ferry has never stranded anyone; it has only made them late, and lateness, here, is something you own. You cannot blame the boat. The boat left at twenty to seven.