The Last Ferry Before the Bridge

Augustin has taken the ferry twice a day for thirty years: the 6:40 to the harbor in the morning, the 5:15 back to the island in the evening. By his own rough count, which he has revised more than once, that comes to something like fifteen thousand crossings. On Monday the new bridge will open, and the ferry will be sold to a company somewhere up the coast. This Friday evening, the last of the service, is his last crossing home, and he has decided to do it properly.

Properly, for Augustin, means standing on the open deck rather than sitting in the warm lounge with a coffee. It also means saying something to Calloway, the deckhand who has tied up the boat at the island pier every evening he can remember. In thirty years, the two men have exchanged perhaps a thousand remarks about the weather and not a single one about anything else.

What he hasn't counted on is the crowd. Word of the final sailing has spread, and the deck is packed with people who have never needed the ferry in their lives. There are photographers, families with children waving little flags, and a man filming everything on his phone. Augustin's usual place at the rail, the one the spray never quite reaches, has been taken by a teenager with a selfie stick.

Calloway is busier than ever, coiling ropes, answering questions and posing for photos he plainly doesn't want to be in. Twice Augustin makes his way toward him, and twice someone else gets there first. Not until the island lighthouse comes into view, a white thumb against the dark hill, does he realize that he has perhaps ten minutes left.

Hardly knowing what he means to say, he squeezes along the rail and holds out his hand. "Well," he says. "I suppose this is it."

Calloway looks at the hand, then at him, and instead of shaking it he passes him the end of a rope. "You've watched me do this for thirty years," he says. "Let's see if you were paying attention."

So it is Augustin, an accountant in a good wool coat, who throws the line toward the island pier for the last time, rather badly. And it is Calloway, having jumped across ahead of him, who catches it, laughing, and makes it fast around the bollard with two quick turns. A few people in the crowd clap without knowing why.

From Monday, the drive will take four minutes. He has been told that it will save him almost an hour a day, and he has no doubt that it will. Walking up the hill in the dark, his hands still smelling of rope and diesel, he finds himself listing what the bridge will not be able to carry. It won't carry the twenty minutes twice a day when nobody could reach him, or the gulls that followed the stern for crusts of bread. Nor will it carry the thousand conversations about the weather that, he now suspects, were never really about the weather.