The crossing takes nineteen minutes and the workers have stopped seeing it.
They stand at the rail or sit on the orange plastic benches bolted to the deck and they look at the water the way you look at a wall. The water is gray today, the kind of gray that doesn’t come from clouds specifically but from the whole sky being one shade of itself, and the channel chops in short irregular intervals that make the ferry roll side to side, a slow disagreement. No one holds the rail. Their bodies have learned to compensate without consulting them about it.
A man named Devereux, or something that sounds like that—he’s worked the port for eighteen years, loading container trucks, and he takes this ferry twice a day. His hands are inside his jacket pockets. He is not looking at the far shore or the near shore. He is looking at the place where the water meets the hull and the foam appears and disappears without pattern, a kind of event horizon, the ferry constantly arriving at the same place and leaving it.
What happens in a crossing you’ve made ten thousand times? The mind empties out. Or it fills with something that isn’t thought—more like weather. The ferry crosses and the body is a vessel inside a vessel, going.
There’s a woman who eats the same breakfast every day on the 6:15: a roll with butter in a paper bag from the bakery near the southern terminal. She folds the bag neatly. She watches the water eat itself. She is thinking about her daughter, or maybe she stopped thinking about her daughter an hour ago and is now not thinking about anything in a way that wears her daughter’s shape.
The fog horn on the far channel marker calls once, and nobody looks.
This is a small crossing. There are crossings on this earth that take days, weeks, that take everything you have, that remake the people inside them. This one takes nineteen minutes. And yet the morning light comes across the water at that specific low angle of spring, and the channel between the two shores is wider than it looks from either bank, and when you stand at the bow the wind smells of brine and diesel and something colder underneath, something the ocean exhaled on its way in from somewhere without a name, and the far shore approaches with the particular quality of all things that approach slowly: revealing themselves, which is different from being seen.
Devereux doesn’t look up. The woman finishes her roll and folds the paper bag into a smaller square.
The ferry docks with a controlled thud, and the workers file off, and the dock swallows them, and the ferry turns around and goes back the way it came.
The water fills in where it was.