Wednesday, January 04, 2012
Story last updated at 1/4/2012 – 1:03 pm
By Brooke Elgie | for The Capital City Weekly
TENAKEE SPRINGS – In order to truly appreciate ferries, you’ve got to live in a small village on an island without cars. looking at a map of where I once lived in Puget Sound, the geography doesn’t seem that much different from our part of Alaska. Like here, it’s water country, a country of islands. Like here, they have ferries, but their relationship to their ferries is far different from ours.
In its heart, theirs is a classic love/hate sort of thing. We loved them but we hated them, too. We got married on them. We sent pictures of them to friends who didn’t have ferries – shoot; half the postcards of Puget Sound have ferries on them. but we hated the inconvenience of having to wait for them and then, because they were so slow, we hated waiting for them to get there. We loved to look at them but we hated to pay the fares. The farther away we lived from water the more we resented taxes to pay for them. those who rode them the most were the ones who complained the most. The difference was that we had all those cars. Take a ferry? How nostalgic? How last decade? We can just jump in the car and go. How "now" is that?
It’s different if you live in one of our little places without roads. around here, the ferry is the dependable, indispensible, slow metronome of bush life. when you’re new here it may take a little while to get into step with the intricate little Dance of the Ferry but it isn’t long before the ferry becomes your ferry and the crew like members of your community that you only happen to see when you leave town. Pretty quickly you find that you have joined the dance.
A TRIP IN ITSELF TO THE DOCK
getting to the boat, you’re in a mild rush to go upstairs and stake out your seat but at the same time neighbors that you haven’t seen in a couple of weeks are coming down and you want to at least say "hello." They’re eager to find their stuff on the baggage cart but it’s been turned around since they put their packages on it – plus they are looking for the friends who said they would be there to help unload – so it’s all a little hectic. There will always be someone bringing in a pile of lumber, or maybe a big order of groceries for the store, each requiring a different line of helpers hustling heavy boxes or shoulder-loads of lumber off the trucks that brought it – trucks can’t leave the boat, remember. then add visiting hunters with their big ATV’s and their mountains of gear, oblivious as they clog things up, leave motors running and shout back and forth to each other like rodeo cowboys. The term "controlled chaos" comes to mind. Throw into the mix a few kids and a half-dozen excited dogs, who never miss any gathering that looks like a party, and it can become a very satisfying spectator sport, indeed.
Even waiting for the ferry is a sort of local ritual with subtle variations. if you live to the east, you can wait at home until you see the "big blue canoe" coming around Grave Island. if you live around the point to the west, you’ll likely have a friend who lives in town call you when it comes into sight, then you’ll grab your stuff and head on down to the dock. You’ll have plenty of time because the boat makes a big, slow turn in front of town. I know full well that they do that in order to line up properly for the landing but, my, it makes a pretty picture and I always suspect that there is just a little showing off involved.
My waiting style is to go early to the store, hang out, drink coffee (we’ve got espresso now so if I’m feeling expansive it might even be a latte) and join the speculation on who’s leaving and who’s coming in. regardless of snide comments by some, and at the risk of sounding prematurely self-defensive, I’ve got to insist that we’re not so hard up for entertainment around here that the whole town troops down to watch the ferry come in. Nevertheless, a decent regard for the truth does compel me to admit that you can usually find one or two – well, OK, maybe three or four – who are there just as spectators. We have a local sport of critiquing the captain up on his wing deck as he swivels like a line judge at a tennis match to watch the bow and the stern of the big boat ease up to the dock. when he’s close enough, the deck crew snags the ends of the big lines and hauls them through those enormous hawse-holes and onto the big winches. you can tell by looking that these are the guys who had the really big Tonka toys when they were little kids.
if the tide is out the ramp will be steep and we’ll all hold our breath when Gary starts up with his tall trailer stacked high and his little ATV straining. We relax a little when he clears the first hump from car deck to ramp, but when he gets to the top with another hump and a tight turn to boot, the collective dockside blood pressure jumps a full couple of points.
WORSE WAYS TO TRAVEL
There is no better way to appreciate the ferry than to ride it to Juneau and then get on a jetliner to go south. I never fail to wish I could just stay on the rumbling old boat and watch the shoreline slip by until the fringes of Seattle gradually begin to show themselves. So what if it takes a couple of days? I’m with friends all along the way. I have good food, plenty of room and a blast of fresh air any time I want it. Oh, that the wonders of modern air travel could be so pleasant. Don’t you wish?
outside of the awareness of most people, the airline industry is very close to making that last tiny technological step that will finally tip us all into the world of Star Trek. think it’s still in the far future? think again. We’ve already been taught to file in to a big aluminum cylinder and be strapped into the smallest possible seats. We can turn our heads a little and move our arms from the elbows down but that’s about it. once we’re all secured in place, doors hiss closed, computers calculate, unseen hands manipulate levers and close circuits and the big cylinder, all aroar and atremble, lumbers itself into space. Talk about fear and trust all twisted up together; not one of us in a hundred could explain how the darned thing actually leaves the ground. once it somehow has … again, they tell us that we can get up to pee, but then take it all back with the litany of restrictions. The invitation later to "move around the cabin" comes across as a cruel joke.
Very soon now the last few pieces of the problem will be worked out. once we’re all strapped down and the doors sealed, we’ll be molecularly deconstructed and then reconstituted in a new time/space like so many freeze-dried entrees. it won’t be long, either. The only big remaining challenge is to induce the coma state and they are closing in on that with the numbing drone of instructions on what to do in an emergency – as if it would do any good. when it does come, I just might volunteer to be first in line if it means freedom from in-flight magazines and empty choices between different versions of the same plastic foods.
give me the ferry every time. let me be greeted by name by pursers Kurt or Mary and have them jot me down in their little books. let me say "hi" to the deck guys and go up to claim my favorite spot, then later amble up to the little window to buy my ticket.
PERKS OF THE MARINE HIGHWAY
Everyone has their favorite spot. if you’re a fresh-air-at-all-costs type you head to the solarium and drag a lounge to just the right place under the radiant heaters; not too close or you’ll soon feel like a crispy critter but not so far that you’ll be in that cold breeze that will soon come whipping around the deck. some head for the canteen to stake out a table and gossip happily with friends for the whole trip. I generally head for the forward lounge where I can tuck my coffee out of sight (no food or drink in the lounge) and either ease into a Zen meditation state as the shoreline slides past or else pull my hat down, lean back and snooze happily to the drone of the big diesels.
Beginning to end, it’s a different way to travel. It’s easy, and low stress – and most of all, it’s human. once, we left the frozen Christmas turkey behind on the baggage cart. A phone call, a "Yeah, we found it, we’ll put it in the freezer and you can pick it up when we stop on Thursday," and all was well.
once in Hoonah, they had already pulled away from the dock when someone saw Fred hustling up to the gate with his three dogs that he’d taken for a potty break. Darned if the captain didn’t call for slow ahead, bring her back in and hold her while Fred and his boys hustled back aboard. Try that with Sardine Airlines.
In Puget Sound, cars and roads made it easy to get around – so easy that we were willing to sacrifice almost anything for them. and we did. and then we kept at it until we had built a world that belonged to them more than it did to us. The bustling "mosquito fleet" of passenger and freight boats that once defined the place came to be seen as bottlenecks – delays in our always-rush-hour commutes. The automobile had seduced us and then, like seducers everywhere, it left us to deal with the awkward consequences of our dalliance. you knew that the great days of the ferry were over when you began to see old ferries restored as though, suddenly, they had become cherished items.
twice a week, regular, on Thursday and Saturday, our ferry comes into view around Grave Island, makes that big, slow turn and pulls up to our dock. for a few weeks once a year our ferry, LeConte, is out of service for refit. We adjust our travel until it returns with new paint and maybe new seats, but the same crew and the same big old engines ready to rumble on for another year. May it always be so.
Brooke Elgie writes from Tenakee Springs. He may be reached at .
Cynthia Meyer is a photographer from Tenakee Springs. View more work at cynthiameyerphotography. smugmug.com. Share this page:
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