The Terminal

Salt and Crossing

Chapter 2: The Terminal

The Port Clement ferry terminal had been built in 1953 by the Maine State Ferry Service, which had contracted the work to Leeman Brothers Construction of Thomaston, a firm that no longer existed but whose work endured in the way that work in poured concrete and dimensional lumber endures on the Maine coast, which is to say unevenly, the concrete still sound where it had been properly cured and properly drained and properly maintained, cracked and spalled where it had not, the lumber replaced board by board over seventy years until the building was, in the philosophical sense, no longer the building that Leeman Brothers had built but was instead the building that the terminal had become, each board a decision made by some maintenance worker in some year about which wood to use and how to cut it and where to nail it, and the accumulation of these decisions was the terminal itself, a structure that was not designed so much as arrived at, the way a face arrives at its lines.

Harlan arrived at 5:30.

This was not an approximation. He arrived at 5:30 the way the tide arrived at its appointed time, not because he consulted a watch — though he wore one, a Casio digital on his left wrist, the same model he had worn since 1998, replacing the battery at Dunmore Hardware every eighteen months — but because his body knew 5:30 the way it knew the channel, by accumulated habit, by the internal clock that thirty-four years of identical mornings had wound and set and maintained with a precision that the Casio merely confirmed.

The walk from his house to the terminal took seven minutes. The house was on Prospect Street, a name that overstated the street's ambition, a two-block stretch of residential road that climbed the low hill above the terminal and offered, from its upper end, a view of the harbor and the channel and, on clear days, the bulk of Dunmore Island two miles to the east. The house was white clapboard, two stories, built in 1931 by a man named Porter whose descendants had sold it to Harlan and Janet in 1994 for sixty-seven thousand dollars, a price that seemed reasonable at the time and that would seem impossible now, because the coast had discovered itself, had been discovered by people from away who saw in its harbors and its islands and its fog a beauty that the people who lived there had always known but had never thought to monetize, because beauty and money had been, for most of the coast's history, separate categories, and the merging of the categories was recent and unsettling and was, in some way that Harlan could feel but not articulate, related to the bridge.

He walked down Prospect Street in the dark. The streetlights — there were two on Prospect, sodium vapor, mounted on wooden poles — cast their orange circles on the pavement, and the circles were the same circles they had cast for twenty years, and the pavement was the same pavement, patched and patched again, and the walk was the same walk, seven minutes, downhill, the harbor smell arriving at the halfway point where the street turned and the air opened and the salt came in, the salt that was not a smell exactly but a presence, a weight in the air, a mineral announcement that the sea was near and the sea was always near and the nearness of the sea was the fundamental fact of this place, the fact from which all other facts derived.

The terminal parking lot was empty at 5:30 except for Harlan's truck, a 2009 Ford F-150 that he parked in the same spot every morning, the spot closest to the terminal office door, not because it was reserved — there were no reserved spots, the lot served the ferry and the ferry served the public and the public parked where it pleased — but because at 5:30 the lot was empty and the closest spot was the most sensible spot and sensibility, in the absence of any competing claim, became habit, and habit became tradition, and tradition became the spot, so that even on the rare occasions when another vehicle was already in the lot at 5:30, it would not be parked in Harlan's spot, because the fishermen and the early commuters knew it was Harlan's spot in the way they knew that the 6:15 was the first crossing and the 9:30 was the last, by the accumulated knowledge of a community that regulated itself not by posted rules but by observed practice.

He unlocked the terminal office. The key was brass, heavy, original to the 1953 lock that Leeman Brothers had installed, a Corbin mortise lock that had outlasted the company that installed it and the company that manufactured it and that functioned with the stiff reliability of mid-century American hardware, requiring a firm turn and a slight lift of the door to align the bolt, a two-part motion that Harlan's wrist performed without thought, without attention, the way a pianist's fingers find a chord they have played ten thousand times.

The office was small. Eight feet by ten. A metal desk — steel, gray, government-surplus, with a Formica top and four drawers, two of which contained current paperwork and two of which contained the paperwork of previous years stacked in manila folders that went back, in the bottom drawer, to 1997, the year Harlan had taken over from his father. A wooden chair behind the desk, oak, swivel, the seat worn to a concavity that matched the shape of Harlan's weight. A filing cabinet in the corner, three drawers, green, locked, containing the ferry's licensing documents, insurance policies, Coast Guard inspection reports, and the maintenance logs that the Bureau of Maritime Services required the operator to maintain and that Harlan maintained with the same precision he applied to the crossing itself, each entry a record of what was done and when and by whom, the ferry's biography written in the language of parts and hours and fluid levels.

On the wall above the desk hung the schedule board.

The schedule board was three feet by two feet, painted white, with the crossing times lettered in black paint, not printed, not typed, but hand-lettered, the letters made by Harlan's father in 1979 using a small brush and a can of marine enamel, and the letters had not been refreshed because they did not need to be refreshed because the schedule had not changed since 1979, which was the year the state had established the current nine-round-trip timetable, and the paint was as durable as the schedule it recorded, both of them fixed, both of them permanent in the way that permanent means on the Maine coast, which is to say until the thing that sustains them — the paint, the schedule, the ferry, the need — ceases to exist.

6:15 AM. 7:20 AM. 8:30 AM. 10:00 AM. 12:00 PM. 2:30 PM. 5:00 PM. 7:00 PM. 9:30 PM.

Nine departure times from Port Clement. Nine from Dunmore, staggered between them. Eighteen crossings per day. Twenty-two minutes each. Six days a week. The ferry did not run on Sundays, and the island's relationship to Sundays was shaped by this absence — supplies laid in on Saturday, errands completed on Saturday, the Sunday isolation accepted and, by some, cherished, because the absence of the ferry on Sundays made the island more fully an island, reminded it of what it was, which was a place you could not leave whenever you chose, a place that kept you if the water kept you, a place whose sovereignty over your time was absolute one day in seven.

He checked the Constance.

This was the first task, always, before the coffee, before the weather, before the tide table, because the Constance was the crossing and the crossing was the job and the job began with the vessel, always with the vessel, the same sequence his father had followed and had taught him: hull, engine room, wheelhouse, car deck, passenger cabin, dock lines, ramp. Seven stations. Seven checks. A liturgy.

He walked the dock to the Constance's berth. The dock was concrete and timber, the concrete apron giving way to timber decking at the water's edge, the timber black with creosote and salt and the particular darkness that coastal wood acquires over decades of immersion and exposure, a darkness that is not rot but transformation, the wood becoming something other than wood, something harder and more mineral, something that has negotiated a truce with the sea.

The Constance sat in her berth. She was 112 feet long and 38 feet wide and she drew seven feet of water fully loaded, which was eighteen cars and two hundred passengers, though she rarely carried a full load except on the Fourth of July and Labor Day and the occasional Friday in August when the summer people left the island all at once, their cars packed with coolers and beach chairs and the particular luggage of people who have been on vacation and are returning to their lives, which is luggage carried with less enthusiasm than the luggage that brought them.

He boarded at the stern. The ramp was up, locked in its raised position for the night, the hydraulic cylinders retracted, the ramp's steel surface dewed with condensation that would burn off when the sun — if there was sun — reached it. He used the crew access ladder, a steel ladder welded to the stern quarter, five rungs, the rungs worn smooth by boots, by his boots and Tommy's boots and the boots of the deckhands before Tommy, and the smoothness of the rungs was a record of the boarding the way the wear on the wheel was a record of the steering.

The car deck was empty and clean. Tommy had swept it the previous night after the 9:30 docking, as he did every night, the push broom moving the sand and the dirt and the dried salt from the deck plates into a pile at the stern, which he shoveled over the side into the harbor, and the deck's cleanliness was Tommy's signature on the day, his assertion that the vessel was ready, that whatever came aboard would come aboard onto a surface that had been attended to, that had been cared for, that had been swept.

Harlan descended to the engine room. The engine room was below the car deck, accessed by a steel companionway with a watertight door at the top that was dogged shut when the vessel was under way and undogged when she was at the dock, and the door's handle was brass, the same brass as the terminal key, and the brass was polished by use to a brightness that no intentional polishing could have achieved, the brightness of function, of a surface that is touched many times a day by hands that are not thinking about the surface but about what lies on the other side of it.

The engine room smelled of diesel and oil and bilge water and the particular metallic warmth of large engines at rest, engines that have been recently run and have not yet fully cooled, that still hold in their iron the memory of combustion, of the controlled violence that is an internal combustion engine's essential act. The Caterpillar 3412s sat on their mounts, port and starboard, each one the size of a compact car, painted Caterpillar yellow under the grime and the oil stains and the marks of thirty-four years of service, the yellow visible only in patches now, the way the original color of an old barn is visible only where the weather has not reached.

He checked the oil. He checked the coolant. He checked the raw-water strainers, pulling each one from its housing and inspecting the basket for debris — seaweed, plastic fragments, the occasional small crab that had been pulled through the intake and caught in the mesh, alive, its legs working against the wire, and Harlan would carry these crabs up to the car deck and throw them over the side, not from sentimentality but from the practical consideration that a crab in the strainer was a crab that would decompose in the strainer if not removed, and decomposition in a raw-water system was corrosion, and corrosion was failure, and failure was not acceptable in the channel.

He checked the bilge. He checked the shaft seals. He checked the steering gear, a hydraulic system that translated the wheel's rotation into the rudder's deflection, the system's hoses and cylinders and fluid reservoir arranged in the stern compartment with the orderly complexity of a body's circulatory system, each component dependent on the others, each one's failure the system's failure.

Everything was sound. Everything was always sound, because the maintenance was constant, because the attention was constant, because the Constance was not a machine that Harlan operated but a body that he inhabited, and you do not neglect the body you inhabit, you do not defer the maintenance of the thing that carries you, that carries others, that moves between the shores with your hands on its wheel and your feet on its deck and your life measured in its crossings.

He climbed to the wheelhouse. The wheelhouse was the highest point on the Constance, a steel-and-glass enclosure mounted above the passenger cabin, reached by an exterior stairway on the starboard side, and from the wheelhouse you could see the car deck below and, when the fog permitted, the full length of the channel in both directions, Port Clement behind and Dunmore ahead, the two shores of a life lived in transit.

The wheelhouse contained: the wheel. The engine controls — two throttle levers, port and starboard. The compass, a Ritchie four-inch, mounted in a binnacle that was older than the Constance herself, transferred from the previous ferry when the Constance was launched, the binnacle's brass housing green with verdigris where the salt had worked into the metal and the metal had responded in the way that brass responds, by producing the green that is brass's version of a scar. The radar, a Furuno 1835, replaced in 2016. The GPS, a Garmin, replaced in 2019. The VHF radio, a Standard Horizon, the microphone hanging on its hook, the channel set to 16, the hailing frequency, which was also the channel that the Coast Guard monitored and the channel that you would use if the thing you did not think about happened, the thing that was always possible and never probable and that the protocols existed to address.

The tide table was pinned to the corkboard beside the radar. The tide table was a printed sheet, issued monthly by NOAA, and Harlan could have consulted the tide information digitally, on the GPS or on his phone, but he preferred the printed sheet because the printed sheet showed the month entire, all of its tides arranged in columns, and the arrangement allowed him to see the pattern, the rhythm, the way the tides advanced forty-eight minutes each day, the way the springs and the neaps alternated with the moon's phases, the way the water's schedule was governed by a body 238,900 miles away, which was a fact that never ceased to strike him as remarkable, that this channel, this local water, this specific crossing, was moved by the moon, was pulled and released by a gravitational force that operated at a scale so vast that the channel was, to the moon, less than a capillary is to the body, and yet the pull was specific, was local, was felt in the Constance's hull and in the dock lines and in the mud of the harbor bottom, and the tide table recorded this pull the way a seismograph records the earth's tremors, faithfully, precisely, with the detached accuracy of a document that does not need to understand what it measures.

He filled the thermos from the coffee he had brought from home and set it on the shelf. He turned on the electronics — radar first, then GPS, then VHF, the screens warming, the instruments finding their signals, the wheelhouse coming alive the way a body comes alive in the morning, system by system, sense by sense.

5:55. The first cars arrived.

He could hear them from the wheelhouse — the tires on the lot's pavement, the idle of the engines, the slam of doors as drivers got out to stretch or to walk to the terminal building where the restrooms were, the restrooms that the state had renovated in 2014 at a cost of forty-seven thousand dollars, an amount that the Port Clement selectmen had found excessive and that the ferry riders had found insufficient, because the renovation had replaced the fixtures but not the walls and the walls were the walls of 1953, tile over concrete block, the tile cracked and grouted and cracked again, the grout darkened by seventy years of coastal humidity, and the restrooms were clean because the terminal attendant cleaned them daily but they were not new and they would not become new and the renovation had made this fact more visible, not less, the way a new frame on an old painting draws attention to the painting's age.

Paul Ouellette was first. He was always first. His green pickup idled in the lane closest to the ramp, the lane marked CARS in faded white paint on the pavement, and Paul sat in the cab with his window down and his arm resting on the door and his coffee in his hand — not thermos coffee but gas-station coffee, Cumberland Farms, bought on Route 1 at 5:15, the cup large, the coffee weak, the transaction completed without conversation because Paul did not speak in the morning, did not speak until he had been on the water for at least an hour, and the gas-station attendant knew this and the ferry captain knew this and the knowledge was a form of respect, a recognition that some people arrive at the day gradually, the way the island arrives from the fog, and that to demand speech from such a person before they are ready is to demand that the fog lift before it has decided to lift.

After Paul came the van from Maine Island Electric. After the van came the gray sedan, driven by a woman Harlan did not recognize, dark hair, forty or forty-five, who parked in the second lane and remained in her car with the engine running.

By 6:10 there were seven cars. The regulars and the strangers arranged in the two lanes according to arrival time, first come first on, the queue self-organizing in the way that queues self-organize in small communities where the rules are known and the violators remembered, where cutting the line at the ferry terminal was a social error of sufficient magnitude that the story of it would circulate through the general store and the harbor and the post office within hours, and the circulating story was the enforcement mechanism, because in a community of this size reputation was currency and currency, once debased, was difficult to restore.

Tommy arrived at 6:00. He came from the island — he lived in the apartment above Mere's store, the apartment where Harlan and Mere had grown up, the apartment where their parents had lived and where their father had walked the same seven minutes to the same terminal and drunk the same black coffee and checked the same vessel, not the Constance but her predecessor, the Clara B., a smaller ferry, wooden-hulled, diesel-powered, that had run the crossing from 1962 to 1988, when the Constance replaced her and the Clara B. was sold to a man in Boothbay Harbor who converted her to a tour boat and ran her for another fifteen years before she was scrapped, and the scrapping was a thing that Harlan did not think about when he thought about the Constance, which was always, which was every day, which was now.

Tommy crossed on the 5:00 AM water taxi from Dunmore, a twenty-foot skiff operated by Eddie Crane, who ran the taxi service for the early workers — the deckhand, the lobstermen who kept their trucks on the mainland, the hospital nurse who worked the night shift and needed to be in Port Clement before the first ferry. The water taxi was not the ferry. The water taxi was a boat and the ferry was a vessel and the difference was not size but purpose, not length but meaning, and the meaning of the ferry was the crossing, was the scheduled, reliable, repetitive act of carrying people and cars and freight between two shores on a timetable that did not vary with the weather or the season or the whim of the operator but only with the most extreme conditions — hurricane, ice, mechanical failure — and the reliability was the crossing's identity, was the thing that made it not merely transportation but infrastructure, not merely a boat ride but a commitment, the state's commitment to the island and the island's commitment to the mainland and the crossing's commitment to both.

Tommy boarded the Constance and began the morning routine. The ramp. The dock lines. The car deck. He moved with the unhurried efficiency of a man who knows exactly what must be done and exactly how long each task takes and exactly in what order the tasks must be performed, and the knowing was not Harlan's knowing — it was newer, six years deep rather than thirty-four — but it was the same knowing in kind if not in degree, the same body-knowledge, the same hands-on-rope understanding that could not be transmitted by manual or by instruction but only by doing, by the repetition that was not repetition but education, the hands learning what the mind could not teach them.

6:14. Harlan descended from the wheelhouse to the car deck. He stood at the head of the ramp and watched Tommy lower it — the hydraulics engaging, the ramp descending, the steel surface meeting the concrete apron with a sound that was the crossing's opening chord, the note that said: the day begins, the crossing begins, come aboard.

The cars drove on. Paul Ouellette first, his pickup finding its spot on the deck with the precision of a vehicle that had occupied the same spot a thousand times, port side, first row, close enough to the wheelhouse stairway that Paul could, if he chose, walk up and talk to Harlan, which he did sometimes, on afternoons, when the morning's silence had been satisfied and speech was again possible. The van next. The gray sedan. The remaining cars.

Harlan counted. Seven vehicles. In summer the count would be twelve or fourteen. In October it would drop to eight or nine. By December it would be four or five, sometimes three, sometimes two on the late crossings, sometimes the Constance would cross with a single vehicle on her deck, one car making the 22-minute passage through the dark and the cold and the fog, and the single car on the empty deck would seem both absurd and essential, the way a single word in a large silence seems both absurd and essential.

The loading took four minutes. Tommy directed the cars with hand signals — forward, stop, cut your wheel, straighten, stop — the signals economical, precise, understood by the regulars without thought and by the visitors with the slight confusion that visitors bring to any ritual they have not practiced, the confusion that is not ignorance but unfamiliarity, the difference between not knowing and not yet knowing.

Harlan climbed to the wheelhouse. Tommy secured the ramp. The sequence began — stern line, bow line, hand signal, engine engagement, departure.

6:15.

The horn sounded. The Constance moved into the channel. The terminal receded into the fog. The crossing began.

It had begun this way every morning for thirty-four years. It would begin this way for — how many more mornings? The state's letter had said the bridge would open in eighteen months. Eighteen months was roughly 468 crossings, roughly 10,296 minutes on the water, roughly 171 hours in the channel, and the roughly was the problem, the approximately, the uncertainty of an end that was certain in fact but uncertain in date, and the uncertainty made every crossing both ordinary and terminal, both routine and last, and the duality was the thing that the morning carried, the weight that the fog carried, the knowledge that the crossing was ending and the crossing was continuing and the continuing and the ending were happening simultaneously, the way a tide is both coming in and going out at the same time, depending on where you stand, depending on which shore you are watching from.

The terminal waited behind them. It would wait all day, as it waited every day, as it had waited since 1953 — the building, the lot, the benches, the schedule board, the restrooms, the tide chart, the brass lock on the office door, all of it waiting, all of it built for waiting, because a terminal is a place of waiting by definition, a place where the present tense is always temporary, always giving way to the next departure, the next arrival, the next crossing, and the waiting is not passive but active, not empty but full, full of the anticipation that is the terminal's essential emotion, the feeling of being about to go somewhere, of being in the last moments before motion, and the moments before motion are, in their way, more charged than the motion itself, because the moments before contain the motion as possibility, as potential, as the thing that has not yet happened and therefore still holds all of its promise and none of its completion.

The terminal waited. The fog sat on it. The morning continued.

And on the wall above the desk, the schedule board — the hand-lettered times, the black paint on the white board, the schedule that had not changed since 1979 — waited too, because the schedule was also ending, the letters that James Goss had painted with his small brush and his can of marine enamel, the letters that had announced the crossing's times for forty-three years, and when the crossing ended the letters would become artifacts, would become history, would become the kind of thing that someone puts in a museum or a historical society or a photograph, and the transformation from function to artifact was the transformation that the terminal and the ferry and the crossing and the man were all undergoing, slowly, over eighteen months, the transformation from present tense to past tense, from is to was, from the living act to the remembered act, and the remembered act is never the act itself but is always a translation, and translations lose something, and what they lose is the thing that cannot be said, the thing that can only be done, the thing that is 22 minutes long and 1.4 miles wide and that happens nine times a day six days a week and that will, when it stops happening, leave behind a silence that no bridge can fill, because a bridge is not a silence-filler but a silence-maker, a structure that replaces the sound of the crossing — the engine, the horn, the ramp, the dock lines, the water against the hull — with the sound of tires on pavement, which is the sound of transit without crossing, of movement without passage, of getting there without the getting.