The Announcement

Salt and Crossing

Chapter 21: The Announcement

The letter arrived on a Tuesday in the first week of December, delivered not by the mail — not by Doris French at the island post office, not in the canvas sack that traveled on the morning ferry — but by interoffice courier, the courier a man named Plante who worked for the Bureau of Maritime Services in Augusta and who drove to Port Clement in a state vehicle, a sedan, and who walked into the terminal office at 10:30 in the morning and placed the envelope on the desk and asked Harlan to sign the delivery receipt, and Harlan signed and the courier left and the envelope sat on the desk.

The envelope was white. Legal size. The return address was printed: Maine Department of Transportation, Bureau of Maritime Services, 16 State House Station, Augusta, ME 04333. The envelope was addressed to Captain Harlan D. Goss, Master, M/V Constance, Port Clement-Dunmore Island Ferry Service. The addressing was correct — every word, every initial, every title, the addressing precise in the way that official correspondence is precise, the precision not a courtesy but a formality, the formality the language's way of announcing its own importance, of saying: this is not a personal letter, this is not a note, this is a document, and documents have consequences.

He did not open it immediately. He set it on the desk beside the coffee mug — the mug that lived in the office, a different vessel from the thermos, a ceramic mug with the Maine State Ferry Service logo on it, the logo a stylized ferry crossing a stylized channel, the stylization reducing the ferry and the channel to symbols, to graphic elements, to the kind of simplified representation that logos require, the representation not wrong but not right either, not the ferry and not the channel but the idea of the ferry and the idea of the channel, and the idea was not the thing, was never the thing, was always the distance between the thing and its representation.

He drank coffee from the mug. He looked at the envelope. The envelope sat on the desk with the patience of all envelopes, which is the patience of contained information, the patience of a thing that holds what it holds and does not release it until it is opened, and the holding is the envelope's function, the containing and the waiting and the eventual releasing, and the releasing is the opening and the opening is the reading and the reading is the knowing and the knowing is the consequence.

He opened it at 10:45. He opened it with the brass letter opener that sat in the desk's pencil groove, the letter opener a thing that belonged to the office and not to Harlan, a thing that had been there when he inherited the office from his father, the opener's handle tarnished, the blade dull, the tool performing its single function with the reliability of a thing that has only one function and that performs it daily.

The letter was one page. Single-spaced. Dated November 28. The letterhead was the same as the return address — Maine Department of Transportation, Bureau of Maritime Services — and the letter was signed by Margaret Fournier, Director, who was a person Harlan had met twice, at annual operator meetings in Augusta, and who was a competent administrator who spoke about budgets and compliance and fleet management with the fluency of a person who understood the system's mechanics and who did not, in Harlan's observation, understand the system's meaning, and the not-understanding was not a fault but was a condition of the job, the condition of administering from Augusta a service that existed on the water, the distance between the office and the channel the same distance that existed between the logo on the mug and the ferry in the channel, the distance between representation and reality.

The letter said:

Dear Captain Goss:

This letter serves as formal notification that the Port Clement-Dunmore Island ferry service, operated by M/V Constance (Official Number 982341), will be permanently discontinued effective March 1. This action is taken pursuant to 23 MRSA Section 4601(3), which authorizes the discontinuation of state ferry services upon the completion of an alternative fixed-link transportation connection.

The Dunmore Island Bridge (Project No. BR-0189) is scheduled for substantial completion on February 15, with the bridge opening to vehicular traffic on March 1. Upon the bridge's opening, the ferry service will no longer be required to maintain the island's connection to the mainland transportation network.

The final day of ferry service will be February 28. All regularly scheduled crossings will operate through and including that date. M/V Constance will be transported to the state's maintenance facility in Rockland for decommissioning and disposition.

Terminal facilities at Port Clement and Dunmore Island will be transferred to the respective municipal authorities for alternative use, subject to the terms specified in the attached memorandum.

We recognize and appreciate the decades of service you have provided to the residents of Dunmore Island and the traveling public. Your dedication to safe and reliable ferry operations has been exemplary.

Please contact this office with any questions regarding the transition process.

Sincerely, Margaret Fournier Director, Bureau of Maritime Services

cc: Owen Delaney, Project Manager, BR-0189 Dunmore Island Board of Selectmen Port Clement Board of Selectmen

Harlan read the letter. He read it once, quickly, the way a person reads bad news the first time, scanning for the essential information, the date and the decision and the finality. He read it again, slowly, the way a person reads bad news the second time, attending to the language, to the words, to the way the words said what they said and did not say what they did not say.

The letter did not say: your life's work is ending. The letter did not say: the channel you have crossed for thirty-four years will no longer require you. The letter did not say: the knowledge in your hands, the knowledge that took thirty-four years to accumulate and that exists nowhere else, will be rendered unnecessary. The letter did not say: the horn will not sound at 6:15. The letter did not say: the Constance will be empty. The letter did not say: the coffee will not be drunk from the thermos on the shelf with the ring worn into the wood. The letter did not say any of these things because the letter was not written in the language of these things but was written in the language of statutes and project numbers and effective dates, the language of administration, the language that reduces the particular to the general and the personal to the procedural and the human to the bureaucratic.

23 MRSA Section 4601(3). The statute. The law that authorized the discontinuation. The law that said, in language that Harlan had not read and would not read, that when a bridge was built to an island the ferry could be stopped, the ferry's service no longer required, the ferry's need eliminated by the bridge's presence, and the elimination was legal, was authorized, was the law's permission granted to the department to do what the department had decided to do, and the permission was the shield, the protection, the thing that stood between the decision and any challenge to the decision, the law saying: this is allowed, this is proper, this is within the authority of the state, and the state's authority was the final word, was the ending's authorization, was the document that turned thirty-four years of crossing into a transition process.

We recognize and appreciate the decades of service. The sentence sat in the letter like a stone in a stream, smooth, polished by the current of bureaucratic language that had shaped it, the sentence deployed in a thousand letters to a thousand employees whose services were no longer required, the sentence generic, interchangeable, applicable to a ferry captain and a road crew foreman and a toll collector and anyone else whose job had been eliminated by progress, by technology, by the state's decision that the old way was no longer the way, and the sentence's generality was its inadequacy, its failure to say what the specific case required, which was not recognition and appreciation but something else, something that the bureaucratic language did not contain, something that existed only in the channel and the wheelhouse and the crossing and the thirty-four years and the hands on the wheel and the coffee in the thermos and the fog on the glass.

Harlan folded the letter. He folded it twice, making a rectangle the size of an index card, the folding precise, the creases sharp, the hands that folded the same hands that held the wheel and that felt the tide in the deck plates, the hands performing this small administrative act with the same precision they brought to every act, the same care, the same attention to the detail that the detail required.

He carried the letter to the wheelhouse.

He climbed the stairs — the steel stairs on the Constance's starboard side, the stairs he had climbed forty thousand times, the number not calculated but felt, the stairs worn at their edges by his boots, by the boots of every captain and every visitor who had climbed to the wheelhouse — and he entered the wheelhouse and he stood at the console and he looked at the shelf where the thermos sat and the corkboard where the tide table was pinned and the drawer where his father's ledger rested and the notebook where his own log was kept, the wheelhouse's furniture, the wheelhouse's collection, the things that made the wheelhouse not a room but a place, not a space but a life.

He placed the letter on the console beside the tide table.

The tide table and the letter. The two documents side by side. The tide table showing December's tides — the highs and the lows, the springs and the neaps, the moon's schedule for the month, the schedule that governed the channel and the crossing and the Constance's handling — and the letter showing the crossing's end, the date, March 1, the date that the tides did not know about and did not care about, the date that was a human date, an administrative date, a date that existed in the calendar and not in the channel, the channel knowing nothing of dates, knowing only the tide and the current and the wind and the depth and the bottom and the ledges, the channel's knowledge not temporal but physical, not about when but about what.

The two documents occupied the same space. They sat on the console together, touching, the tide table's edge against the letter's edge, the two pieces of paper in contact, in proximity, in the relationship that proximity creates between objects that are placed near each other, the relationship not meaningful in itself but made meaningful by the man who placed them there, the man who chose to put the letter beside the tide table because the beside was the point, the juxtaposition was the statement, the statement being: these are the two facts, these are the crossing's two truths, the tide's truth and the letter's truth, the truth that the water will rise and fall according to the moon's schedule and the truth that the crossing will end according to the state's schedule, and the two truths coexist, and the coexistence is the last season's condition.

He did not remove the letter. He left it there. Day after day, crossing after crossing, the letter sat on the console beside the tide table, the letter's white rectangle becoming part of the wheelhouse's landscape, becoming another instrument, another gauge, another piece of information that the wheelhouse displayed — the radar showing the channel, the GPS showing the position, the compass showing the heading, the tide table showing the tides, the letter showing the end.

Tommy saw the letter. Tommy climbed to the wheelhouse that afternoon, on the 2:30, to discuss a maintenance issue — the stern ramp's hydraulic cylinder was leaking, a slow leak, the fluid weeping from the cylinder's seal, the weeping not urgent but eventual, the kind of leak that worsens over time if not addressed — and Tommy saw the letter on the console, the white rectangle beside the tide table, and he did not pick it up and he did not read it and he did not ask what it said because the letter's presence was its own communication, the white rectangle saying what it said without being read, the way a flag says what it says without being decoded, the symbol sufficient, the symbol the message.

"Hydraulic seal," Tommy said.

"Order the part," Harlan said. "Pendleton will have it."

"I'll call tomorrow."

They stood in the wheelhouse. The letter was between them — not physically between them, but between them in the way that a known thing is between two people who know it, the knowing shared, the sharing silent, the silence the acknowledgment that the thing is known and that the knowing does not require discussion, does not require the saying of the thing, because the saying would make the thing more real and the thing was already real enough, was already the white rectangle on the console, was already the date, March 1, was already the ending.

Tommy descended. Harlan stood in the wheelhouse alone. The letter and the tide table. The 2:30 crossing under way. The channel in December light, the light short, the light leaving early, the afternoon already dimming at 2:30, the dimming the season's honesty, the season saying: there is less now, less light, less warmth, less time, the less the winter's arithmetic, and the arithmetic was the same arithmetic as the letter's, the subtraction, the counting-down, the approach of the zero that was March 1.

He poured coffee from the thermos. He drank it. He set the thermos on its shelf, in the ring. He held the wheel. He crossed the channel. The channel was the same channel. The tide was the same tide. The crossing was the same crossing. The letter did not change the channel or the tide or the crossing. The letter changed only the number, only the count, only the total of remaining crossings, and the total was now finite, was now calculable, was now a number that he could compute if he chose to compute it.

He chose not to. He chose not to count the remaining crossings, not to calculate the number, not to convert the time between now and March 1 into a quantity of twenty-two-minute intervals, because the counting would be the ending's arithmetic, and the arithmetic would make the ending present in every crossing, would make every crossing the crossing-before-the-last, the penultimate, the approaching-zero, and the approaching-zero was not how he wanted to cross, was not how the crossing deserved to be crossed, the crossing deserving instead to be crossed the way it had always been crossed, as itself, as this crossing, this channel, this tide, this weather, this morning or this afternoon or this evening, the crossing in its own present tense, not in the future tense of the ending.

But the letter was there. The letter sat on the console. The letter's white rectangle was visible from the wheel, visible in his peripheral vision as he steered, visible the way the radar screen was visible and the compass was visible and the tide table was visible, the letter joining the wheelhouse's instruments, becoming part of the information that the wheelhouse presented to the captain, the information that the captain processed continuously, simultaneously, the radar and the GPS and the compass and the engine gauges and the tide table and the letter, all of it present, all of it informing, all of it part of the crossing's data, the crossing's reality, the crossing's diminishing account.

The letter stayed. It stayed through December. It stayed through the Christmas crossing — the December 24 schedule, abbreviated, four round trips instead of eight, the abbreviated schedule the holiday's concession to the crew's need for rest and the island's reduced demand — and the letter was there on Christmas Eve when Harlan crossed the channel in the dark at 5:00 PM with twelve cars on the deck, the cars carrying the island's people home for Christmas, home to the island, home across the water, and the crossing was the Christmas crossing and the Christmas crossing was the crossing and the letter was on the console and the tide table was beside it and the two documents sat together in the wheelhouse on Christmas Eve as they had sat together every day since December's first week, the letter and the tide table, the ending and the continuing, the state's schedule and the moon's schedule, the administrative and the astronomical, the human and the natural, the two truths of the last season, coexisting, cohabiting, sharing the console the way two people share a house, not always comfortably, not always peacefully, but necessarily, the necessity the condition, the condition the fact.

The letter stayed. It would stay until March 1. It would stay until the last crossing. It would stay in the wheelhouse, on the console, beside the tide table, the white rectangle becoming softer with time, the paper absorbing the wheelhouse's humidity, the edges curling slightly, the fold lines deepening, the letter aging in the wheelhouse the way everything aged in the wheelhouse — the wheel, the compass, the binnacle, the shelf, the thermos — the aging the record, the aging the proof that the thing had been present, had been there, had occupied the space, had been part of the crossing's final season.

And on March 1, when the last crossing was crossed and the engines were shut down and the wheelhouse was emptied, the letter would go with Harlan. He would take it. He would take it the way he would take the thermos and the notebook and his father's ledger — the personal things, the things that were his and not the state's, the things that the decommissioning could not claim — and the letter would join these things in his house on Prospect Street, the letter and the thermos and the notebook and the ledger, the collection, the archive, the crossing's remains.

But that was March. That was the future. That was the ending.

Now was December. Now was the crossing. Now was the wheel in his hands and the channel beneath the hull and the tide in the deck plates and the coffee in the thermos and the fog on the windows and the letter on the console.

Now was now. The letter said March. The tide table said now.

He chose the tide table. He chose the now. He crossed the channel.

The channel did not know about the letter. The channel knew only the tide.