The Constance

Salt and Crossing

Chapter 7: The Constance

She was launched on a Thursday in April of 1988 at Bath Iron Works, and Harlan was there, standing on the pier with his father and his mother and Mere, who was twenty and already engaged to Carl, and the launch was attended by the governor and the commissioner of transportation and the shipyard workers who had built her and the ferry service officials who had contracted her and the press from Portland and Augusta and Rockland and the small-town weeklies that covered the coast, and the press photographed the governor holding a bottle of champagne against the bow and the bottle breaking and the champagne running down the steel hull in a white froth that mixed with the rain, because it was raining, because it was April on the Kennebec River and April on the Kennebec River is a month that has not yet decided whether it is winter or spring and that expresses its indecision through rain.

The Constance. Named not for a person but for a principle, and named also for the first ferry that ran the Dunmore crossing in 1891, a wooden-hulled side-wheeler called the Constance that was in turn named for the daughter of the man who built her, Josiah Clement, the founder of Port Clement, who named the town for himself and the ferry for his daughter and the crossing for the need, because the need was the reason, was always the reason — the island needed the mainland and the mainland needed the island and the water between them was an obstacle that the need demanded be overcome, and the overcoming was the ferry, was the crossing, was the act that Josiah Clement began in 1891 and that his daughter's name preserved through 131 years and four vessels and three generations of captains, the name a thread connecting the wooden side-wheeler to the steel-hulled diesel that sat now at the Dunmore terminal with her engine idling and her captain in the wheelhouse and her deckhand on the car deck, the thread unbroken, the name the same, the constancy that the name promised delivered daily, nine round trips, six days a week, 22 minutes each way.

She was built to a design specified by the Maine State Ferry Service and executed by Bath Iron Works' small-craft division, which was an odd phrase for a shipyard that built destroyers — small craft, as though 112 feet of steel ferry were small, as though the vessel that would carry eighteen cars and two hundred passengers across a tidal channel six days a week for decades were a minor undertaking — but the phrase was relative, was the shipyard's way of categorizing its work, and the category placed the Constance alongside the tugboats and the research vessels and the Coast Guard cutters that the yard built between destroyer contracts, the in-between work, the bread-and-butter, and the Constance was bread-and-butter in the way that daily bread is bread-and-butter, which is to say essential, fundamental, the thing you cannot do without.

Her hull was steel, quarter-inch plate, welded, the welds ground smooth on the exterior and left as beads on the interior, the beads visible in the engine room as raised lines running along the hull frames like the veins on the back of a hand, structural, load-bearing, the evidence of the joining that made the plates a hull and the hull a vessel and the vessel a ferry and the ferry the crossing. The hull was painted below the waterline in red antifouling paint that was renewed every two years when the Constance was hauled at the boatyard in Rockland, the haul-out a week-long event during which the ferry did not run and the island was served by a temporary vessel, a smaller ferry borrowed from the state's fleet, and the temporary ferry was slower and smaller and could carry only eight cars and the difference between eight cars and eighteen cars was the difference between service and accommodation, between the island's needs met and the island's needs approximated, and the approximation was tolerable for a week but would not have been tolerable for longer, and the week's disruption was itself a demonstration of the Constance's necessity, her centrality, her irreplaceability — a word that would soon be tested, that would soon be contradicted by the bridge, because the bridge was, in engineering terms, a replacement, a fixed link substituted for a floating link, and the substitution was rational, efficient, permanent, and wrong in a way that rationality and efficiency could not address, because the wrongness was not logical but ontological, was not about function but about being, about the difference between a thing that crosses and a thing that spans.

Her beam was thirty-eight feet. Her draft was seven feet loaded, five feet ten inches light. Her displacement was 380 long tons loaded, 312 light. These were the numbers that described her in the language of naval architecture, the language of dimensions and weights and capacities, the language that the shipyard had spoken when it built her and that the Coast Guard spoke when it inspected her and that the Bureau of Maritime Services spoke when it licensed her, and the language was precise and it was true and it did not describe the Constance, not the Constance that Harlan knew, not the vessel that he had boarded on the day of her launch at Bath and had worked on as a deckhand under his father for two years and had commanded as captain for thirty-four years, because the Constance that Harlan knew was not dimensions and weights but was the way the wheel felt in his hands at different speeds, the way the hull responded to a quartering sea, the way the stern sat down when the engines went to full ahead, dropping two inches at the transom, the propellers biting deeper, the wake broadening, and the sitting-down was the Constance's way of saying: I am working now, I am doing what I was built to do, and the doing is not effort but nature, the way a bird's flying is not effort but nature, the expression of the thing's essential design.

The wheelhouse. Harlan's wheelhouse. Not his by ownership but his by occupancy, by the thirty-four years of standing in it, by the wear on the wheel and the indentation in the console shelf and the particular arrangement of the instruments that was not the arrangement the shipyard had specified but was the arrangement that Harlan had evolved over decades, moving the VHF microphone's hook from the left side of the console to the right because his right hand was dominant and the microphone was needed quickly when it was needed at all, adding the corkboard for the tide table because the original clipboard mount had broken in 2003 and the corkboard was a better solution anyway, more visible, more legible, the monthly tide sheet pinned at eye level where he could glance at it without turning from the wheel.

The compass. The Ritchie, four-inch, in its binnacle. The binnacle had been transferred from the Clara B. when the Constance was launched, because the binnacle was older than either vessel, had been built in 1952 by Ritchie Navigation of Pembroke, Massachusetts, and had been installed on the Clara B. when she was built in 1962, and the transfer was Harlan's father's decision, a decision made for reasons that were partly practical — the binnacle was sound, the compass accurate, the replacement unnecessary — and partly sentimental, because the binnacle was the Clara B.'s binnacle and the Clara B. was James Goss's ferry and the binnacle's presence in the Constance's wheelhouse was a thread connecting the new vessel to the old, the son's crossing to the father's, and the thread was brass, green with verdigris, heavy, magnetized by decades of proximity to the compass card, and the compass card pointed north the way it had always pointed north, with the steady insistence of a thing that knows where it belongs.

The engine room. Below the car deck, accessed by the companionway with the brass-handled watertight door, and the engine room was where the Constance was most herself, most essentially what she was, because the engine room was where the power lived, where the two Caterpillar 3412s sat on their rubber mounts and converted diesel fuel into rotation and the rotation into thrust and the thrust into motion and the motion into crossing, and the conversion was violent — internal combustion is controlled violence, the fuel igniting in the cylinders twenty-four hundred times per minute at cruising speed, twelve cylinders per engine, two engines, 57,600 individual explosions per minute driving the crankshafts that drove the reduction gears that drove the propeller shafts that drove the propellers that drove the water that drove the Constance across the channel in 22 minutes — and the violence was contained by the iron and the steel and the engineering, contained so thoroughly that what reached the wheelhouse was not violence but vibration, not explosion but hum, the hum that Harlan felt in his feet and his hands and his sternum, the hum that was the Constance's pulse, her heartbeat, the evidence that she was alive in the way that machines are alive, which is to say by function, by doing, by the performance of the act they were designed to perform.

The engines smelled of diesel and oil. They smelled of heat — not the sharp heat of overheating, not the dangerous heat, but the steady working heat of iron that has been converting fuel to motion for thirty-four years, the deep warmth that the engine block held even at rest, even after shutdown, the thermal memory of ten thousand crossings stored in the iron the way a stone stores the sun's warmth after sunset, slowly releasing it, slowly cooling, but never fully cold, because the engines were started again before they fully cooled, because the schedule did not allow for full cooling, because the Constance ran from 6:15 AM to 9:30 PM and the interval between the last crossing and the first was eight hours and forty-five minutes, and eight hours and forty-five minutes was not enough for 38,000 pounds of cast iron to cool to ambient temperature, so that the engines were always warm, always ready, always carrying the residual heat of the previous day's crossings, and the residual heat was a form of memory, the engines remembering the work they had done the way a body remembers exertion, in warmth, in the stored energy of muscles that have been used and have not fully rested.

Tommy worked the car deck.

The car deck was the Constance's public face, the surface that the passengers saw and drove on and walked across, the steel plates painted gray with non-skid coating, the coating renewed annually, the painting done by Tommy and Harlan in the third week of June during the two-day maintenance window that the summer schedule allowed, the painting a task that required the deck to be cleaned first — pressure-washed, the accumulated salt and dirt and oil and the rubber marks from thousands of tires blasted from the surface with water at 3,000 PSI — and then primed and then coated, two coats, the first thin, the second thick with the non-skid aggregate mixed in, the aggregate a silica sand that gave the paint its texture and the deck its grip, because a ferry deck without grip is a ferry deck on which cars slide and people fall and the sliding and the falling are the things the non-skid prevents, and the prevention is the care, and the care is the work, and the work is Tommy's and Harlan's, their hands on the rollers and the brushes, the paint on their clothes and their skin, the two days of painting a ritual that renewed not just the deck but the relationship between the men and the vessel, the physical contact that said: we maintain you, we preserve you, we do not let you decline.

Tommy's hands knew the ropes. This was not metaphor. His hands, at twenty-eight, had the beginning of the roughness that Harlan's hands had fully, the roughness that comes from handling manila and nylon and wire rope in cold and wet and salt, the roughness that is not damage but adaptation, the skin responding to the demand the way any tissue responds to demand, by thickening, by toughening, by becoming more than it was, and the more-than was visible in Tommy's palms and fingers, the calluses forming in the places where the dock lines ran, at the base of the fingers and across the palm's center, and the calluses were a map of the work, a topography of the handling, and the map was the same map that Harlan's hands carried, the same calluses in the same places, because the ropes were the same ropes and the cleats were the same cleats and the hands that worked them learned from the ropes and the cleats rather than from each other, and the learning produced the same result — the same roughness, the same pattern, the same hands.

The docking choreography. Nine times a day, eighteen dockings — nine at Port Clement, nine at Dunmore — and each docking was the same sequence performed by two people who did not speak during the performance, who did not need to speak, because the sequence was known, was practiced, was so deeply embedded in their bodies that speech would have been a distraction, an interruption of the flow that the bodies had learned, the flow that began when Harlan reduced speed on the approach and Tommy moved to the bow and the Constance slowed and the dock appeared and the pilings appeared and the fenders appeared and the cleats appeared and Tommy's hands found the bow line and Harlan's hands found the wheel and the ferry came alongside and the line went over the cleat and the stern swung and the stern line went over and the ramp lowered and the cars drove off and the cars drove on and the ramp raised and the lines came off and the departure began, and the entire sequence took twelve minutes, sometimes fifteen, and the twelve or fifteen minutes were as choreographed as the twenty-two minutes of the crossing, every movement predetermined, every gesture rehearsed by repetition until the rehearsal was not rehearsal but performance, not practice but the thing itself.

They did not speak. This was not hostility. This was not estrangement. This was the silence of two people who have performed the same act together so many times that the act has become their language, has replaced their language, has made their language unnecessary in the way that speech is unnecessary between two musicians who know the same piece — the music is the communication, the playing is the conversation, and the playing does not require narration, does not require one musician to say to the other now we modulate, now we crescendo, now we resolve, because the now is known, is shared, is the thing that practice has produced, which is not merely familiarity but fusion, two bodies performing as one body, two sets of hands working as one set, and the oneness is the choreography's achievement, its reward, its beauty.

Harlan had docked the Constance approximately 190,000 times. He had not counted. The number was an estimate based on the mathematics — 18 dockings per day, 312 operating days per year, 34 years as captain — and the mathematics was imprecise because it did not account for the days he had missed, the sick days and the vacation days and the days when weather had canceled the schedule, but the imprecision did not matter because the number was not the point, the number was merely the measure of the thing, and the thing was the docking, the act, the bringing of the Constance alongside the dock in the specific way that the specific dock required, and each dock — Port Clement and Dunmore — required its own approach, its own angle, its own speed, its own relationship between the wheel and the engine controls and the current and the wind, and the two approaches were as different as two handshakes, each one shaped by the hand it met, and Harlan knew both, knew them the way he knew his own hands, which was to say completely, intimately, without the need for thought.

The Port Clement dock was the easier approach. The harbor was wider, the current less influential, the wind blocked by the buildings on the waterfront. The approach was straight-in, port side to, the Constance coming alongside with a gentle leftward swing that was more suggestion than maneuver, the hull easing against the fenders with a pressure that was firm but not forceful, the way you might press your hand against a wall to feel whether it was warm.

The Dunmore dock was harder. The harbor entrance was narrower, the current ran across it on a flood tide, and the wind, when it blew from the northeast, funneled through the gap between the breakwater and the shore and hit the Constance on the starboard beam at the worst possible moment, in the middle of the turn, when the ferry was committed to the approach and could not abort without backing into the channel and starting again, which Harlan had done exactly twice in thirty-four years, both times in northeast gales, both times with the wind gusting to forty-five knots, and the backing-out was not failure but judgment, the captain's decision that the conditions exceeded the approach's margin, and the decision was made instantly, without deliberation, because deliberation in a tidal channel with a northeast gale is the luxury of people who are not responsible for 380 long tons of steel and the passengers it carries.

The Constance had been repainted in 2004. The hull, the superstructure, the wheelhouse — all of it scraped and primed and coated in the ferry service's colors, white above the waterline and blue at the waterline and red below. The painting had taken two weeks at the Rockland boatyard, the Constance hauled out on the marine railway, her hull exposed, the underwater growth scraped and the zinc anodes replaced and the propellers inspected and the rudder inspected and the through-hulls inspected, each inspection a reading of the vessel's body, a diagnosis, and the diagnosis in 2004 had been sound, had been better than sound — the hull solid, the frames solid, the welds solid, the Constance in better condition at sixteen years than many vessels are at ten, because the maintenance had been constant, because the attention had been constant, because Harlan maintained the Constance the way a careful person maintains a body, not by crisis intervention but by daily care, by the checking and the filling and the greasing and the tightening that prevent the crisis, that keep the breakdown at bay, that preserve the function.

She would be decommissioned. This was the word the state used — decommissioned — a word borrowed from naval practice, from the ceremony by which a warship is removed from active service, and the borrowing was wrong because the Constance was not a warship and her removal from service would not be a ceremony but an absence, not a decommissioning but a disappearance, the ferry that had run the crossing for thirty-four years simply ceasing to run, the engine that had started every morning at 6:10 simply not starting, the horn that had sounded at 6:15 simply not sounding, and the not-starting and the not-sounding would be the decommissioning, the silence that replaced the sound, and the silence would be louder than the horn, would be more audible than the engine, because silence is always louder than sound when the sound has been continuous, when the sound has been the background against which life has been conducted, and the removal of the background does not create silence but creates its opposite — a roaring absence, a deafening void, the negative sound of a thing that should be there and is not.

She would be sold. The state would sell her, as it sold all decommissioned ferries, at auction or by negotiated sale, to whoever would buy her — a private ferry operator, a tour-boat company, a scrap dealer. The Clara B. had been sold to the man in Boothbay Harbor who ran her as a tour boat for fifteen years. The ferry before the Clara B., the Agnes, had been sold for scrap in 1965, towed to a breaker in Portland and cut apart with torches, the steel sold by the ton, the brass fittings sold by the pound, the wheel and the compass and the binnacle — the same binnacle that now sat in the Constance's wheelhouse — saved by James Goss, who drove to Portland and bought them from the breaker for forty dollars, because the binnacle was the Agnes's binnacle before it was the Clara B.'s and the saving of it was the preservation of the thread, the constancy, the thing the name promised.

Harlan stood in the wheelhouse. The afternoon light came through the windows, filtered by the salt haze, and the light fell on the wheel and the console and the compass and the tide table and the thermos on its shelf, and the light was golden in the way that September light is golden on the Maine coast, the gold of late season, of the sun's lowered angle, of time running out, and the gold fell on the Constance's surfaces the way gold leaf falls on a frame, decorating the thing it touches, making it precious, making it visible in its preciousness.

She was his. Not by ownership. By love.

He did not use this word, would not have used it, would have found the word excessive, would have said instead that he knew the vessel, that he was responsible for the vessel, that the vessel was his charge and his work and his daily occupation, and all of these descriptions would have been accurate and none of them would have been sufficient, because the relationship between a captain and a vessel is not described by the vocabulary of work or responsibility or even knowledge but is described, if it is described at all, by the vocabulary of marriage, of the long dailiness that becomes identity, that makes the two things — the man and the vessel, the husband and the wife — into a single thing, a unit, a compound word that cannot be broken into its components without destroying both.

He put his hand on the wheel. The steel was warm from the sun. The warmth was the warmth of the afternoon and it was also the warmth of the morning's crossings and the warmth of the previous day's crossings and the warmth of all the crossings, stored not in the steel — steel does not store warmth that way, steel is not sentimental — but in the hand, in the hand's memory of the wheel, in the palm's record of the gripping and the turning and the holding that was the crossing's manual act, the thing the hands did while the mind navigated and the feet balanced and the eyes read the water and the body performed the integrated, whole-body operation that is piloting a vessel in a tidal channel, an operation that cannot be reduced to its components because the components do not function separately, because the hand on the wheel is nothing without the eye on the water and the eye on the water is nothing without the foot on the deck and the foot on the deck is nothing without the ear listening to the engine and all of it, all of these senses working together, is the piloting, is the crossing, is the act that the bridge will end.

The Constance idled. Her engines ran. The vibration in the deck was steady, constant, the pulse that said: I am here, I am ready, I am the vessel that crosses the channel, and the crossing is what I do, and the doing is what I am.

Twenty-two minutes. 1.4 miles. Thirty-seven years of steel and salt and diesel and constancy.

The name was right. The name had always been right.