The last ferry

The last ferry of the night is a different boat from the one that runs at noon, though it is exactly the same boat.

By the last crossing the day trippers are long gone. What is left is a particular set of people, and I could pick them out on any coast in the world. There is always someone in a work uniform, off a shift that ended too late for the earlier sailing, eyes shut, not asleep. There is always one couple who have had either the best evening of their year or a quiet disagreement they will not finish until they are home. There is a woman with too many bags who has clearly been visiting someone, and a young man who has missed the boat he meant to catch and is pretending he always intended to be on this one.

I take the last ferry more than I need to. I tell myself it is for the work, and it is, a little. But mostly it is the light. The cabin lamps come on too bright against a black window, so that the glass turns into a mirror and you can watch the whole cabin twice, once as it is and once reflected out over the water, everyone sitting in the dark sea as if the boat had quietly sunk and nobody had told them.

On the crossing I am thinking of, the engine note dropped halfway over, the way it does when the current turns, and for a moment the whole cabin went still in that way a room goes still when everyone notices the same thing at once and decides not to mention it. Then it picked up again, and everyone unnoticed it, and went back to their phones and their bags and their not quite sleeping.

I did not use any of it. That is the honest part. I sat there gathering the uniform and the too many bags and the couple and the sudden hush, certain that at least one of them would end up in a book, and none of them ever have. They were not scenes. They were just true, and true is not the same as useful, whatever people imagine a writer does with an evening.

What I took instead was the feeling of the thing, which is the only part that ever survives the crossing. Everyone on a last ferry is between two places and belongs fully to neither. The shift is over but home has not started. Whatever the evening was, it is finished, and whatever tomorrow is has not begun. For twenty minutes on dark water they are nobody's, not even quite their own, and they all know it, and none of them say so, because the whole point of the last ferry is that you do not have to be anyone until you reach the other side.

That is what I am really after, on the nights I do not need to travel. Not a plot. A place where ordinary people are briefly unwatched, or think they are, and let their faces do what they like. Then the lights of the far jetty slide into the window, and the mirror breaks back into a window again, and one by one they gather themselves and become, in the last minute before we dock, the people they will have to be tomorrow.

I am always a little sorry when the ramp comes down. It is the most honest room I know, that cabin, and it only exists while the boat is moving.