Ferry lands

Every mode of transport has its benefits and beauties.  The plane collapses distances at the rate of ten miles a minute; the ship abstracts you from life, a kind of floating retreat; the train offers the outside world as a seamless panorama; the car is personal freedom made manifest in metal.  But there is one hybrid form that for me is the most glorious and romantic of all: the ferry.

But not any ferry: to partake of the particular magic I seek it must be an open car ferry.  That is, its design is quite peculiar, consisting of a single deck for the cars and lorries, with perhaps a bridge straddling overhead, and the passengers from the vehicles plus any pedestrian hangers-on stowed up front somewhere.  It is the quintessence of a boat: just a hull and a deck, and so plugs into our most ancient feelings – and doubts – about this type of travel.

A ferry boat is special because it grants to land-bound cars the ability to cross the waters; it allows them and us to transcend the petty limitations imposed by the mundane world.  So almost immediately the experience is strange, your car and the others around it distant from dry land, appearing to float miraculously above the waters.

As well as strangeness, car ferries are also the occasion for melancholy.  Most roads lead somewhere, but in the absence of the boat the path to the ferry seems to drive straight into the waves.  Passing with increasing sadness along such roads, we feel the insidious urge to keep on going, to drive into the deep, consoling embrace of the waters.  But the ferry catches us, saves us from ourselves.

There is another aspect of these roads to the sea or river.  The ferry’s promise is to grant you a matching path on the other side, wherever that might be.  The journey is the nautical equivalent of science’s wormholes – those shortcuts in space and time which allow you to jump through to distant parts and eras of this or other universes.  The car ferry’s road does not show on maps any more than wormholes do; but the road itself exists, and we can take pleasure in this unreasonable gift.

This strangeness, this melancholy, this satisfaction have been constant companions on my journeys with the ferry.  Crossing out to the heather-clad hills on the Isle of Skye I felt the mysterious wind of another land blowing, one of those Celtic worlds of eternal youth.  Passing from the northernmost tip of Euboea back to the Greek mainland, I sat poised in thought, gazing at hazy villages and towns unchanged since Pericles.  And traversing the Nile towards al-Amarnah, crossing from the land of the dead to the land of the living, I felt a sense of achievement in fighting this mighty river’s flow to reach the other side.

So subtle are these journeys that I was barely conscious of leaving my point of departure, and could hardly make out how fast we approached our destination.  But always, when I suddenly found myself abandoned in the middle of the waters, I wanted to dwell there, in these strange, melancholy but deeply satisfying ferry lands, forlorn but happy.

(27.12.91)

See also Moody's Black Notebook Travels

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