The Last Ride Across The Ferry

The landing

My name is Carolyn. I am sixty years old, and I was raised on a river landing that no longer carries my father’s boat.

Our river is the Saline. It is not a big river. In August a tall man can almost wade it, and in April it will take your truck if you are foolish enough to try.

For forty-one years my father ran the ferry across it. A flat steel boat on a cable, a diesel winch, and a cigar box for the dollars. That was the whole operation.

His name is Harlan. He is seventy years old now, and his hands still look like the handles of the tools he used.

His own father ran that same crossing before him. My father learned the cable standing on a milk crate so he could reach the winch lever, a skinny boy with his daddy’s hand on his shoulder.

There was a time when that ferry was the only way across for eleven miles in either direction. The whole east half of the county depended on it to get to the doctor, to church, to the grain elevator, to the grave.

I grew up thinking every family had a river running through the middle of their work. I thought every girl fell asleep to the sound of a diesel winch pulling a cable taut.

My mother was named Ruth. She kept the little shed at the landing swept, and she brought coffee down to the boat in a green thermos twice a morning, and she counted the cigar box at the kitchen table every night of her life.

She has been gone six years now. I still cannot look at a green thermos in a store without my throat closing up.

My father never once called the ferry a business. He called it the crossing. As in, who is minding the crossing. As in, I have to get back to the crossing.

For my whole childhood, that crossing was the fixed point the rest of the world turned around.

People set their lives by it. They knew my father would be on the water by six and off it after dark, and that if the river was down you could cross, and if it was up you waited, and that either way he would be there.

The young doctor who came to our county kept a key to the landing shed so he could wake my father at any hour. Babies were born on the far side because my father crossed the midwife at three in the morning in a sleet storm. That is not a story somebody told me. I was the girl holding the lantern.