Free Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn Page B

rumble to life. I am going to sea! Who can resist an embarkation? The thrill of watery beginnings? The dock falls away. On the forested hills of Bellingham, the houses face the harbor. How festive the ferry must look from up there! As the ship turns and slithers toward the horizon, the low sun moves across the windows of the town, igniting them one by one. I stand at the taffrail and think to myself taffrail , enjoying the reunion of a thing and its word.
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    There is something quaintly democratic about the Alaska Marine Highway. Cheap and utilitarian, it exudes a faith in government that, like the Malaspina itself, was supposed to have been decommissioned years ago, around the same time that Amtrak went quasi-private and the U.S. Postal Service became a trademarked brand and PBS started licensing Big Bird to toymakers. The ferries have survived, I suspect, because there is no money to be made from what is essentially a maritime municipal bus system connecting the isolated fishing villages and resort towns that dot the islands of the Alaska Panhandle. For most of those towns, the Inside Passage is the only thoroughfare that leads to the outside world, and there are many locals as well as many tourists aboard the Malaspina today. The Marine Highway’s misleading name suggests what its creators had in mind—a public works project in the spirit of Eisenhower’s interstates. And yet travel by ferry no more resembles the solitary confinement of the automobile than these coastal waters resemble a four-lane road.
    For one thing, travel by ferry is slow going; the cruising speed of the Malaspina is sixteen knots, or approximately twenty miles per hour. You can if you are so inclined, as I am, draw pictures of a mountain or an island before it disappears from view, and after several hours, the drone of the engines and the sameness of the scenery induce either boredom or peace of mind, or possibly both. It will take us three days and three nights to travel the 952 nautical miles between Bellingham and Sitka, a distance planes fly in less than two hours.
    And then, for another thing, life aboard the public ferry is inescapably communal. It’s true that the passengers in the tiny staterooms belowdecks have purchased some privacy, but since staterooms are cheap and the most desirable spaces on the ship are public, there’s little sense of economic segregation. We squatters on the sundeck prefer the open air. Everyone eats in the same cafeteria, where the plebeian menu of grayish Salisbury steak and scrambled eggs matches the Cold War-era decor—seats upholstered in vinyl, tables enameled in sparkly Formica. In an America increasingly devoted to the service economy, even the relationship between the paying passengers and the crew feels atypically egalitarian. The crew keeps the Malaspina shipshape, but it does not serve. There are no chambermaids or stewards aboard.
    If anything divides the ferry’s passengers, it’s age. Tent city has the feel of a floating youth hostel, or even a floating campground—hence the stenciled sign that prohibits campfires and cookouts (but not, alas, folksy sing-alongs). The retirees tend to congregate on the boat deck in the observation lounge, a sightseeing theater overlooking the bow. Sitting there in the anchored, amply cushioned chairs, it’s hard not to feel as though the wraparound windows are movie screens on which footage of the passing scenery plays, though every now and then a passenger outside will walk through the foreground and break the spell. Often as not the passenger in the foreground is a dude in orange-tinted sunglasses and a cowboy hat who seems to be intent on walking a marathon before we make Sitka.
    The main source of onboard entertainment is Ed White, a bespectacled “interpreter” employed by the National Forest Service. “Interpreter” is what the Forest Service calls a ranger who is also a tour guide, and I love what