The ferry

I took the ferry to Bainbridge today, by myself, which is something I do about once a season when I need to be somewhere that isn't anywhere in particular.

You walk on at Colman Dock downtown. You pay on the way over and ride back for free, which I've always found philosophically interesting. Then it's about half an hour across the water. I sit outside on the top deck until the cold gets the better of me, then inside by a window among the people doing crosswords. On a Saturday it's families with bicycles, couples visiting the island for lunch, and a few men who have clearly made this crossing every weekday for twenty years and are asleep before we've left the dock.

On the island I walk up the hill into Winslow, go into the bookshop, buy a book I don't need, eat a bowl of soup, and walk back down. It takes maybe three hours. Nobody knows where I am. I don't mean that dramatically. I mean it's the one afternoon in a season when nobody could reach me if they tried, because my phone is in my bag and my bag is under the bench, and that seems to me, more and more, worth the fare.

The ride back is what I go for. The boat comes around, and the whole city is in front of you at once, the towers and the hills and the Needle, small as a toy, the lights coming on floor by floor. From the water, at that distance, it looks like something people built on purpose. Which it is, I suppose. It's hard to remember that from inside it.