It was 8.30 a.m. when I arrived at the MV Alert, a nasty
gray morning that held the promise of a quickly brewing storm. There were six of us at the beginning,
huddled against the wind on the splintery wooden bench outside the office, but
the two single day-tripping hikers quickly decided to take Captain Ray’s advice
and “Come back on a better day.”
That left me, Mary Sarmento, and Jack and Gladys Ashworth.
The youngest of them had a good fifty years on me.
Brad still owned the Alert then, but Ray ran it most days,
and would be running it that day, if he
decided to run.
He wasn’t sure. It might be too rough.
He had a mail run,
but it could wait a day. Could we?
Jack and Gladys conferred for a moment, and announced they
could wait. Linda called a taxi to take them to wherever they’d come from for
another night.
Mary said she thought the ride would be just fine. But then,
she’d gone from one island to the next in an open boat for 40 years.
You’d think I would learn, eventually. If the captain doesn’t
really want to go out on the water, should you?
It’s not as though I like the sea, or boats, on calm and
sunny days. I have the stomach of a two-year old who has overdone it on cotton
candy at the county fair.
But even then, just a few years into the job, the
transformation had begun. I was becoming one with the big grey building with
the red roof. I was the Allen House.
And whatever was happening, if it was happening between
February and October it couldn’t happen without me. Obviously.
Mary settled into the tiny cabin with her knitting. I went
up with Captain Ray, knowing the diesel fumes and heat in the enclosed cabin
would sicken me in an instant. Ray opened the doors on both sides, then gave me
a pair of bright yellow oilskins to wear for protection against the wind and
spray.
We cast off and headed out into Buzzard’s Bay.
The boat had barely
cleared the harbor when it became evident the sea was much rougher than even
Ray had surmised. He looked down at me, perched in the middle of the seat, uneasily
clutching a paper bag to heave into, already wet from the waves lashing the
boat.
“Are you sure you want to go?” he asked.
The radio squawked to life. Ray
listened a moment to what was, to me, unintelligible gibberish. He turned back to me.
“Well, too late now,” he
answered his own question. “They just closed the hurricane gates.”
What’s your worst, or best memory of the old Alert? Or any
ferry to a remote summer spot? Leave me your story in the comment box.
(This might be the Alert II--I honestly can't remember.) Dad, Laura, and I had missed our flight from Greensboro because Peggy's wedding gift, a lead crystal bowl, sent up flares with airport security. We got a flight the next day, sure we would miss the boat which was supposed to leave at 9:00am or something. Pulling onto the pier at *12:20pm*, we rejoiced--the Alert was still in port! It was pelting rain, and the seas were swoll up, but an hour later, the ferry chugged out of the harbor, with most of the wedding party on it. Shawn's mother, nauseated and petrified, held on to the metal bar on the top of her seat, feet spread wide for stability (she looked like a starfish), as we dropped into the trough of each swell, but at 20 years old, I thought it was a fantastic ride. The next day, Peg got married in the sunshine.
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