I've been captivated by ferries ever since setting foot on one here,
where I am this morning, on vacation in the Puget Sound. It was the mid-eighties, and I was a teenager and traveling then, too--living in a
school bus with a bunch of other people for a year. I was away from everything I'd known in my small corner of the world back east.
Something about them still gets me. It's the size of them, the big industrialness of them moving through the water. They're the biggest people-movers I've still set foot on and usually no matter how full they are, there's plenty of space left over. You can drive trucks onto them. Airstreams.
For very little money you can be front and center on your own cruise through fantastic islands, through fog and rain, with a lot of other strangers on the journey with you. They're doing puzzles that are left on the table for someone else to complete. They're reading, playing guitar, talking to their dogs. They're sp…