The Ferry Ticket With No Ferry

Photo: Unsplash.

The ticket machine sold me a ferry ticket at 1:42 p.m. The handwritten sign on the pier said there would be no ferry after 1:30.

Both pieces of information looked equally official.

The terminal office was locked. A telephone rang behind the glass until it gave up. At the end of the pier, a man was fishing with no bait and seemed unsurprised by the situation.

“Tomorrow,” he said when I showed him the ticket.

I pointed at the printed date.

“The ticket is today. The ferry is tomorrow.”

There were no buses for two hours, so I sat beside him. He had brought a folding chair, a radio, and a bag containing exactly one orange. The radio reported traffic from a city too far away to matter.

Other passengers arrived one by one. A family unpacked sandwiches. Two cyclists compared maps and discovered that both routes required the missing ferry. Someone found a vending machine behind the terminal that accepted coins but returned every banknote folded into a small accordion.

By four o’clock, the closed pier had become a picnic area. The fisherman finally attached bait to his hook, caught nothing, and shared the orange anyway.

A small maintenance boat appeared near sunset. Its operator explained that high wind had canceled the ferry and that the ticket machine had not received the message. He could not carry passengers, but he called the bus company and persuaded the last bus to make an extra stop.

I kept the unused ticket. It cost less than the coffee I bought while waiting and produced a much better afternoon.