Magic And The Water

Living in the city, you get up each morning and walk down the same street, past the same boarded-up video stores and Chinese donut shops to the same BART station, where you board the same metal tube filled with the same commuters wearing the same expressionless expressions, to be whisked away to another familiar group of buildings you've seen before, maybe in a different city.

It's something totally different when you see the city from outside, when you see the bigger picture, the skyline, without the hassle of dealing with all those pesky people. You get the impact when driving south through Marin on 101 and see the city beyond Sausalito and across the Bay, and when you come through the tunnel and begin the slow sweep down towards the Golden Gate Bridge.

You get the same impact when taking a ferry. In this case, my sister and I took the ferry last Saturday from the Ferry Building over to Oakland's Jack London Square for the Eat Real Festival.








There is something in the light and the angle at which you see the city while pulling away from it on a ferry that is a little magical, once you get over the diesel fumes that kind of ruin the effect for a minute or two. Or maybe magical isn't the right word; it is more of a vintage feeling, as if you were looking at a place from an earlier time. Maybe it is the pace, the more leisurely approach you take when you choose to cross the bay via ferry instead of by car or by rapid transit. We tend to believe that an earlier age transpired at a gentler pace, that it was a little bit idyllic. I think we've always felt that way about the past, wanting to perceive it as somehow less frenetic than our own time, as somehow better, more satisfying.

That may be an ironic aspect of our Puritanical heritage, always feeling obliged to drive forward faster, to work harder, while looking over our shoulders at some imagined past where we didn't have to work so damn hard, to heave a sigh over something we didn't actually lose while hurrying on to something we feel compelled to gain, even if we can't explain why.

Or maybe we just like being on a boat. It's kind of fun, bouncing over the waves, wondering what's swimming around beneath you. Without boats, the ocean would be something of a forbidden zone, a place we could not go.

In any case, my point is that I do believe in ferries.