Romancing the Stone

The captain had to alter our course to North Haven to avoid taking the waves in a dangerous position. Still, the ferry was getting battered. I felt him pull back on the throttle, bringing the boat almost to a stop. A brief pause, and then a thud.

The man behind me had fallen asleep. He woke to water breaching the passenger cabin door, coming in up to the tops of our shoes. Startled, he yelled, “I can’t swim!”

All this, I thought, for a ten-minute meeting about prepping the base of a stone wall?

Twenty-something years ago, I was the one dozing off, this time on a plane. In that drowsy state between being fully asleep and fully awake, my mind created a beautiful little fantasy. I daydreamed that someone had hired me to fly across the country to build something amazing with stone. They hadn’t. I don’t remember where I was going or what for, but it wasn’t for that. But I remember the fantasy about traveling the world to build cool things with stone, complete with first class flights, fancy hotels, beautiful scenery, the prestige of being chosen. I suppose that was my idea of making it. Of being successful.

I’ve had opportunities to travel, but they’ve been…different.

Last night, after my nephew’s basketball game, I stayed in a hotel across from the ferry terminal in Rockland. After a quick walk through town to see the Christmas lights, I ate a prepackaged salad from Hannaford in my room with a beer from the kiosk behind the hotel’s front desk, and scrolled on my phone for forty-five minutes before falling asleep.

This morning, after the rough crossing of Penobscot Bay and the ten-minute meeting, I drank coffee at the North Haven Community Center, waiting a little nervously to take the ferry back to the mainland. Jingle Bell Rock was playing on the radio while a woman was making gingerbread houses. The graham crackers were giving her trouble and she took out her frustrations on the door the wind kept blowing open.

On the ferry ride back, the cabin was full of middle schoolers returning from a basketball game on island in the middle of the day, planned around the ferry schedule. Local artist Eric Hopkins stood at the front of the cabin as the boat left the dock, eating soup. Then he sat down and pulled his black cat from a travel bag to show the kids.

I chuckle now thinking about that fantasy on the plane. It was so vague and childish. It was all external validation and ego. The reality is so much better.