As a matter of fact the ferry isn’t a boat at all. It is more like a
house or a street car or a park full of pretty benches. It doesn’t sail,
it only plies, plies between two given points at stated intervals, and
could anything be more dull. Nothing is more prosaic than a ferry unless
it be an ironing board.
Even a barge is superior, and a barge doesn’t pretend to be a boat. A
barge goes somewhere and it gets mussed up by the real salt sea, and so
do flat, old scows, honest and rough and sea-going. Any boat in the bay
is superior to the effeminate ferry. Even the boat to Sacramento has a
bit more atmosphere. As for tug boats, they are little, but O-my as they
pull the great, impotent barges after them. Pilot boats have quite an
air making the big, dignified steamers look foolish being yanked here
and there. The tidy fisherman’s motor boats look rather unimaginative,
all tied in rows at Fisherman’s Wharf, but they go somewhere, sometimes
away down the coast and from their sides the long nets reach away down
into the sea itself.
How the real boats in the bay must despise the ferry. Think of being
called a boat and never once sailing out of the Golden Gate. How
maddening it must be. If the ferry had any spirit at all, some day it
would just switch about and go chunking out to sea. Imagine then the
concern of the staid commuters from Oakland and Alameda to say nothing
of the citizens of Berkeley and Marin County, to find themselves being
borne away from their vegetable gardens and fresh eggs out to sea in a
wooden boat.
I suppose there are many people living right here in San Francisco who
have never sailed away out of the Golden Gate, people who have been
bound economically or by love or duty, and have had to ply like the
ferry daily between two given points. But can there be a man who has
seen tall-masted schooners and long-bodied ocean-going steamers pass in
and out of the alluring Golden Gate, and has never longed to sail away
to the enchanted South Seas, or to Alaska. Such a man is not a man any
more than the ferry is a boat.
If I could choose the boat I’d sail away upon, it would not be a
coast-wise steamer, nor the prim Alaska packers nor even the steamers to
the Orient. I’d choose me a four-masted schooner, carrying freight and
going somewhere, anywhere, no one knows where. And then some day the
wind would die or some night the wind would howl and there would come to
me a great longing for or a ferry that should take me home at night in a
safe and prosaic manner.