Down on the Batture

Ferry

- 107 Ferry We come into the city for the first time along the river, two boys in the back seat, six years old and three, face deep in a nest of comic books, food wrappers, pillows, and a slingshot I purchased in a moment of weakness at a truck stop in Tennessee called Mad Harry’s. Driving into Dixie, all the gas stations seemed to carry names indicating the mental instability of the owner. Lisa says that is to show how low his prices are. We are sodden with fatigue. Suddenly Gabriel’s voice pipes up from the back seat. “Look! Trains!” and there it is, a train as long as an anaconda, but it is not out in front of us. It is in the sky. The cars stretch from one bank of the river to the other, out of sight on both ends, crawling up and over the Huey Long bridge so slowly that you wonder if they will make it, the rust-red boxcars from my childhood with their exciting logos: Rock Island, Route of the Rockets, Southern Pacific, The Western Way. We see new tank cars, too, all black, anonymous as bombs, their chemicals stenciled in white codes so the first responders don’t kill themselves. We pull over to watch. I rode the boxcars one summer and a flatcar of squared-off logs from Wenatchee, Washington, to Chicago. I am seeing my past. The boys are seeing something out of their picture books. And this is before we see the ferries. The New Orleans ferries are magic. They cross the Mississippi River so close to water that you can feel the spray and almost touch the gulls wheeling overhead, one shore receding and a new world approaching; we are with Christopher Columbus, ready to land. - 108 Ferry Our first drive downtown is a disappointment of traffic, roadside trash, and streets that simply disappear until we get to the batture and find a ferryboat called the Thomas Jefferson. We had no idea it was there. We ride over to Algiers Point and I lean against the rail, oblivious to my boys’ delight and to Lisa’s worry that they’ll go overboard, lost in another memory. I am crossing the Hudson River with my father. It is a special day; he is taking me to New York City, to his office, I do not remember why. We get off the train at the Port of Newark along with hundreds of similar-looking men in dark suits and gray hats who are very determined and walking fast, briefcases in one hand, newspapers in the other, down a rushing tunnel and across a plank walkway and onto one of several waiting ferries, heaving slightly in the pitch of the river, the water sloshing underneath and then, ominously, disappearing. Suddenly the engines churn, and we are on the open water. The men jam the decks,Wall Street bankers and advertising executives rubbing elbows with taxi drivers and elevator operators, the upstairs-downstairs of the working city for one brief moment equal under the sky. They take off their hats, hair to the breeze, smile, small-talk to each other. How about those Yankees! Didn’t it rain yesterday! It all might end, and will indeed end, the moment they get to the far shore, but here, for this brief wink of the day, they are friends with each other and the river and the rising morning. They are transformed. The undoing of ferries was time. I got into trouble one weekend fishing down at Point a la Hache with Charlie Bosch, who ran the Louisiana Wildlife Federation in the early 1970s. Among his other duties Charlie kept legislators supplied with enough liquor and companionship to enact the state’s first environmental laws and keep them afloat. The game was wide open in those days. The fishing was wide open, too; you measured a good weekend not by the number of fish but by the number of ice coolers you filled, a two-chest day, old lunkers and juveniles, it didn’t matter, life had no limits. - 109 Ferry Only on this occasion the weather was frigid, the wind blew stiffly out of the north, and we were thoroughly skunked, not even a flounder, nothing to take home. Seeing our predicament from the dock, a friend of Charlie’s, who wrote an outdoor column called“Sink the Hook...