The Ferry

It's very clean and modern, with blue rubber mats for the deck, blonde wooden tables and bright plastic chairs. This is, I suppose, my first time at sea. Unless you count the Staten Island Ferry. It's strange to be on board this monstrous nautical mass of steel and plastic and glass, somehow accommodating buses and trains and cars and young Danes in matching hoodies, drinking beer and fiske liquor before noon, elderly couples gazing placidly out the floor-to-ceiling windows of the 'Panorama Cafe,' at least a hundred American students, coolers full of ice cream, a cafeteria and white deck chairs bolted to the floor. And yet it floats, rolling and rumbling across the surface of the sea, creating white froth, leaving dying mermaids in its wake.

It's brimming with joviality, pensiveness, hope, loneliness, hunger, stomach trembling with anticipation, mouths chewing small and meaningless words, eyes squinting in the wind and widening to drink in all the waters of the Baltic Sea.