I love the ferry companies, both of them. But I’m partial to North Ferry because my husband retired from the Navy and returned to the Island to manage the company.
This was in the 1980s, during the era of smaller boats and routinely waiting in ferry lines for three agonizing hours.
Oh geez! There I go again. I never waited three hours in a ferry line or even two hours. No one did, though a lot of us said so. We weren’t lying, exactly.
To quote George Costanza on Seinfeld, “Remember Jerry, it’s not a lie if you believe it.”
The Way We Were
There is a lot less waiting today compared to when we sat in ferry lines that inched forward at the glacial pace of 12 cars per boatload. Only first-timers to the Island, or people with super large bladders, made the mistake of bypassing bathrooms at that last stop before heading to the ferry.
And poor us, we didn’t have the diversion of cell phones. All we could do was stare at the water and try to imagine what a bridge might look like. We spent that ferry-line time reading musty paperbacks, balancing our checkbooks and wiping down already clean dashboards.
Some people just slept. That’s why ferry lines were so much quieter now; back then you had to honk to wake the driver in front of you. It was like dominos, but with car horns.
Mutiny on the ferry line
I have a vivid memory of going off-Island one July 3rd Friday to pick up a specially ordered ice-cream cake. Getting to the store in Mattituck was no problem, but I knew I was in trouble on the return trip when I got to the Catholic Church on Route 25 in Greenport and traffic stopped because that’s how long the ferry line was.
It was a lot of hot, hot-tempered people standing alongside our overheated cars discussing the ferry company. And we were not happy. Within minutes the ferry-line grapevine buzzed with news that the end of the line was creeping toward Riverhead.
Being part of the North Ferry family didn’t stop me from joining in on management bashing. Familial loyalty is one thing, but come on! My Yankee-Doodle Poodle was melting!
Einstein’s other theory
People who don’t ride on ferry boats won’t get this, but there is a peculiar quirk in the theory of relativity experienced by those who have gone through labor, listened to a first grader practice Hot Cross Buns on a recorder or waited in a ferry line. Time warps during those activities; it stretches and expands until every distorted minute contains way more than 60 seconds.
Look it up. It’s one of Einstein’s lesser known theories. I read it on the internet.
On that particular Friday, I waited and griped and eventually boarded the ferry. When I got off on the Shelter Island side, management was standing by the gates. He smiled and waved at me. My gesture was not a wave. “How long did you wait?” he asked.
“Three hours!” I shrieked back.
That evening at home he asked me how long I’d really waited in line and when I told him almost two hours he laughed. Then he spouted some complicated mathematical formula that involved the number of cars divided by the number of ferries and factored in the wind speed and barometric temperature.
“You waited 35 or 40 minutes,” he informed me. “But that’s not what it FELT like,” I said and tried to explain the time-warp theory as it applied to ferry lines.
And again, he laughed. He said it sounded like more of a truth-warp theory. I refused to speak to him until it was time for dessert when I handed him a spoon and told him to go scrape some of the Yankee Doodle Poodle puddles off the front seat.
It’s not a lie if …
Thankfully, with four big boats that can shuttle hundreds of cars an hour instead of mere dozens, such long waits are history; however, even former deniers have to admit that the ferry line time warp still exists.
I was with my husband in the Greenport line. We waited 10 minutes, 15 max. As we pulled off the boat on the Island side, the manager was there and asked how long we’d waited.
“About a half hour,” my husband said.
There. I rest my case.
