Waiting for the ferry you can:
Become a Parking Nazi and monitor all tourists’ attempts at getting in the correct line. You can chose to be either moderately helpful by pointing out with ambiguous hand gestures where the line begins and ends OR you can treat day trippers like pets and watch the funny things they do when left to their own devices, as long as they don’t cut in line and as long as you still make your boat.
Bring your checkbook up to date, writing in the bounced check fees if it’s winter, adding in the deposits if it’s summer. Then, according to how much or how little money you have, you can…
Make Your list of Things-to-Do, in the order in which you’ll do them, from Camden to Rockland and back again:
[Helpful Hint: Know as you make your list that eight to ten items will be scratched off as the day wears on and time runs out. This is due to the Rule of Thumb for All Ferry Travelers Heading to the Mainland for the Day: the minute you get ashore you will want to come back. This irrational yet uncontrollable urge will force you to jettison the majority of your day’s plans to make a mad dash for a much earlier boat than you had ever dreamed of getting when you set out that morning.]
Scout the parking lot for cars of friends and relatives. When you have made a mental note of, say, six of them, judge which have keys in the ignition and which have keys tossed under the mat. Gauge how much gas is in each car and which cars you know have faulty gas gauges that might prove fatal to your plans. Then estimate if the friend or relative with the most easily accessible keys and the fullest gas tank would mind or notice if you ran home in their car to:
a.) Brush your teeth and/or put on earrings because you didn’t have time or weren’t awake enough before.
b.) Pick up the mortgage payment/bank deposit you left on the desk upstairs.
c.) Whip together a peanut butter and jelly sandwich because you are starving and the prospect of waiting an hour to eat is too much to bear.
d.) Get the video to be returned out of the VCR.
e.) Find your list of Things to Do.
f.) All of the above.
Go for a walk, timing how far you can get one way before you have to turn around to walk the equal distance back in order to be in your driver’s seat when they load the boat. This can be tricky if you’ve left the house without your watch (your teeth un-brushed, your ears devoid of earrings goes without saying).
You can try to time it by traffic–on the hour there is a generally a steady stream of wannabe mainland-goers heading for the ferry. If offloading ferry traffic passes you, you’ve obviously missed the boat because it’s going on twenty after and you’re still ten minutes from the comfort of your car.
Another, more ulcer making, method is to try to see where the ferry is in the bay at any given moment. This is a far from foolproof method because calculating the distance from shore of large objects moving on a body of water is often a challenge. I, for one, can never tell from land which way the ferry is heading, stern and bow interchangeable to my landlubber’s eye.
To play it safe in timing a walk, I know my personal best is 15 minutes to the end of the ferry road so, if conditions are favorable (the wind is at my back both ways), the whole enchilada takes half an hour. I’ve been known to run the last leg, from the bend in the road right to my car door, yelling for the person behind me in line not to cut “Oh, come ON!! I’ve been here for hours!” Sometimes this doesn’t work.
Talk up the line. Use the wait as an exercise in airing your views and practicing your social graces. It’s like a giant cocktail party, only with a less blatant show of inebriety. In the “good months,” there are often thirty or more cars in line, providing a minimum of thirty interpretations of the latest gossip. (There’s an expression here on Islesboro that runs: “It’s not a rumor; I heard it!”).
Find out who is in the ambulance and why. Learn who is going where–a fight with a spouse is driving So-and-So off again for another vindictive round of wasting and spending. Mrs. G. is driving her elderly mother to the psychiatrist to help her control her rage. Suzy Q — in jodhpurs! — takes dressage lessons in Dover-Foxcroft, hours away, quite the indulgence but the nanny’s with the kids, so what the hey-ho?
Working the line with the devotion and sincerity of a politician running for office, you can see what everyone’s wearing and how clean or how trashed each keeps the interior of his or her car. You’ll soon glean who hollers at their kids in frustration after missing the ferry by one car. You’ll see which couples kiss when parting for the day, which slam car doors without so much as a backward glance, murmuring “Free at last, great God almighty, free at last.” It’s really worth taking the time. Plus you’re building goodwill should you ever need to use their car to run home for something while you wait.
Diana Roberts lives on Islesboro where she owns and operates Island Books, a used book store.