THE BOAT LEAVES WHEN THE BOAT IS FULL

My first clue that getting to and from the Island of Kassa from the mainland of Guinea was going to be REALLY different than taking the ferry from Staten Island to Manhattan, was Kalifa informing us a week before the trip that we needed to bring our own life jackets.  I didn't quite comprehend “you have to have a life jacket or you can’t get on the boat, but you can’t buy one there.”   I still can’t provide an explanation of why this is so nor where the folks who live there get their life jackets, but after crossing the channel a few times, it certainly is so.  And fortunately a friend here in the US who owns a boat lent us some to take with us.

As Kalifa talked about negotiating the price for the ferry ride, my vision of a dock, ticket booth and turnstiles faded rapidly although there wasn't anything to replace the vision, just curiosity.

Our first experience of crossing, which was to the island of Room for a New Year’s Eve party gave me a glimpse of what it must have been like for my ancestors trying to catch a boat to come to American.  Our subsequent experiences had more of a rhythm to them, for they were during “routine” traffic times and not part of the chaotic holiday partying.

The components of getting on the boat usually included:

Purchasing a ticket – someone else always did this for us, someone who was a native of Guinea, so we could get a fair rate.  Sometimes we were handed something that constituted a ticket – a plastic covered orange square, a white strip with handwritten scrawls.   Other times, when one of the boat crew balanced precariously on the edge of the boat climbing amongst the bodies to collect payment, simply stating we had already paid seemed sufficient.

Printing our names on the boat log – this was done on the dock, with purpose being that if we drowned en route they would be able to identify us. The log was often a page in a spiral bound notebook held by a man who was “somewhere” in the dock area; we’d wander around until we found him. He might be sitting on a folding chair in the shade or hanging out at a table with a food vendor.

Navigating how to get ON the boat - it was different each time, depending on the level of the tide and how close the boat we were boarding was to the dock. Methods for getting on the boat included walking through the surf, being carried piggyback by a slight built man whose size belied his strength, climbing over other boats that were between the dock and the one on which we would be traveling, walking down slick concrete steps while holding onto a rope, and I do believe once we simply stepped off the dock onto the boat we were to ride in.

For a country in which the only PDAs I witnessed were the ones between my partner and I, there was a tremendous amount of physical contact involved in taking the ferry: arms reaching out to help folks get on and off the boats which ranged from the offering of a hand to passing babies and small children to pushing folks up from underneath to scale the concrete walls at the dock on Kassa.

Assisting each other was done without a second thought and was very friendly.  Perhaps it had to do with the fact that the boat doesn't leave until it is full, so all passengers had a vested interest in filling the boat if they did indeed want to get to the other side. There were no complicated schedules like “the ferry runs every half hour on the quarter hour during peak use and once an hour during off-peak times” – nope nothing of the sort.

As the independent owner/operators wanted to get the most out of each trip, the word “cozy” doesn't begin to describe the seating arrangements across the rows of wooden slats connecting starboard and port walls of the boat. Time and again, I was certain there was not an inch to spare and lo and behold 3 more people would be summoned aboard. 

The structure of the boats meant that seats were often muddy from folks walking across them – experienced travelers brought a plastic bag to sit on – and because many of the boats had broken floor boards it wasn't unusual for someone to start bailing about halfway across. People seemed to take this all in stride, a routine part of the journey.  Panicking over the possibility that the boat was sinking seemed as strange a concept as using a clock to decide when the boat should leave. 

Yup – it is pretty damn simple – the boat leaves when the boat is full.