That Friday I got up before the first crossing and walked down to the ferry landing, meaning only to look at the boat one last time before the gathering on the dock.
But there was a crowd already, and it was not a celebration. It was fear.
The night before, the cheap seasonal crew the tourism company hired had taken the ferry out into a fog bank, and they did not know the sound the way you have to. They missed the channel. They came within a boat length of the rocks off the point, in the dark, with a full load of islanders aboard.
No one drowned only by the grace of God and a deckhand who happened to know one landmark, but every soul on that island understood at once that the tourism company had put their lifeline in the hands of people who did not know the water, and that is not a staffing decision, it is a danger.
The islanders had already called the Coast Guard by the time I got to the dock. Because a boat that carries a whole island across hard water is not a tourist attraction to be run by whoever comes cheapest. The law requires a licensed master who knows the route, and the tourism company had cut exactly that corner to save a dollar.
The Coast Guard did not care for what they found. An essential ferry, run by unqualified seasonal crews, nearly on the rocks in fog, is the kind of thing that ends a company right to run a route at all.
Faced with losing the route entirely, the tourism company folded. They needed a licensed captain who knew every tide and fog bank and hidden rock in that sound. There was exactly one for forty miles.
They brought me back to the wheel, on my terms, and the islanders made certain of it. I bring the boat in slow and clean, the way I always have. I hold her an extra minute for the ones running down the dock. I get everyone home safe.
The schoolkids ride across every morning again, and I know every one of their faces. The old-timers heading to the mainland doctor ride with a captain who knows how to keep the crossing smooth on a bad stomach. The island breathes easy again, because its lifeline is back in hands that have never once let it down.
The manifest that came up short, the excuse they fired me over, had been the new deckhand miscount, not mine. It always was.
Thirty years I steered that boat, and they called me the wrong direction. Then the fog came, and the rocks came close, and the island remembered that a lifeline is only as good as the hands on the wheel.