Dream d3521-s: The Slow Pull Across

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I came down to the shallow crossing beyond Dunnesquare before the day had properly settled into itself. The reeds along the bank held the night's chill still, and the water moved in flat sheets, barely stirring the gravel beneath.

He was already working. An old man, broad through the shoulders despite his age, standing thigh-deep in the current with a flat-bottomed boat drawn up beside him. He was checking the hull planks with his hands, pressing each one, listening for something I could not hear from the bank. He did not look up.

I stood at the edge where the bank flattened and the grass gave way to wet stones. A frayed mooring rope lay coiled near my feet, the hemp worn pale and loose at one end where it had been rubbing against something for a long time. It lay in a small heap, not tied to anything. I did not touch it.

The ferryman moved around the hull in the methodical way of someone who has done this so many times that each check is no longer a check but a kind of conversation. His hands went to the same places in the same order. The boat rocked gently against his weight. A heron stood further along the bank and watched him the way a heron watches things it has decided are not interesting enough to flee.

The water was low. This was the shallow crossing, and in early light the stones on the bottom were visible almost all the way across, pale brown and close together, the kind of bottom you could walk in a pinch. He would know that. He was checking the boat anyway.

I wanted to pick up the rope and hand it to him, or ask if he needed the end respliced, but nothing in the scene invited that. His attention was entirely in his hands. The light was increasing, very slowly, the kind of increase you only notice when a cloud has moved off somewhere without announcing itself.

He straightened once and looked at the far bank, then back at the hull, then at the water between. He was counting something, or measuring something by eye, and I stayed where I was and watched him count it.

The rope at my feet did not need me to do anything with it. It was waiting for whoever would need it next. That was not my question to answer.

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