boat (the)

noun, the Wolfe Islander (Wolfe Island Ferry)

“Oh my gosh, you know. Well you, sometimes youse look around and say, ‘Well if the boat does go over, what am I gonna grab’, you know? You got a little kid too, you know? Or maybe more than one.”

“When he was about two or three he would come over with his mother in the evening for a ride over to Kingston on the boat.”

“I would know everybody coming off the boat. Now I line up for the boat, and I hardly know anybody.”

“When I hear people complaining about the boat, I get a little irate.”

“It’s seven minutes to walk from my house to the boat.”

“Well the phone is all ship-to-shore on the boat. If that 911 goes, they call the boat first thing and say, ‘Be at the shore. There’s ambulances coming’.”

“‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I was down there and dove on The Wolfe Islander, on the boat.’”

“I mean if you look at the boat in the morning, there’s one person in most of those cars.”

“Tourists take up space on the boat.”

“We had to give them five minutes to catch the boat.”

“Tom at that time worked on the boat.”

“It wasn’t that far from the boat.”

“Then later on he’d run in conjunction with the ferry ’cause the boat would only run to certain hours, and then he took over after hours and would run their water taxi.”

“You can tell a Wolfe Islander by they’re always doing this, okay. They’re always looking at their watch. And if they’re in town or here, but their whole lives are governed by the boat. Some curse and swear at it, you know. ‘Oh, who’s on it? Ah, why is it late? Who are the goons?’. Or you accept it and relax with it.”

“See, the boat could only get in here so far in the wintertime, so they’d go out. And then Christmas Day it was minus 17 celsius, and there was a whole load of kids and families heading back. It was the last boat of the day heading back to town. Coming close to the boat … horse and sleigh go through the ice. Captain boomed open the door and said ‘Everyone, don’t panic. Don’t panic. I’ll get you out’.”

“Everybody’s at rest … everything’s, you know, quiet. ‘Honk!’ and I thought — Who the hell is this? And I looked out, and I said, ‘Oh geez, somebody needs the boat’. So I come out. I said, ‘What is it?’ ‘Baby’s coming!’ … ‘Okay, we got an emergency, guys! Fast!’ So one by one you hear everything fire up. We’d have the boat running in less than eight minutes.”