If you don't,
then as sure as you're alive, you'll find yourself growing queer.
The Ferry and Real Boats
As a matter of fact the ferry isn't a boat at all. It is more like a
house or a street car or a park full of pretty benches. It doesn't sail,
it only plies, plies between two given points at stated intervals, and
could anything be more dull. Nothing is more prosaic than a ferry unless
it be an ironing board.
Even a barge is superior, and a barge doesn't pretend to be a boat. A
barge goes somewhere and it gets mussed up by the real salt sea, and so
do flat, old scows, honest and rough and sea-going. Any boat in the bay
is superior to the effeminate ferry. Even the boat to Sacramento has a
bit more atmosphere. As for tug boats, they are little, but O-my as they
pull the great, impotent barges after them. Pilot boats have quite an
air making the big, dignified steamers look foolish being yanked here
and there. The tidy fisherman's motor boats look rather unimaginative,
all tied in rows at Fisherman's Wharf, but they go somewhere, sometimes
away down the coast and from their sides the long nets reach away down
into the sea itself.
How the real boats in the bay must despise the ferry. Think of being
called a boat and never once sailing out of the Golden Gate. How
maddening it must be. If the ferry had any spirit at all, some day it
would just switch about and go chunking out to sea.
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