Keller Ferry

For a long time, whenever anyone said "ferry" I pictured not that hulking green and white apartment building-sized ships that cruise powerfully back and forth across Puget Sound with a backdrop of fog, green pine forests, and towering snow-capped peaks, but instead a little cabin-less thing shaped more or less like a dinner-plate with a few up-ended cubes of butter stuck around the periphery. This vessel, surrounded not by the verdant mountains of Western Washington but by the sage and sand hills of Eastern Washington, was the only thing I knew in my childhood that was ever called a ferry, and everyone always just called it "Keller Ferry."

We called it that because that's how you got to Keller, obviously, or the popular Sanpoil campground almost as far away. It's only today via a blog post by Captain Richard Rodriguez over at Bitter End that I find out that Keller Ferry has a real name: the Martha S. Even more incredibly, she's been on that run in more or less continuous service for more than sixty years, having begun in 1948.

I had always assumed, as a child, that this was the ferry, an assumption reinforced by the fact that the county it connected to the north was Ferry county (named, I also find this afternoon, not after Keller Ferry, but instead Washington's first governor, Elisha P. Ferry). I grew up not far from it and spent many a summer swimming and playing in Lake Roosevelt at a Park Service campground just downstream from the landing. If you waited until it got close the the landing and then dove under water and were still, you could hear the throbbing of the engines, a much different sound than the high-pitched whine of propellers from every other craft on the river.

I think about that now as I hear the throb of the Evergreen State through the hull as I sit moored near the periphery of the docks at Friday Harbor.