How the Ferry Changes the Workday
For most of my life I assumed a commute was simply the toll you paid for living somewhere worth living. It was time to be endured, not enjoyed. Then I began taking the ferry, and the whole equation quietly rearranged itself. The trip stopped being the cost of the day and became one of its quiet pleasures.
There is a particular stretch of the crossing I have come to love. The city falls away behind you, and the bay opens wide and unhurried ahead. The morning light moves across the water in a way it never quite does from land. Some days the fog is still lifting off the hills; other days it is clear straight across to the far shore. Whatever the weather, something in you loosens. By the time you step off at the Ferry Building, you have already been given a handful of minutes that belong to no one but you, before the day begins to make its requests.
The people I meet who work in technology tell me this is the part that caught them off guard. They expected to trade a punishing commute for quiet and open space, and they found it. What they did not anticipate was that the journey itself would become something they looked forward to. You can answer a few messages if you like. You can read. Or you can do nothing more demanding than watch the boats and let your thoughts drift, which has a way of clarifying the very things a desk never could.
On the days you do not need to be in the city at all, the bay is simply there, a wide and changing view just beyond the kitchen window. That, I think, is the rhythm so many people are quietly searching for now. A few mornings on the water and in the office, a few on the trails with a laptop and a good cup of coffee. A working life that bends around the shape of a real one, rather than the reverse.
There is a subtler gift in it as well. The ferry draws a clean line between the two halves of the day. When you board to come home, the city stays behind on the dock. You watch it grow smaller, and by the time you reach this side of the water you have already crossed into something gentler. The evening arrives as your own, in a way it rarely does when you drive home tense and depleted, still half tethered to the office in your mind.
I have lived here a long time, and the crossing still moves me. It is an unusual and rather wonderful kind of luxury, to sit so near one of the great cities of the world and feel a world away from it the moment the boat pulls from the dock.
If you have found yourself wondering what a life like this might actually feel like, the kind in which the way to work restores you rather than wears you down, I would be glad to talk it over whenever you like.
Tammy Riemer, eXp Realty
