The photograph we could not print: Late afternoon at the Lake Hollis ferry dock
The photograph we could not print shows the Lake Hollis ferry dock at 4:47 p.m. last Thursday, when the sun broke through the cloud cover for exactly eleven minutes.
Ferry operator Dale Mitchum stands in the pilothouse doorway, one hand on the brass throttle that hasn't moved in three years. The ferry itself—the Wexagaw Crossing—sits idle at the near end of the dock, its paint the color of old pennies, its name still legible beneath thirty-two winters of weather. The rope coiled on the forward deck makes three and a half perfect loops.
What the camera saw
The light came sideways across the water, the kind that makes every detail sharp. You could count the dock pilings—there are eighteen—and see where the ice pushed two of them slightly out of true last March. The ticket booth window, which hasn't sold a ticket since 2009, reflects the treeline on the far shore.
Mitchem's jacket is the green the county used before they switched to blue. He was looking toward Grebe Point, though the photograph cannot show what he was looking at. In his left hand: a thermos cup. On the dock behind him: a folding chair, a tackle box that might contain tackle, and a orange life ring that reads "LAKE HOLLIS FERRY" in letters that have faded to the exact shade of the winter sky.
Why we could not print it
The camera's light meter disagreed with the moment. What appeared perfectly clear to the eye registered as underexposed, the shadows too deep, the highlights blown out where the sun caught the pilothouse glass. The photograph shows either too much or too little, depending on how you adjust it afterward.
Mitchem has kept the ferry operational for three years without passengers, running the engine once a month, inspecting the safety equipment, maintaining the schedule in a logbook that no one from the county reads anymore. The route—Lake Hollis to Grebe Point, twenty-three minutes crossing—remains on the township map.
He says the service could resume at any time. The Wexagaw Crossing is ready. The dock is sound. The route is marked. All that's missing are the passengers, and those, he says, are a temporary absence.
The photograph we could not print would not have shown this. It would have shown a man standing in a doorway, holding a cup, looking at water. But for eleven minutes last Thursday, the light was wrong for the camera and exactly right for everything else.