The Louis B. Porterie is the last ferry I was on, a few days ago. The river was at dead low water then, about as low as it ever gets, a good twenty feet lower than last spring. Upriver from Vicksburg to Cairo, the river goes up and down fifty or sixty feet, but the river’s more stable here, closer to the sea, and twenty feet is its range. High water is fast moving and ominous, but low water reveals more. It’s raw and raunchy, leaving little to imagination. By the ferry dock, under the wide apron built on piers outside the aquarium, a sandy beach appeared. It looked like a beach after a high school prom party, with detritus aground everywhere. A little downriver by Jackson Square a sandbar shows up, waves licking at the seagulls patrolling it. But even at low water the river’s well over one hundred feet deep here, and sometimes deeper than two hundred feet when it curves around the great bend at Governor Nicholls Wharf. In high water the current moves so fast around that bend the water actually climbs a foot higher on the east bank than across the river on the west bank, like a race car banking around a turn.

The Porterie spins away from the dock like a carnival ride, not fast, but it throws you off balance because you lose your reference points. Then it straightens, whirlpools trail its propellers, and you’re out on the river watching seagulls comb the wake while a pelican skims the surface of the water.

A tow passes, the City of Jonesville her name, port of Wilmington, Delaware, it says, and you wonder what she’s doing here. The great cliff of a hull of a large freighter rises up, four deck cranes long, its bow turning over the water like a plow turning soil. Then another ship slips past, the Diamond Ocean, then a tug pushing five barges downstream, then another freighter, the Mary F, riding high and empty in the water, so high you can see her rudder and maybe even the blades of her propellers churning. The Mary F is different, rust showing both above and below its markings, and she makes me think of Conrad and Lord Jim; then I see she’s registered to Monrovia. There are life jackets, hundreds of them, in lockers all over the ferry. This is indeed the great wide world churning past, steel and sea and strength, downtown New Orleans lying to the stern. The other shore comes up, and the captain docks the boat so gently you don’t feel even a bump. He knows what he’s doing all right.

I think about the ferry a lot more often than I actually ride, especially in the past few years. That’s another thing a favorite place does; it sits there in the back of your mind. You know where it is and you can slip away into it at will to find a little respite. There are memories, of course. Some years back my not-yet-wife and I rode the ferry to the courthouse in Algiers to get a marriage license. We didn’t do it for the romance of it, just the practicality. (The license expired unused, and we had to go back a second time.)

But most of my memories of the ferry go back a lot further, when I first started riding it, back before container ships, before time-shares, when the French Quarter was still the low-rent district. I had started writing then, but all that gave me were fantasies and the cliché of rejection slips. Money came from the occasional job, physical jobs mostly—I liked the feel of sweat rolling off my body at work, it made me think I was doing something real—or I collected unemployment, if I worked long enough to qualify for it. Back then stevedores worked the docks, and sailors came rolling off gangplanks looking for something they couldn’t find at sea. They went to sailor bars clustered on Decatur, a pretty rough street then, or near Decatur on Iberville, Bienville, Conti. There were the two Greek bars whose names I never knew—I couldn’t read the Greek lettering—on the second floor next door to each other on Decatur that didn’t even open until midnight. I think the gift shop for the House of Blues is there now and all the other bars are gone, and the sailors and stevedores are almost gone.

They’re gone but the ferry is still around. I started riding the ferry at a time in my life before memories. It was my favorite place even then, back when instead of memories I just had life. I had life rolling out before me. It may be a voyage of no consequence, back and forth across the river, like rocking a baby to sleep, but it still promises to take you anywhere. There is always a breeze on the river.