John Wayne rode Emmet ferry across the Columbia on a Wednesday afternoon in July of 1964 because the drive around added 40 minutes and he was not in a hurry but saw no reason to take the longer road when the ferry was right there. He was the only passenger on the crossing. Emmet ran the engine from the wheelhouse and did not come out until they were midriver and when he did come out and looked at the man standing at the bow rail watching the current he placed the face and said nothing about it because there was nothing to say. Here is the story. Emmet was born in 1897 in Klickitat County, Washington the son of a man who fished the Columbia River for salmon and a woman who kept the household accounts and never once let the two of them get ahead of what the river could provide in a given year. Emmet grew up on the water and grew up respecting the arithmetic of the water which is to say he understood from an early age that the river gives what it
gives and takes back what it decides to take and a man who makes his living on it had better not spend the summer’s income in April. He had worked the salmon boats and the log rafts and one season on a core of engineers dredge before he ran the ferry the first time in 1933. The ferry was not his then.
It belonged to a man named Ira Conkle who had run it since 1919 and who had gotten sick in the winter of 1932 and could not run it in the spring. He asked Emmet to take it for the season. Emmet took it for the season and the season after that and by the third season Ira Conkle had died and his widow had sold Emmet the ferry and the operating permit and the small dock on the north bank for a price that reflected what the ferry earned and what the depression had done to everything else.
Emmet paid it off in four years. The ferry was a flat-bottomed cable ferry 40 ft long and 16 wide running on a steel cable strung across the quarter-mile crossing between the North Bank farming community and the South Bank road that connected to the market town 8 miles east. It held two vehicles and their passengers or one truck and its load.
The engine was a converted marine diesel that Emmett had rebuilt twice. The cable was replaced in 1947 and again in 1958. The deck planking was replaced section by section as it wore so that no plank on the ferry in 1964 was the original plank. But the ferry itself was the same ferry, the same hull, and the same frame, and the same cable drive mechanism that Ira Conklin had used to carry the farmers and their produce back and forth across the Columbia since 1919.
Emmett had run it every day it was navigable since 1933. He ran it from ice out in March to freeze up in December, 6 days a week, first crossing at 7:00 in the morning and last crossing at 7:00 in the evening. He charged a dollar for a car and a dollar fifty for a truck and twenty-five cents for a passenger on foot.
He had raised his rates twice in 31 years. The farmers on the North Bank had never complained because the alternative was the 40-minute drive to the Cascade Bridge that was now being built 4 miles downstream and the drive around had always been the alternative and was therefore the measure against which Emmett’s ferry was judged.
His wife Clara had died in 1959, a spring cold that went to pneumonia in a week. They had a daughter Susan who had married and moved to Yakima in 1955 and had two children. The younger of them, Ruth, had come to live with Emmett on the North Bank in 1960 when Susan’s husband had taken a job in Alaska and the family situation had required it.
Ruth was 10 years old when she came to Emmett’s house on the river and 17 when the bridge downstream began to take shape in the summer of 1964. She was not a child who needed watching. She was serious and capable and had spent four years helping Emmet on the ferry on weekends and school holidays, collecting the fares and logging the crossings in the ferry book, and learning the river the way children learn things when the learning is practical and immediate.
She had been accepted to the Providence Hospital School of Nursing in Portland for the fall of 1964. The acceptance letter had arrived in April and Emmet had read it twice and felt two things at once, which was pride and the arithmetic of the tuition deposit. The deposit was $150, due the 1st of August.
Emmet had $200 in the account at the Stevenson Bank. He needed the $200 for the operating permit renewal in September and the diesel fuel account through the end of the season and two sections of deck planking on the port side that were getting soft. He had been planning to pay the deposit from the July income.
In June, the county road department put the bridge opening signs up downstream. Emmet did the July arithmetic and it did not come out the way he needed it to. He had not told Ruth. Ruth was working the summer on the ferry with him and studying for a state nursing entrance examination at the kitchen table in the evenings and he saw no reason to put the deposit problem on her before he had solved it.
He had not solved it. The Cascade Bridge was scheduled to open September 1st. Emmet’s operating permit expired September 30th. The Washington State Department of Transportation had informed him in April in a politely written letter that no renewal would be issued after September given the change in transportation infrastructure in the area.
The letter noted that the state appreciated his 31 years of service to the rural Columbia River community. It did not offer compensation. There was no provision in his operating agreement for compensation upon permit non-renewal due to infrastructure change. He had read the agreement when he signed it in 1933, and he had read it again in April of 1964, and the provision was not there either time.
The ferry was his only significant asset. It was worth what someone would pay for a 40-ft flat-bottomed cable ferry in 1964, which was not much because the specific configuration of a cable ferry made it useful only in a cable ferry application, and the cable ferry market in 1964 was not expansive. He had spoken to two salvage operators.
One had offered him $200 for the hull. The other had not made an offer. He was thinking about the salvage operator’s offer on Wednesday afternoon in July when the truck pulled up to the North Bank dock, and the man in the tan Stetson got out and asked how much for the crossing. “25 cents if you leave the truck,” Emmett said.
“A dollar if you want to bring it.” The man looked at the truck. He said, “I’ll leave it.” He paid the quarter and walked on. Emmett ran the crossing from the wheelhouse. Midriver, with the current running easy and the South Bank coming up steady, he came out and stood at the stern and looked at his passenger. The man was standing at the bow rail with both hands on it, watching the water.
He was tall, broad, wearing the Stetson and a canvas jacket over a plain shirt, and his hands on the rail were the hands of a man who was not gripping it for balance, but holding it the way a person holds something familiar. Emmett looked at him. He placed the face. He said nothing and went back to the wheelhouse and brought the ferry into the South Bank dock.
The man did not get off. He stood at the bow rail as Emmett secured the cable and looked at the South Bank, and then turned and looked back at the North Bank, and then looked at the river between them. He asked how wide the crossing was. “Quarter mile,” Emmett said, “give or take with the current.
” He asked how long the cable was strung. Emmett told him. “1,400 ft steel cable, 3/4 inch, replaced 6 years ago.” The man looked at the cable where it ran from the ferry to the tower on the south bank. He said, “You run this alone?” Emmett said, “Yes.” The man asked how long. “31 years,” Emmett said. The man looked at him.
He said, “31 years on a quarter mile of river?” Emmett said, “The river is different every day.” He said it the way a man says a thing that is true and that most people do not believe until they have spent enough time on moving water to see it for themselves. They rode back to the north bank. There was a truck waiting to cross south.
Emmett ran the truck across and came back empty and the man in the Stetson was still on the dock. He asked Emmett about the bridge downstream. He had seen the signs on the drive in. Emmett told him. “September 1st, permit expires September 30th.” He said it the way he’d been saying it to himself for 3 months, flat and without self-pity, the way a man states the weather.
The man asked what happened to the ferry. Emmett said he had spoken to salvage. He said “$200 for the hull.” The man looked at the ferry. He looked at the cable. He said, “What does your granddaughter need for the nursing school?” Emmett looked at him. He had not mentioned Ruth. He had not mentioned nursing school.
The man said, “You have a girl on the dock this morning helping with the log book. She’s wearing a Providence Hospital lanyard. Providence has a nursing school in Portland.” Emmett looked at the dock. Ruth had gone to the house for lunch. He said, “Deposit is $150, due August 1st.” The man took the long brown leather wallet from his jacket.
He counted $150 onto the dock cleat beside the cable housing. He set a stone from the dock gravel on top of the bills to hold them in the river wind. Emmett looked at the money on the cleat. He said, “I run a ferry, not a charity.” The man said, “I know you do.” He put the wallet back. He looked at the river. He said he had been working with a Columbia River Heritage Group out of Portland that was looking for a working river ferry to preserve as a functioning historical exhibit.
He said a cable ferry in original operational condition was exactly what they had been trying to locate for 2 years. He said the compensation for a long-term loan agreement would be modest but regular, and that Emmett would be required to operate the ferry on scheduled demonstration days through the summer season, which would give him something to do with the river besides let it go.
Where are you watching from? Drop your state in the comments. I want to see how far this story reaches. Emmett looked at the river. He looked at the ferry tied to the dock, the deck planks worn smooth, the cable housing painted and repainted, the engine housing he knew by feel in the dark. He said, “The hull is sound.
” He said, “The engine runs clean.” “I know it does,” the man said. “I rode it.” Emmett picked up the bills from the cleat. He held them in the river wind. He said, “Ruth wants to work the pediatric ward. She told me last week. She said there are not enough nurses who grew up on farms and understand that children from farm families are different from children from city families.
” He said it the way a grandfather says the thing he is most certain about in his life. The man said, “Then she should go.” Emmett put the bills in his shirt pocket. He said, “Who do I call at the Heritage Group?” The man wrote a name and a Portland number on the back of a dock receipt he found in his jacket pocket.
He gave it to Emmett. He said, “Tell them I called.” He said, “They will come out and look at the ferry.” He said the hull and the cable mechanism were what they needed and that the deck would do. He walked up the dock to the North Bank Road and got in his truck and drove east.
Emmett stood on the dock for a while. The river ran past the dock pilings the way it always ran, the current pulling south and east toward the gorge, different today than yesterday, the same river it had always been. He called the Portland number the following morning. A woman named Mrs. Aldrich answered and listened and said she would have someone out by the end of the week.
A man from the Heritage Group came on Friday and walked the ferry stem to stern and looked at the cable mechanism and asked Emmett questions about the crossing history and the engine and wrote things in a notebook. He said he would recommend the acquisition to the board. Ruth Doll mailed the $150 deposit to Providence Hospital School of Nursing on August 2nd.
She started her first year in September of 1964, the same month the Cascade Bridge opened downstream and the last commercial crossing on Emmett’s stretch of the Columbia ran on September 30th. The Columbia River Heritage Association formalized the ferry loan agreement in November of 1964. Emmett operated demonstration crossings on summer weekends beginning in May of 1965.
He ran them the same way he had run the commercial crossings, first crossing at 10:00 in the morning and last at 4:00 in the afternoon, the same cable, the same engine, the same quarter mile. He charged nothing. The Heritage Association covered the fuel and the insurance. He kept the ferry book.
He operated the demonstration crossings for 9 years until his knees made the dock difficult in the spring of 1973. He was 76 years old. Ruth by then was a registered nurse working the pediatric ward at Providence in Portland, the ward she had told Emmett about on the dock in in of 1964. Emmett Doll died in the fall of 1974 in the house on the north bank of the Columbia.
He was 77 years old. Ruth came home from Portland and handled the estate. She donated three items to the Columbia River Heritage Association in 1975. The first was the ferry logbook, 31 years of daily crossing records in Emmett’s careful hand. Every crossing noted, every fare recorded, the weather and the river level and the load.
The second was his Washington State Ferry operating permit from 1964, the last one issued, framed. The third was a dock receipt with a Portland phone number written on the back in someone else’s handwriting. The ferry is still there. It runs demonstration crossings on summer weekends, the same cable, the same quarter mile.
The logbook is in the archive room of the Columbia River Heritage Association office in Hood River, Oregon. The last entry is dated September 30th, 1964. It reads, “Final commercial crossing, one truck southbound. River running at 47,200 cubic feet per second. Wind from the west, clear. E. Doll.
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