Take the Ferry, Keep Your Soul

Algonac — International travel has become hellish in the 21st century. Long lines, bureaucratic interrogations, psychic lobotomies performed by the DHS. Crossing the Canadian border by car, a routine trip for many, is no exception. The major bridge crossings cost you brain cells every time. You can feel them dying as you sit in traffic waiting for your turn to explain “the purpose of your visit.” You feel like Frodo crossing into Mordor, hiding from orcs.

The Walpole-Algonac Ferry is the rare exception, a beacon of humanity amid the mass transit hellscape.

There are a few conventional ways to get from Michigan to Canada and back. The Blue Water Bridge in Sarnia, the Ambassador Bridge, the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel. All have their vices and virtues. 

Blue Water is the fastest, if there’s no traffic, but there’s always traffic. If you’re unlucky, you’ll end up sitting on the bridge for an hour plus; with the current construction, bad luck might cost you three. The Ambassador is similarly backed up, and well out of the way, unless you’re headed right to Detroit. And the tunnel… crawling your way through the subterranean ooze only to emerge in downtown Windsor, the tackiest casino town in Canada? Oof.

A new contender! The Gordie-Howe International Bridge is under construction, at a price tag of $4.6 billion. A magnificent modern span, directly connected to both highway systems, promises a boon for commercial trucks in particular. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer celebrated the recent joining of the two sides of the span herself, touting it as “a huge milestone made possible by workers on both sides of the border who threw on their hard hats, laced up their steel-toed boots, and got the job done.” Thank you, Gretchen, for explaining how blue-collar fashion powers our highways and bridges. She’ll undoubtedly promote it as a major achievement of her administration, despite it actually being an achievement of the Snyder administration and the entire funding for it coming from Canada.

Sure, it will be beautiful, clean, and modern. Until the actual cars start crossing, the trucks back up, and the stern border patrol officers harsh the vibes. It’s only a matter of time until you’re sitting in traffic, waiting for a full cavity search on that bridge too. We’ll see if Big Gretch wants to own it then. 

There’s only one alternative to the major crossings: the Walpole-Algonac Ferry. Few have ever heard of it, with only two small boats fitting 12 and nine cars apiece. Continuously operating for over a century, save a pandemic pause, the ferry makes dozens of trips per day across the St. Clair River. I simply had to try it out.

The vibes were immaculate. Pull up, wait a little for the ferry to come back from its last crossing. Drive your car onto the boat, pay your $8 (same as the Ambassador Bridge), sit back and enjoy the 15-minute trip across the river. You can even hop out of the car, stand on the edge of the boat, and take in the surroundings. I wandered about, camera in-tow. Having my car on a boat felt rather whimsical. 

The ferry was sparse on my Tuesday afternoon crossing, just a few locals. A young woman in a short dress crossing to visit her boyfriend. A mother and her daughter going shopping on the American side. They offered to take a picture of me with my camera, asking, “First time on the ferry?” as I snapped all my photos. Bobby was a ferry virgin indeed, and he was feeling the joy that comes with bypassing the routine hellishness of the crossing with this luxury cruise ride.

All of the people on the ferry during my trip, and the ferry workers themselves, were indigenous Walpole Island natives. Walpole Island is native territory, a reservation, the “First Nation on Walpole Island,” as the Canadian government officially calls it. Tobacco shops and gas stations as far as the eye can see. A big statue of a native in a headdress flanked by tribal and Canadian flags greets you shortly before arriving at the ferry. The ferry crossing itself is owned and run by the reservation, with the entry points and customs checks themselves administered by their respective federal governments.

Algonac, on the Michigan side, is a pleasant little riverside town. Very classically American, filled with boats and docks and summer houses. American flags dot the shoreline in front of large cabins and boathouses. Boats speed past, fast boats, leisure craft, pontoon boats. A sign of affluence, free time for leisure being the real and true commodity of American prosperity.

All in all, a better way to live than the brain-damaging bridge crossings. A quick trip across the river, the ramp goes down as the ferry arrives in dock, you drive your car off up to the customs building waiting for you. The wait was fast, and hell, even the Border Patrol officer was uncharacteristically chill. 

These guys usually interrogate you. They’re all business, often even mean. This guy took one look at me, asked where I was going, and said, “See ya.” Of course he’s happy, he must have the best posting possible. He must thank his lucky stars every day he’s not down in Tijuana or El Paso or any of the government-run border crossings where you have to stay mean. 

You cross through that single outbuilding with the officer, and you’re in Algonac, and it’s Michigan Summer. I stopped at the Dairy Queen, still an old-style building with a sidewalk counter and only outdoor seating. A vanilla milkshake while I took in the waterfront, a giant statue of a Civil War veteran at its center, flanked by USA and POW-MIA flags. Proudly, unflinchingly, American.

It’s a bit of a detour, depending on where you’re going. Roughly an hour or so. But that assumes no traffic on the bridges though, and with current construction on the Bluewater Bridge, and traffic on the Ambassador Bridge, you’re likely to waste an extra hour sitting in gridlock anyways. If you’ll be delayed anyways, the ferry is a far more pleasant way to spend that time.

It’s a shame that a sense of freedom has been so ruthlessly bled out of our travel infrastructure. We used to pride ourselves on it, but the ever tightening noose of the modern security landscape has taken that away. The “shoe bomber” was over 20 years ago, and we’re still taking our shoes off and shuffling around in our socks in the airport lines. It doesn’t even work, by the government’s own admission. What’s more, it’s a hypocritical show; politicians leave the southern border porous and open by design, letting immigrants flood into the country illegally, while subjecting citizens to interrogation at every crossing. 

Don’t mistake me for an open-borders guy; my vision of an open border would be finally bringing those northern loyalists to heel (I’m kidding, Canadians). My simple point is, we’ve let the government ruin the spirit of travel. 

The ferry works. It runs on its own time, and you feel like a human being crossing it, because real people run it and are happy to see you. The greatest victory of private enterprise is that they’re happy to have customers, and the greatest failure of bureaucracy is that they resent the people who need them, rolling their eyes at the audacity of citizens wanting to cross the border in a timely, pleasant fashion.

Bobby Mars is an artist, alter ego, and former art professor. Follow him on X at @bobby_on_mars.