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facts & arguments

Facts & Arguments is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.

I take a ferry to work.

Wide-beamed Coralita sidles up to the dock with a shudder and a bump. I go up the stairs with some of the others crowding aboard and sit on a bench on the upper deck looking out over the water.

Coralita has carried me in rain and high winds, in scorching heat at noon and, on the last run of the day, home in darkness. Aboard her, we are men, women and children of every human shade. Schoolchildren in pinafores and shorts, garrulous pensioners and those of us on our way to work on this tiny, fish-hook-shaped archipelago in the North Atlantic called Bermuda.

On any given workday, Americans and Brits, Scandinavians and South Africans take their seats beside white and black Bermudians aboard Coralita.

Those of us "from away" are interlopers employed in insurance, financial or legal services who have no memory of the riots here less than 50 years ago, when black people fought to gain access to equal wages and job opportunities that were available only to whites.

I take my seat beside a young Chinese man holding a slim book, the characters cascading down the page. Some of us never speak and some never shut up. Snippets of conversation float to me: a cautionary tale about a wife who has left Bermuda because she's had enough of doing nothing while he works. A lovely house on the water couldn't keep her in this paradise without something to do.

Work. We need it. We hate it. It's an anchor that keeps us steady or weighs us down, or both.

I had a job in Canada, a good job as a lawyer and director of the Human Rights Commission in Prince Edward Island. But I am a player in the employment fantasy draft. My fellow players and I see job ads and we think, "I can do that."

Usually, we scan the ads the way a long-married spouse may have a peek at Tinder – not seriously looking, just curious. We get up and go to work whether we want to or not. We have things to do. There's a corner of our desk we haven't gotten to in months. Even when you have a job you love, or love most of the time, there are those between times when things are intolerable, or you're just tired, so you look at job ads to remind yourself there's a wider world out there. I was finding PEI like potato soup: cold, white and hard to stir.

Tara Hardy for The Globe and Mail

In November, 2006, my wife and I were sitting at our kitchen table in PEI. The newspaper careers section was open in front of me, and I saw an ad for a job in Bermuda.

“How would you like to live in Bermuda?” I said.

“Sure,” she responded.

The fantasy might have ended there, but she went on to ask: “Why don’t you apply?”

Because, I told her, we have just built a house and sworn it will be our last abode, a place where they’ll have to take off the doors to get us out in our caskets. We had a son who had not finished high school. We had good jobs and a life. Still, I applied.

In June, 2007, I took our younger son to Bermuda to find a school. We’d sold our house and almost everything in it. I’d soon be working as a lawyer in the office of the Attorney-General in Bermuda.

My wife jokingly told friends she was retiring to Bermuda, which sounded good, but she soon found she needed something more to fill her days than golf, tennis and a busy social life with other expats. She started to work about a year ago.

Not long after we first arrived, my son and I sat at the ferry stop, our legs dangling over the concrete dock, looking across the water as Coralita approached.

The water was otherworldly cerulean. A shark swam sinuously beneath our feet. Coralita arrived and we hopped over her low rail and took the stairs to the upper deck. That introduction to the ferry ride to town was the model for all the others.

Who knows what “urgent” crisis may greet me when I get to work, or who may be clamouring for “my immediate response”? But on the ferry I have a view of cobalt and azure waters, palm trees, warm-yellow, beige and sky-blue houses topped with blinding-white roofs.

Before I slide the card that gives me access through the door to all-occupying work, I stand at Coralita’s rail and the view triggers an autonomic response of exhalation. The toil ahead is over there, just across the harbour, a million miles away. The brittle remains of yesterday’s effort are behind me in the wake somewhere. When I return home this evening, the stars may be out.

On the ferry, I’m reminded that there’s work, and then there’s everything else – things that matter more, like this little archipelago, every one of us here a visitor, and the vast ocean, the Earth.

Sometimes, friends and former colleagues will say how glad I must be to have escaped the Canadian winter and I say, “I’m working here, remember.”

What I don’t tell them is that I take a ferry to work. That when I board Coralita, work takes its proper place.

I will have to leave when my work permit ends. But for now, each ferry ride marks a beginning and an end, a lesson in the impermanence of work and life, and the anticipation of unknowns on other shores.

Gregory Howard lives in Warwick Parish, Bermuda.