By Phillip Vannini Associate Professor, School of Communication and Culture

For many communities, the ferry serves as a town square, where people meet, greet and share stories, says RRU Prof. Phillip Vannini.

Taking the ferry isn’t just a way of moving through space, it’s also of way of journeying across time. Over the past year I have formalized my consuming interest in ferries and shaped it into a multi-year ethnographic study of boats, communities of commuters and the largest and least investigated mass medium of communication of all: the ocean.

My study will require me to travel to numerous locations served by the provincial ferry service, as well as to a few remote places not served by Bennett’s brainchild, B.C. Ferries.

My earliest reflections on ferries have already found their way into a couple of academic journals, and the interest among residents of coastal British Columbia has been growing remarkably fast.

It’s impossible not to be concerned about the ferries, especially if you live on the West Coast outside a major urban centre. In many areas B.C. Ferries holds a monopoly on how people travel and distribute goods. The ferries are an everyday technology of settlement and a testament to the Canadian ingenuity in managing population growth though controlling space.

RRU Prof. Phillip Vannini is studying how ferry travel shapes  communities on B.C.'s coast.

My study on the ferries is based on observations and reflections on the role they play in structuring the lives of the residents of the Gulf Islands. I like to learn from the stories I hear. If a vessel is 10 minutes late, or worse yet when it suffers an accident and sinks, not only are people’s routines destabilized, but so are the cultural rituals that the passengers carry with them. It’s a view of progress where technology is an agent of environmental and historical control.

As an academic I am influenced by a host of cultural theorists, including prominent Canadians such as Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. B.C. Ferries are media of a message that carves a deep unique sense of time and space. A commuter boat is to a small island what a public square is to a small village. It’s a place for a community to carry out its rituals. Throughout Europe you see a similar social phenomenon occurring on local commuter trains. These are not mere means of transportation, but vessels which carry culturally unique work ethics, environmental attitudes and senses of community.

I am interested in the concept of island time on Gabriola and recently co-authored a paper with Royal Roads student and Gabriola native Jaigris Hodson about how the vessels function as timekeepers. Like common clocks, the ferries mark schedules, daily rhythms, ways of thinking and experiencing the past, present, and the future and, as communities get smaller, so do the vessel sizes and speeds. It is no accident that life in these places feels as slow as their ferries.

I am now exploring Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands) and will focus on the impact the sinking of the Queen of the North had on the consciousness of residents of northern coastal communities. The tragedy has shown that these vessels aren’t just machines, they have names, they transport memories, they are extensions of our bodies and identities and they need the same moral protection that we reserve for our selves.

For Vannini, the ocean can be seen as a medium for communal and cultural mass communication.

Between trips up north I’ve been investigating meanings of the fleet as symbols of progress in the southern Gulf Islands. Just like the ferries serve to impose a central definition of time, they also work to shape a definition of space governed by the logic of land as real estate. But many people on those islands strongly resist that logic and there is no better way to understand our contradictory culture of technology than by looking at these kinds of relations.

As I continue to fill my diary with islander stories, one thing becomes increasingly certain – no matter how much people love to complain about the ferries, they get even more agitated at the thought of replacing them with bridges. That’s the funny thing about our ferries: as much as any case of poor service results in isolation, without them we would have no insulation, that is, no islands – only meaningless, dispersed, deserted rocks that run contrary to our Canadian frontier culture. After all we’re all on the same boat and we have no way of ever truly getting off it.

Read media stories about Vannini's ferry study from the Queen Charlotte Islands Observer and the Prince Rupert Daily News.

If you have a story to tell about taking the ferry, contact Phillip Vannini at phillip.vannini@royalroads.ca or send your story to the School of Communication and Culture, Royal Roads University, 2005 Sooke Road, Victoria, B.C. V9B 5Y2.