Ewell's Ferry

Once, in the early 1980s, I spent a good hour on a bench on a bluff just beyond the ferry. Serenaded by the ripples of the water, I reread, for the fourth or fifth time, Siddhartha. It seemed appropriate to read about a man who found peace while transporting pilgrims and merchants across the river. Ewell’s Ferry wasn’t very busy that day and the ferry operator only had a few vehicles that crossed. I thought he had the ideal job. He worked at a pace about as slow as the muddy stream that divided Bladen County. His duty was to shuttle cars, trucks and tractors back and forth. He could take no more than two vehicles a trip and was limited to six passengers. When he wasn’t moving cars or mowing the grass, his other task in summer, I imagined him tending a trotline for catfish or sitting up under a shade trees and watching a bobber or reading a book, while nodding to the occasional fishermen or tugboats pushing barges of pulpwood, all while keeping an ear open for the horn of a car announcing a customer.

Ewell’s Ferry is located County, between the communities of Carvers and Kelly. It’s the only way to get an automobile across the Cape Fear River for fifty or so miles and it is the only inland ferry left in North Carolina. All the other rivers and creeks have been spanned by bridges. When the ferry isn’t running, which it doesn’t do at night or when the water is high or during fog, you have to drive up to Elizabethtown or down near Riegelwood to find a bridge. Last week, when I was driving from Wilmington to Pinehurst, I decided go up the north side of the Cape Fear and then cross over at Ewell’s Ferry. I wanted my daughter to get this experience, riding across a two car ferry that runs on a cable. Unfortunately, the ferry wasn’t running, but maybe that’s okay because she wasn’t impressed. The locked gate didn’t give a reason for the closing, but it may have been weather as the day had been rainy and there were a few light patches of fog. Or maybe its budget cuts, but I’d hate to think of that.

-
When I worked this area back in the early 80s, I occasionally use the ferry to get over to the northeastern part of Bladen County. If I had an evening meeting, it’d only been one way. I’d cross right before they shut down operations for the day and then drive back at night on Highway 53, taking it around White Lake and crossing the river at Elizabethtown. Without the ferry, I had an additional 45 minutes of a deer-dodging drive home. I loved it when I had extra time and could stop at the ferry. Sometimes I just sat on the bench and watched the water flow by, other times I talked with the operator or read.

Never had a river attracted him as much as this one. Never had he found the voice and appearance of flowing water so beautiful. It seemed to him as if the river had something special to tell him, something which he did not know, something which still awaited him. Siddhartha had wanted to drown himself in this river; the old, tired, despairing Siddhartha was today drowned in it. The new Siddhartha felt a deep love for this flowing water and decided that he would not leave it again so quickly.

-Herman Hesse, Siddhartha