The seaport puts a hard angular metal edge on the city. Beyond the wooden piles of the wharves, beyond the crusted bird s**t, road cones, toll booths, and bobbing boats lies the ocean. The end of the Earth, it feels like.
With Hopey papoose’d tightly against me, I bicycle right through the warning signs, the security booths, ducking the automated gate-bars, weaving through puddles of oil, steel cable coiled like snakes, cycling merrily through a carpark stocked with fifty identical pickup trucks each with a winch in the back.
The last hundred metres of the port is flat, dense concrete before it’s edged with thick square wooden logs with three-inch-thick rubber. The tide bumps a tugboat against the wharf. It’s rough out there today. The ocean spray nips.
I hop off the bike and look for s
