The Ferry Schedule
The ferry runs on Tuesdays and Fridays. If you miss the Friday ferry, you're on the island until Tuesday. This is not a problem the island considers a problem.
I found out about the Tuesday-Friday schedule after I'd already booked the accommodation. The island has about 200 permanent residents, one restaurant that's open when it feels like it, and no ATM. You bring cash or you don't buy things. The restaurant takes cash. The one small shop takes cash. The woman who rents kayaks takes cash or a handshake, depending on her mood.
What Happens When You Can't Leave Easily
The first day, I was anxious about the cash situation. I had enough, but not a lot of margin. I kept doing mental math. By the second day, I'd stopped. There wasn't anything to buy that I needed, and the math was always the same. I had enough.
The Have a Field Trip principle — that the best travel happens when you're slightly constrained — is easy to say and hard to feel until you're actually constrained. The island forced a kind of attention that I don't usually have. When you can't leave easily, you stop planning your exit and start noticing where you are.
The restaurant was open for dinner on both nights I was there. The owner, a man in his sixties who'd been born on the island and left for twenty years and come back, cooked whatever he'd caught or bought from the fishing boats that morning. There was no menu. You ate what there was. Both nights it was excellent.
The slowing down that happens on an island with a twice-weekly ferry isn't manufactured. It's structural. The island doesn't have to try to be slow. It just is, because the infrastructure doesn't support speed. The texture of place is different when the place has actual limits.
I missed the Friday ferry on purpose. Stayed until Tuesday. Came back with more cash than I'd spent and a notebook full of things I'd noticed. More at josephcalitoy.com.