It was the foggy end of a drizzly day. Along the lunch counter of the Ferry Dock Tavern, gray-haired men in overalls and leather jackets were eating oyster stew. A set of hamburgers sizzling on the electric plate sent little wisps of the smell of scorched beef up through the cigarette smoke. From outside, through the loosely slapped-together boards of the frame building, came the hoots and howls of steamboat whistles. Through every crevice, the fog seeped into the tavern, bringing with it a tang of rotting evergreens and giving faint ruddy halos to the bare electric light bulbs.

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