Grant Turismo

Northern ferry landing

Grant Turismo started his map collection with a ferry chart folded into the shape of his niece Maeve's very small coat pocket. She was six, and better at keeping hold of it than her uncle. They made a rule that she could add a dot whenever they got off at a landing she'd never used before. One day she applied the rule to the pier arcade in Saltbridge. They spent twenty minutes looking for the dotted corner where the chip van ought to go. Grant could have said they'd drawn the map for ferries. He hunted down a pencil instead.

He now works for the cooperative that runs the same boats. On a winter schedule he can spend a whole Wednesday arranging for someone to make it home after dark. A passenger once came across to the little office to thank him and found the door shut because he was walking the last route himself. He gets uneasy telling other people a trip takes a certain amount of time unless he's felt how long the cold part at the end takes on foot.

Gate by the splicing bench

At the DGM garage, Grant marks a dot when a closed practice route finally makes sense from the Ford GT. His first drawings gave too much room to straights. He could wait there and admire the open line until a small corner came up half a beat earlier than the drawing implied. Josh Falcon painted a scale on Grant's wooden board after they both tried to read the same napkin. Josh wanted to take it to the highest seat in the little viewing stand. Grant had been at ground level so long he assumed there was no reason to look from up there.

They looked through the fence one after the other. The long curve had two distinct parts. On the next outing the Ford ran out of the first smoothly, and Grant could hold the second line without taking back steering when the track closed around him. On the board he drew a little break where before there had been one sweep of pencil.

Where Finn stopped walking

Finn Flatout paused over a low spot farther down the track on a windy morning. Grant noticed because Finn kept watching the same bit of dust move. They took the board between them and marked the low spot in the margin. On the next visit somebody had swept it clean, and Grant could still follow Finn's observation because he had written down which side of the gate they'd been standing on. Maeve later saw a sketch and wanted to know who Finn was. Grant showed her the side of the map where he'd put the person's full name.

At the ferry office he tried the same thing on a service chart for a substitute boat. The trainee wrote the deckhand's name beside the narrow landing. By Friday the note had saved two telephone calls.

The blank below the pier

Maeve is old enough to take the boat without Uncle Grant now. She has asked him to bring the GT down so she can see a practice from Josh's new seat. Grant has added the gate, the shortcut to the viewing stand and the dry place to put her coat. His notes don't yet say how to come back from the stand without passing the empty spot where the chip van used to park. He intends to ask the new cooperative trainee what he would put at the bottom.