The Ferryman's Unseen Current: On the Cable That Runs Beneath the Surface

I remember the morning the ferry stopped. Not with a dramatic lurch or a cry of alarm, but with a gentle, almost apologetic sigh. One moment we were gliding across the river’s grey, choppy surface, the next we were simply… still. The low hum of the engine had cut out, leaving only the sound of the wind and the water slapping against the hull.

Passengers shuffled, looked at their phones, and murmured. A tourist asked if this was part of the tour. But the ferryman, an older man with a face like worn leather, didn’t seem perturbed. He simply nodded to himself, as if a suspicion had been confirmed. He radioed the shore with a calm, practiced brevity—"Main's out, George. Running on the battery. Not for long." Then he went below deck.

I watched him, peering down the steep metal stairs. He wasn’t frantically checking the engine or hitting switches. He was kneeling, shining a flashlight on a thick, tar-black cable that ran along the keel of the boat. He ran a gloved hand along its length, feeling for something the rest of us couldn’t see.

Later, after a tugboat had nudged us to the dock, he explained it to me. The ferry doesn’t just run on an engine; it runs on a submerged cable system, a guide wire that lies on the riverbed. It’s the thing that keeps you on course in strong currents and poor visibility. It’s utterly boring, completely out of sight, and entirely reliable—until it isn’t. The engine failure was a momentary glitch. The real concern, the thing he was checking for, was the integrity of that unseen cable. If that had frayed or snapped, the outage wouldn’t have been a morning’s inconvenience; it would have been a week-long crisis.

That image has stayed with me. In our own work, we spend so much time monitoring the engine—the CPU usage, the memory graphs, the lively hum of active requests. We watch the surface of the water. But the true reliability of a system isn’t in its visible, noisy parts. It’s in the boring, buried, unglamorous infrastructure: the backups no one ever hopes to use, the logging that feels pointless until the moment it isn’t, the redundant paths that lie dormant until the primary one fails.

We are all ferrymen, in a way. The real work isn’t in steering the boat on a calm day. It’s in knowing the condition of the cable you can’t see, the one that runs silently beneath the surface, holding your entire operation together. Its failure is quiet, its function is invisible, and its maintenance is the least exciting task on the list. But it is, without question, the most important.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: