I said to the engineer, “Isn’t this ferry some kind of old Navy craft?” “An LSM they brought out of the Pacific after the war and put a new superstructure on. She’s been making this crossing since nineteen forty-eight, but she’s in her last month. They got a new, specially designed boat just about ready.” When John Steinbeck began his 1960 tour of the United States that he describes in Travels with Charley, he crossed Long Island Sound on this very boat and worried about the nuclear submarines of an earlier day. Yet a couple of decades later, that great flash of light still had not shown
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