daron aric hagen

'Ferry me across the water, Do, boatman, do,' sang the voice in my mind as I watched Seattle recede on the Bainbridge-bound ferry during the fall of 2007, having spent the morning walking Speight Jenkins, Gary Wedow, Stephen Wadsworth and some key members of Seattle Opera's management staff through the just-completed vocal score of Amelia, the evening-long opera they commissioned me to create for them. Despite—or possibly because of—the fact that Speight and the company had been at every step engaged and resolutely supportive, and the fact that I had never felt so secure in the viability of a piece, I felt during the presentation as though I had a bellyful of spawning salmon. Eager to please the people who had placed so much faith in my work, in/secure enough to strike back out of defensiveness if it was unfairly criticized, it was difficult to remain centered. Afterwards, Speight issued his verdict: 'You have far exceeded my hopes and expectations.' The weight of the next three years of development, revision, orchestration and production settled on my shoulders and it felt good. I imagined that someday I would feel this way standing on the sidewalk in front of my son's school on his first day, watching him walk away and into his own life.

'If you've a penny in your purse I'll ferry you,' a male voice continued in my mind as I suddenly recalled with intense happiness watching the magical village of Bellagio approach from aboard the morning ferry from Ravenna in 2004, the crisp Como air flowing through my beautiful wife's hair, a look of concentrated pleasure on her intelligent face. And then, with a razor-sharp shard of self-reproach, I recalled the same view in 1993, when I was aware but unable to express verbally the effects of a gradually-deepening depression, felt moved by the loveliness, but from afar, as though it was being experienced by someone else.

'I have a penny in my purse. And my eyes are blue...' the song continued in my head, this time in a flirty female voice. The wind had picked up, now that we were nosing out into the bay. Seattle receded as so many times Manhattan had receded aboard the Staten Island Ferry. Sipping my coffee and leaning into the wind, I shivered involuntarily, my thoughts skipping like a stone over water through hundreds of Staten Island round-trips over the years, clutching coffee and a pretzel, trying to summon the courage to continue plugging away as an unknown freelance musician in Manhattan by—through communing with the proud, soaring buildings—triggering a renewal of my determination as a child to one day Live and Make Art there. Like a fist around my heart, then came the recollection of my first ferry trip after the Towers came down.

'So ferry me across the water, Do, boatman, do!' the voice in my head purred as I walked into the passenger cabin, installed myself next to one of the tall windows and took another sip of my coffee.  I realized that the voice was Karen Hale's, for whom I composed a setting in 1983 of Christina Rossetti's poem at the behest of Ned Rorem. Ned's setting briefly superimposed itself on mine in my poetic memory, and evaporated as I recalled the pre-dawn mist at the Cimitero di San Michele on a December morning in 1989, when I was a lone, heartsick insomniac waiting on the Fondamenta Nove for the first vaporetto of the day, Venice asleep, the Aqua Alta a clawing pair of icy anklets.

There have always been so many singers in my mind's ear. Who was that baritone ghosting my setting? Paul Kreider, of course, singing, 'Step into my ferry boat, be they black or blue.' I thought of the dozens of singers I had accompanied over the years in Ned's setting and in my own, of master-classes given to cowed but proud youngsters at colleges and conservatories around the country, some getting my songs just right and some so deliriously wrong-headed as to inspire an eye-popping sense of dislocation. How many of those renditions could I honestly say that I remembered? Not many, but the affection for each singer remained. And certainly the poem is about Charon, but it must be the Acheron, not the Styx, yes? And is the other character Euridice?

Charon as conductor, checking Euridice Eva Marie Saint's ticket in Hitchcock's North by Northwest, Cary Grant reluctantly beginning his adventure up the Hudson concealed in the compartment above her, a movie first seen as a teenager at the Oriental Theater in Milwaukee. —Or Charon as the solitary commuter I recognized but never spoke to every week for a decade as I sped north to teach at Bard on the same train as Hitchcock's lovers. —Or Charon as bartender, serving a drink to The Hero with a Thousand Faces as he begins his Campbellian journey in the cantina scene of Star Wars. —Or as the stewardesses (charming Charons-all) on the planes hurtling towards the Towers in my planned-but-never-to-be-written sequel to Vera of Las Vegas.

'And for the penny in your purse, I'll ferry you,' Charon concluded, and my thoughts finally settled, as the ferry pulled into Bainbridge, upon beginning the Nicaraguan day at Rio Mar, in the liminal zone where the moon greets the sun's rise, the river's fresh water meets the salty Pacific, the horse next door rolls over in the sand a few yards in front of me. I remembered why the poem has always been so important to me. It is, of course, because I identify with Charon, and have steered his craft for him too many times. I thought of the night I sat with James Holmes as he died, surrounded by his pets, Ned in the other room, of waking Ned to tell him that Jim had gone, serving as Charon for my mother, and of my father reaching into my uncle's casket to cover his eyes with coins.