Lifeline Ferries: Existential dimensions of ‘essential’ mobility

Abstract

Grounded in an analysis of islanders’ ferry mobility between the Isle of Coll and mainland Scotland during the Covid-19 pandemic, this article argues for increased anthropological engagement with the existential dimension of mechanised mobilities. The pandemic restrictions on mobility rested upon the distinction between socio-economically framed ‘essential’ and existentially framed ‘non-essential travel’. However, islanders’ agentive navigation of restrictions gave rise to a locally specific regime of im/mobility that emphasised the existential dimension of those mobilities that policymakers understood as a ‘lifeline’ in a socio-economic sense. To show this, the article applies the concept of existential mobility, developed by Hage, to mechanised mobilities, which remain understudied in anthropology. It argues that thus attending to their existential dimension is crucial to overcome a remaining sedentarist bias in anthropological thinking on mobility, and to avoid unintentionally reproducing governing categories like ‘essential’ and ‘non-essential’ in our analyses.

Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork on the Isle of Coll in Scotland, this article traces islanders’ agentive navigation of Covid-19 restrictions on ferry mobility. At the core of the Scottish government’s response to the pandemic, restrictions on mobility rested upon the distinction between ‘essential’ and ‘non-essential travel’. The former related to the socio-economic sphere (Salazar, 2021a) and included travel to work, medical appointments, grocery shops, and a limited amount of outdoor exercise. These mobilities were maintained over the latter, which revolved around existential mobility – the sense of movement that is integral to people’s wellbeing (Hage, 2005; Salazar, 2021a: 22). Tracing three islanders’ ferry mobility ethnographically, I show how the lines between essential and existential blurred. Islanders’ mobility practices gave rise to a locally specific regime of im/mobility that emphasised the existential dimension of those mobilities that policymakers understood as a ‘lifeline’ in a socio-economic sense.

Building on this ethnography, I put forward an argument for increased anthropological engagement with the existential dimension of mechanised mobilities. With a few notable exceptions discussing automobility (Dawson, 2017; Laviolette and Argounova-Low, 2021) and aquamobility (Roseman, 2019, 2020), mechanised mobilities have remained on the sidelines of the anthropological discourse on mobility. This discourse grew from a critique of sedentarist thinking (Gupta and Ferguson, 1992), putting forward a sense of the world in constant flux. Among the literature that followed, a wealth of studies explores the movement of people, focusing especially on international migration (see Brettell, 2018) and forms of non-mechanised mobilities such as walking (Coates, 2017; Ingold and Vergunst, 2008) or running (Kingsbury, 2019; Salazar, 2020). Overlooking experiences of mechanised mobilities, however, risks reproducing the sedentarist bias scholars have sought to overcome. It runs the danger of dismissing mobility as ‘dead time’ (Cresswell, 2021: 53) and focusing only on what happens where mobilities drop people off. Grounded in my analysis of ‘lifeline’ ferries, I unpack the existential dimension of mechanised mobility to move past this bias. Doing so broadens the concept of existential mobility, applying it not as has been previously done to migration (Hage, 2005; Jackson, 2013), social mobility (Hage, 2009), or non-mechanised mobility such as walking and running during the pandemic (Salazar, 2021a), but to forms of mechanised mobility such as ferry mobility. I show that this is crucial if we are to avoid unintentionally reproducing governing categories like ‘essential’ and ‘non-essential’ in our analyses.

The ethnography presented here rests on the fieldwork I conducted as part of my PhD project on the impacts of the pandemic on island communities in Scotland. I lived on Coll from August 2020 to August 2021, employing participant observation in public spaces and while working in the community centre and the island shop, as well as conducting informal interviews with islanders. As the research took place under Covid restrictions and social interactions were limited, it built on informal networks and relationships with islanders that I had established when living on the island prior to starting my PhD. This longer-term engagement with islanders prompted my interest in the existential dimension of ferry mobility. Han (2011: 26) observes that how anthropologists come to understand the dynamics in people’s lives ‘depends in large measure on our own movement in time with those with whom we work’. Working with islanders both before and during the pandemic, with its shifting restrictions, similarly drew my attention to the shifting existential roles that ferry mobility played in people’s lives. Although the socio-economic precarity of ferry mobility remained constant, it was these existential shifts that informed people’s experiences of it. Before I turn to three ethnographic cases to show this, though, I will first situate the theoretical contribution of this article and start to disentangle the term ‘lifeline’.

Im/mobility and the pandemic

Covid-19 served as a reminder that the spread of infectious diseases is inextricably entwined with mobilities (Lavau, 2014), and viruses thrive in the contemporary mobile world (Cresswell, 2021). From the 14th-century plague to the Covid-19 pandemic, attempts to separate out the potentially contagious and limit mobilities have been among the first responses to disease outbreaks (Cresswell, 2021; Tognotti, 2013). Mobility has also been symbolically understood as a disease within a sedentarist paradigm (Cresswell, 2006, 2021). This view resonated with the framing of the mobility of migrant ‘others’ as a danger of contagion and the implementation of measures to contain them during the Covid pandemic (Martin and Bergmann, 2021). An analysis of pandemic im/mobilities thus draws to the fore the entwinement of the biological, the social, the economic and the political in health crises (Fuentes, 2020).

Studies of pandemic mobilities further highlight the need to consider mobility in relation to immobility (Adey, 2006; Salazar and Smart, 2011). In Britain, for example, those whom the government classified as ‘keyworkers’ – medical staff, people working in grocery stores and for delivery services – kept moving and thus made possible others’ relative immobility (Burns et al., 2021). By immobility, I do not mean stasis (see Salazar, 2021b). Rather, considering mobilities in relation to one another shows how patterns of concentration of mobility create zones of (relative) disconnection and social exclusion just as much as they create zones of connection and centrality (Sheller and Urry, 2006: 210). It draws out that not everyone is equally at liberty to move or has equal amounts of control over their mobilities (Salazar and Glick Schiller, 2014). At the same time, mobility does not always equal freedom and immobility does not necessarily mean being stuck. In the context of Covid-19, for instance, immobility could be experienced as a privilege – as safety from contagion – and mobility could be precarious (Dobusch and Kreissl, 2020). However, scholars have also drawn attention to the suffering that involuntary immobility during the pandemic has caused for aspiring migrants and asylum-seekers and for those unable to work from home (Martin and Bergmann, 2021) and have discussed the ‘stuckedness’ (see next section) that can come with staying at home (Zuev and Hannam, 2021).

This article is not primarily about the impacts of the pandemic but understands the pandemic as shedding light on a crisis as well as on ordinary practices (Jensen, 2021: 67). It is lens through which I seek to understand im/mobility practices. The distinction between those mobilities classified as ‘essential’ and prioritised over those understood as ‘non-essential’, for example, reflects the values attributed to different kinds of mobilities in a society more generally (Salazar, 2021a). Thus, I will use my discussion of the existential dimension of ferry mobility during Covid-19 to point to the existential values of mechanised mobilities more broadly.

The existential dimension of mechanised mobilities

In this section, I use the notion of existential mobility to draw attention to the often neglected temporal dimension of im/mobility (Amit and Salazar, 2020; Jefferson et al., 2019; Zuev and Hannam, 2021) and to emphasise agency. Existential mobility – the sense that life is going somewhere – is fundamental to wellbeing (Hage, 2005: 471). Developing this concept in his work with Lebanese migrants, Hage (2005: 470) argues that when people feel they are not moving on in their lives as much as they would wish, they engage in physical movement to a place that offers ‘a better launching pad for … [their] existential selves’. The existential mobility they seek has its flipside in the existential immobility of ‘stuckedness’, as Hage calls it. Hage (2009: 104) describes this in work with the white Australian middle class, finding that the observation of others’ social mobility leads people to experience stuckedness as a form of mobility envy. In both cases, existential im/mobility is tied to futures and therefore temporal mobility that is variously entwined with physical and social mobility.

In research on pandemic regimes of mobility in Belgium, Salazar (2021a) proposes a less metaphorical use of the concept. He finds that especially active mobility – walking, cycling, running – provided people with a sense of movement amidst long stretches of time spent at home. As in Hage’s case, the temporal dimension matters, when active physical movement sets in motion the sticky temporalities of waiting out the pandemic. The term ‘active’ is important, too, as existential mobility entwines with agency. During the pandemic, it contrasts with a more passive waiting out, and for the migrants it afforded a higher state of agency (Hage, 2005: 472). The emphasis on temporality and agency thus enables us to understand experiences of existential mobility both while being on the move and while staying relatively immobile.

While the term ‘existential mobility’ has been used in relation to migration (Hage, 2005; Jackson, 2013), social mobility (Hage, 2009), and non-mechanised mobility (Salazar, 2021a), I am concerned with it came to bear in the context of ferry mobility. I also attend to experiences of mechanised forms of mobility that have received little anthropological attention (see Dawson, 2017; Roseman, 2019, 2020). Many of these mobilities were dismissed as ‘dead time’ (Cresswell, 2021: 53) prior to the mobilities turn, with a sedentarist metaphysics framing their purpose as getting people from one place of action to another. This way of thinking is criticised by Ingold (2011: 150), who distinguishes such a top-down logic of transport from experiences of wayfaring. Following the logic of transport, mobility is understood spatially as the displacement of an entity from a point A to a point B. The logic operates on the macro-level and is reinforced by an emphasis on the socio-economic importance of connecting places that predominates in studies on mechanised mobilities, such as the Scottish ferries (Begg, 1996; Currie and Falconer, 2014; Schiffling, 2015), and underlies the governing category of essential travel. Wayfaring, however, draws attention to experiences of mobility and embeds movement within worlds and lives, rather than isolating and abstracting a displacement from point A to point B. It has been discussed in relation to non-mechanised mobility and migration (Schapendonk, 2018).

In considering the existential dimension of a form of mobility that is commonly understood as transport, I seek to extend the move towards embedding mobility within lives to mechanised mobilities, and reinforce the critique of the logic of transport. Such an anthropological perspective on the existential dimension of mechanised mobility contributes another layer to understanding mobilities like ferry mobility, that are almost exclusively discussed as transport in other disciplines and analysed with a socio-economic focus (Begg, 1996; Currie and Falconer, 2014; Schiffling, 2015). This perspective highlights how, both on a wider and a personal level, ‘[t]he fine line between essential and existential mobility is not always that clear (and is often deliberately left fuzzy)’ (Salazar, 2021a: 23) and in doing so, avoids reproducing this governing distinction unintentionally in our analyses.

Lifeline ferry mobility in Scotland

My ethnography zooms in on one island and its ferry mobility. The Isle of Coll is located on the west coast of Scotland and has about 200 inhabitants. Infrastructure and services on the island are limited, and the ferry gives islanders access to specialist medical appointments, dental care, banks, schools and universities, and shops. The Scottish government understands such ferry services as a ‘lifeline’ (Transport Scotland, 2012). It subsidises all lifeline ferries that link Scotland’s 93 inhabited islands to the mainland. A definition for ‘lifeline’ is given in the Ferries Plan 2013–2022 (Transport Scotland, 2012), which guided legislation and policy relating to Scotland’s ferries at the time of my fieldwork: A lifeline service is ‘required in order for a community to be viable’ (Transport Scotland, 2012: 65). There is no explicit discussion of what viability entails but the introduction to the document places the emphasis on the socio-economic sphere, setting out a commitment to delivering ‘sustainable ferry services to our communities, stimulating social and economic growth across Scotland’ (Transport Scotland, 2012: 1). This is seen as especially important in the Highlands and Islands, an area that has long been considered in need of economic development (see McCollough, 2018). This understanding of ‘lifeline’ aligns with the definition of ‘essential’ travel during the pandemic. The ferry company Caledonian MacBrayne (Calmac) that operates ferry services in the region, made this clear in the announcement they published in March 2020, stating that ‘[a]ll islands will receive a regular lifeline service ensuring essential goods and services are delivered’ (Calmac, 2020).

Policymakers’ understanding of the term ‘lifeline’ thus resonates with a wider focus on the socio-economic dimension of mechanised mobilities that I criticised above. The ethnography presented in the following sections shows, though, that islanders’ lived experience foregrounded the existential dimension of ferry mobility, giving ‘lifeline ferries’ another layer of meaning.

‘Essential’ mobility and existential immobility

The first ethnographic account of ferry mobility during the pandemic draws out its precarity – the insecure connection it provides and the costs islanders face to travel – and shows how it can give rise to a sense of existential immobility. I arrived at the community centre on Coll on a sunny morning in June 2021. Restrictions on ‘non-essential’ travel had been lifted at end of April, and the island was receiving a steady stream of visitors. I had started working in the community centre and the adjoining bunkhouse (hostel). When I entered the office on that day in June, my co-worker Iris ¹ was vibrating with nervous energy, swivelling round on the office chair. Iris was in her late fifties, with chin-length grey hair; she wore shorts and a button-down shirt, and a bright cotton mask covered her face. As I put my bag down on another chair, she told me that she was very anxious. She had just been given an appointment on the mainland to get her second Covid-19 vaccine. The news had almost made her cry. She had had to get her vaccines on the mainland, because an allergic reaction in the past meant the doctor on Coll felt it would be safer for her to be close to emergency services.

As we got ready for work, switching on the slow computers to check the even slower booking system, she told me how scared she had felt going to her first appointment. She had travelled during the winter lockdown, when all but ‘essential’ mobilities between Coll and the mainland had been banned. There had been no confirmed cases of Covid-19 on Coll at the time but high numbers of infections on the mainland. Travelling meant being surrounded by more people than on Coll, even if she sat outside on the ferry. Due to the ferry timetable, she also had to stay overnight on the mainland.

People on Coll cannot access all the services and infrastructure they need on the island, which is a growing issue in the context of service withdrawal and depopulation (Wilson and Copus, 2018). Medical care is one example of this. Although the island has a doctor’s surgery, this provides a limited amount of care, forcing islanders to attend appointments on the mainland. In the absence of Covid-19 cases on Coll at the time, the need for and desire to attend the appointment clashed with Iris’s sense of safety. What is more, having only recently moved to the island after months of being on hold mid-move due to the pandemic, being forced to return to the mainland for the appointment was yet another disruption of Iris’s attempts to build a life on Coll. The journey thus produced a sense of existential immobility, which, as Jefferson et al. (2019: 6) argue, is something that is ‘more temporal than spatial’.

Iris’s experience of existential immobility was connected to a loss of agency over her mobility, not just in relation to whether she travelled but also to the pacing of ferry mobility. Emphasising temporality and agency, Amit and Salazar (2020: 2) understand pacing as ‘the rate at which people may seek to enact or deploy their movements, as well as the conditions – socio-economic, political, financial, relational or aspirational – under which these moves are being marshalled, represented and contested’. Different forms of mobility allow for different means of pacing. The ferry operates on a timetable set by the company Calmac. This timetable – which can shift with disruptions due to technical issues and weather conditions – is structured by economic considerations and labour regulations. It determines when islanders travel and how long they stay on the mainland. Given that most ferries to the mainland arrive at about 3 p.m. and leave for Coll the following morning at 7 a.m., one night’s stay is often not enough for an appointment. Iris perceived the hotel stay and the contact with people on the ferry as a risk of contagion. This risk was greater for islanders than for mainlanders, who could walk or cycle to an appointment. Iris’s experience of existential immobility was thus directly informed by the particular experience of ferry travel.

Iris’s dependence on the ferry highlights that ferry mobility can be understood as a kind of precarious mobility in Roseman’s sense, that is, a case in which:

individuals or groups face non-standardized, irregular, or insecure access to specific forms of essential mobility in relation to a broader societal context in which such mobilities are otherwise provided on the basis of relatively standardized, regularized, and secure conditions of access. (Roseman, 2020: 87)

The use of the term ‘essential’ in Roseman’s quote is striking, resonating with a wider focus on the socio-economic dimension of mobilities in Scotland. People living in rural Scotland often find their mobility restricted. Public transport is limited, transport takes up a bigger proportion of household spending in rural Scotland than it does in urban areas of the UK, fuel poverty is higher, and journeys to access, for instance, a shop or a doctor’s surgery, are comparatively longer (Davis et al., 2021: 17). The cost of ferry travel adds to this for islanders, who may also face higher prices for groceries and goods due to freight and delivery costs (Davis et al., 2021: 13), and disruptions in sailings can upend the mobility of people and goods. The pandemic entrenched these asymmetries. exacerbating pre-existing vulnerabilities (Team and Manderson, 2020). And, as argued by Dobusch and Kreissl (2020), it also showed that being forced to be more mobile than some urban dwellers in order to access services exposed islanders to a greater risk of contagion during the pandemic.

Iris’s story highlights the precarity of ferry mobility perceived through her experience of existential immobility, and it draws out the dynamic existential roles that mechanised mobilities can play in people’s lives. It shows that access to ferry mobility is unequal, and the connection to the mainland that ferries provide is limited and liable to disruption. In a health crisis, this exacerbated the uncertain access to medical care for islanders, and the risk of contagion they were exposed to when forced to travel on the ferry. Iris perceived this precarity through an experience of existential immobility that entailed temporal stuckedness and a loss of agency. It was this existential dimension that mattered most to her. Notably, this experience contrasted with previous experiences of existential mobility while travelling on the ferry. In the years leading up to the pandemic, she had been feeling stuck in her everyday life on the mainland. As she prepared to move to the island, every ferry journey brought her closer to that goal, giving her a sense of possible futures and agency. This highlights the dynamics of the existential dimension of ferry mobility in someone’s life in the face of persistent socio-economic precarity, showing what focusing exclusively on the socio-economic level might miss.

Navigating restrictions for existential mobility

Others experienced ferry mobility differently, and their agentive navigation of restrictions gave rise to feelings of existential mobility during the pandemic. On a Saturday in February 2021, I sat with Lauren, her husband Matt, and their son Lewis in the Coll Hotel at one of the high tables. Twice a week, the hotel opened for a few hours to give people on Coll a heated indoor space to socialise while keeping the mandated 6-foot distance from each other. Scotland had been in another lockdown since just after Christmas and socialising, as well as mobilities between the mainland and the island, were restricted. Lauren was updating me on the chaos of cancelled ferries in the last two weeks. Islanders had missed medical appointments on the mainland, the nurse who had been scheduled to come over had not arrived, and the shop had missed its weekly delivery of fresh groceries. To improve the service, Calmac was sending their bigger vessel, the MV Hebrides, to Coll in the hope that it would cope better with the wind speed.

Lauren was tracking the vessel closely because she had a medical appointment on the mainland in Glasgow the following week. Unlike Iris, though, Lauren was excited. She pulled up a photo of herself and her son sitting next to a golden bell. Her grandfather had been a ferry captain, and the bell of that ship was on the MV Hebrides as a reminder of its older namesake. Lauren loved the ferries, but especially the one she was going to take the next day. Her story of ferry mobility is very similar to Iris’s and yet completely different. Having commuted every weekend between Coll and Glasgow before moving to the island permanently, both the drive to the city and the ferry journey itself were familiar routes to her. She told me that it was one of the most beautiful journeys in the world, and she loved being on the ferry. Moreover, the particular ferry she would travel on gave her a sense of connection to her family history and the region. She saw the route the ferries took as her roots, tying her to the islands and to the boats that sail between them. Thinking aloud about her mainland trip, Lauren told me that she would drive to Glasgow and stay with her friend, which would give her the chance to help her around the house and catch up. Pondering what she would do with all that time on her hands, she mused that she would just have to take her Gaelic books and focus on learning the language. Then, looking the very opposite of worried, she reflected that the weather was so bad and the ferries so unreliable, that she could get stuck in Glasgow for much longer than planned.

Lauren’s experience underlines the precarity of ferry mobility, which did not just stem from the weather-based disruptions but, in her opinion, was linked to islanders being disadvantaged during the pandemic. She felt that people on the mainland could get their cars fixed, go to the hairdressers, or go shopping, while islanders could not. Talking about the first few weeks of being in a lockdown in 2020, she reflected that ‘if you were on the mainland, you had more excuses to leave your house than we did […] The notion of actually just – as much as I hate shopping – being able to do shopping, just as an excuse to leave your house. It was so appealing!’ Although the disadvantage expressed here encompasses the inequalities and asymmetries in accessing services like medical care or shops and the precarity of being cut off, Lauren expressed primarily a desire for existential mobility. The existential immobility of being stuck at home that she talked about was relative to what she perceived people on the mainland could do (see Hage, 2009).

Through the agentive navigation of the restrictions, Lauren changed her experience of the ferry journey into one of existential mobility. She used the medical appointment as a chance to see her friend in Glasgow, to do things people on the mainland had been doing, and to pursue her hobby of learning Gaelic. This shows that an ‘essential’ reason to travel allowed islanders to justify their ferry mobility during the pandemic, accommodating a variety of activities that were important to them existentially on these journeys. And this alleviated a sense of immobility in comparison to the mainland. Strategically including different activities on a journey also reduced the financial burden of travel, because the NHS reimbursed expenses arising from attending medical appointments on the mainland. This increased islanders’ sense of being able to access opportunities that are otherwise prohibitively expensive.

This sense of agency was key to Lauren’s experience of existential mobility – and so were the means of travel. The ferry was not just a lifeline connecting her to medical infrastructure but also a link to her sense of family and belonging. The vessel she would travel on was significant to her, showing that mechanised mobilities offer specific experiences rather than sharing generic characteristics of non-places (Augé, 1995). Though entwined with spatial mobility, existential mobility was primarily temporal and not just oriented towards futures. It returned Lauren to a more ordinary past of commuting between Coll and the mainland and, on a different level, to her family’s historical connection to the region. Being on the ferry and on the mainland was also an opportunity for Lauren to spend time away from the obligations of work, childcare and the household. She explained that the two-and-a-half hours on the ferry gave her time to herself: ‘I can sit by myself […] and watch a film or do a hobby or something that I want to do.’ Lauren’s sense of existential mobility highlighted that ‘a central dimension of new experiences and adventure associated with travel is the ability to leave the routine pacing of mundane everyday life behind’ (Olwig, 2020: 186). The slow pacing and frequent disruptions of ferry mobility were key to that, as she used them to spend more time doing what she wanted to do. Importantly, while Lauren explained that she had always enjoyed commuting for that reason, there were times in summer 2019 when I recall her framing ferry mobility as a chore, especially after a few months of frequent medical travel, and as something that felt like the opposite of existential mobility. As with Iris’s experiences, this shows that the existential meaning of ferry mobility is in flux and involves multiple temporalities.

Like Iris’s story, Lauren’s shows that pandemic restrictions on mobilities reinforced differential regimes of ferry mobility. However, her agentive navigation of restrictions allowed her to regain a sense of control over the pacing of ferry mobility, and that shifted the temporalities of life under lockdown and gave her the chance to spend her time differently. Ferry mobility can be integral to a sense of existential immobility – being stuck on the move as Iris described – and give rise to such experiences of existential mobility. These dynamics shift into focus only when moving beyond a socio-economic framing of mechanised mobilities, considering them as existentially embedded in people’s lives, as forms of wayfaring (Ingold, 2011: 150). They connect ferry mobility to a wide range of other aspects in people’s lives – be that safety and connection, recreation or freedom. Tracing this shows what a socio-economic focus on mechanised mobilities misses: even if the ferry were not a socio-economic lifeline – if, for instance, digitalisation gave islanders access to all the services and infrastructures they need on Coll – it might well remain a lifeline in an existential sense.

Island regimes of im/mobility

The third ethnographic account expands on how the existential dimension of essential ferry mobility was emphasised in the local regime of im/mobility that emerged on Coll. In March 2021, I ran into Alice in the village, coming down a grassy track between rows of houses, holding on to her bouncy dog. Smiling, she suggested we walk to the pier together to watch the ferry arrive. We caught up on news as we made our way down the incline towards the pier, then followed Alice’s dog across the waiting area to join Catherine, who was waiting for the post. Scratching the dog’s ears, Catherine announced that she was going to the mainland on Saturday to stay with family for a week. She spoke in a firm voice, as if challenging us to tell her she could not. ‘Good for you’, Alice told her instead. Catherine explained that she just had to get away for a while, she had a bad case of ‘island fever’. Again, Alice nodded, agreeing that people on the mainland saw each other all the time. They went shopping all the time, too. Meanwhile, we, the islanders, were cut off. When living on Coll, they seemed to imply, we had a right not to feel stuck and to be able to access the same opportunities as people on the mainland. Catherine added, as if only thinking of it just then, that if anyone asked, she would argue that she was travelling to do ‘essential shopping’.

Like Lauren, Alice and Catherine expressed a sense of existential immobility compared to people on the mainland, who seemed to be returning to their pre-pandemic lives. Many islanders argued that their travel – which in Catherine’s case was primarily motivated by the existential need to escape feeling stuck – was ‘essential for island life’, collapsing the distinction between ‘essential’ and ‘non-essential’. While precarious, the limited services and infrastructure on Coll could serve as a means of justifying existentially motivated journeys, especially the argument that there was always ‘essential’ shopping that islanders could not do on Coll.

Islanders related their existential take on what was ‘essential’ to an understanding of a lifeline ferry service that gives islanders equal access to opportunities. Many argued that the existential immobility islanders experienced contradicted policies like the National Islands Plan, which was introduced in 2019. Its transport section argues that a fair ‘transport system is needed so that island communities are put on an equal footing with people on the Scottish mainland, and in order for transport to fully allow the fulfilment of basic human rights’ (Scottish Government, 2019: 29). This phrase is immediately followed by a mention of ‘sustainable tourism’ and ‘economic development’ (Scottish Government, 2019: 30). While the Scottish government kept their emphasis on the socio-economic importance of lifeline ferries, islanders appealed to the note on equality and used it to claim a right to existential mobility.

Islanders’ mobility practices thus led to the emergence of a local regime of im/mobility that emphasised the existential dimension of ferry mobility. This was possible because there is no police presence on Coll, and, unlike on other islands, no one was at the pier checking people’s reasons to travel. The regime of im/mobility was highly controversial though, as is apparent when thinking back to Iris, for whom ferry mobility was entwined with existential immobility. The way Catherine stated her travel plans hints at the conflicts and tensions surrounding ferry mobility. In the small community, everyone knew who boarded the ferry and was aware that others paid attention to their movements.

Debates about whose mobility was justified were further complicated by the question of who was considered an islander. Waiting with Catherine and Anne at the ferry pier, we watched cars disembark. Looking at them in surprise, Anne commented, ‘Are they trying to sink the island?’ She pointed out that all those people were travelling, even though some of them should not be coming to Coll at all. While Alice argued that Catherine being an islander meant she had the right to the same opportunities as people on the mainland, she did not apply this to some of the people we saw arrive. This moment might resonate with a general suspicion towards (mobile) others as possible carriers of the virus (Cresswell, 2021; Lavau, 2014), but I think that misses a key point. Everyday life on Coll relies on extensive mobilities. In the summer months, these include second-home owners and tourists travelling to the island. Some second-home owners have been coming to the island for years if not generations, perhaps have even lived there permanently for a while and have friends and family on Coll. In practice, this means who is considered an islander is blurry (Kohn, 2002). This added another layer of controversy and tension when it came to deciding whose mobility was ‘essential to island life’ – and for whom.

Policymakers largely overlooked these debates. From the start of the first lockdown in 2020, the Scottish government was concerned with an influx of people travelling to rural and island areas with limited infrastructure (see Scottish Government, 2020a). As Martin and Bergmann (2021) argue, such new mobility patterns emerged as people sought to protect themselves from the virus, moving to less crowded areas. The public and political discourse in Scotland remained focused on mobilities to the islands – in line with a focus on the economic role of tourism – neglecting that islanders, especially those living in small places such as Coll, continued to move between island and mainland. Islands were treated as separate and understood as both more vulnerable to the pandemic, due to a lack of infrastructure, and safer from it. A lower level of restrictions applied to islands linked to the mainland only by ferry or plane (Scottish Government, 2020b), reinforcing the idea of the ferry as a portal to the islands (Vannini, 2012: 194). The limited ferry connection to the islands thus lent policymakers a greater sense of control over the mobility of the virus (Lavau, 2014), which they attempted to preserve when restrictions eased by encouraging testing before travelling to the islands (Scottish Government, 2021).

It was in the gaps of the misfit between such policy making and islanders’ continuing need to travel that islanders’ agentive navigation of restrictions took place. Emphasising existential mobility rather than the lifeline ferries’ socio-economic role, and islanders rather than tourists, the localised regime that emerged on Coll was a response to the differential regime of im/mobility that the pandemic restrictions had highlighted. It grew from the asymmetries between island and mainland, taking the precarity of being at a distance from necessary services as grounds to claiming islanders’ rights to existential mobility. In navigating restrictions – using ‘essential’ reasons to justify existentially motivated journeys – islanders regained a sense of agency over their mobilities and alleviated experiences of immobility by comparison. Once again, existential immobility was more temporal than spatial, springing from a desire to return to ‘pre-pandemic’ lives as mainlanders were perceived to have done. As in Lauren’s case, the sense of mobility sought was both a return to ‘normal’ and a movement towards future possibilities. While the ferry was key to experiencing existential mobility in this context, it was the opposite for other islanders, for whom a lack of agency over its pacing and an increased infection risk produced a sense of existential immobility. This made the localised regime of ferry im/mobility highly controversial – even more so as people’s sense of when ferry mobility was existential was constantly in flux – in a way that cannot be grasped by an analysis of ferry mobility’s socio-economic role.

Conclusion

This article traced islanders’ agentive navigation of Covid-19 restrictions on ferry mobility, drawing out the existential dimensions of a mechanised form of mobility. I extended Hage’s (2005) notion of existential mobility to mechanised mobilities to foreground agency and the temporal dimension of im/mobility. Following Iris revealed that a lack of agency over the pacing of ferry mobility can give rise to experiences of existential immobility – a form of temporal stuckedness (Jefferson et al., 2019) – while on the move. Though it stems from the precarity of ferry mobility, this experience can persist even if ferries fulfil their socio-economic purpose of connection. Following Lauren and Catherine, I showed that ferry mobility can give rise to a sense of existential mobility, too. This relied on islanders’ agentive navigation of restrictions and regimes of im/mobility – the use of ‘essential’ reasons to pursue existential mobility and the accommodation of different activities on journeys that were reimbursed. It alleviated a perception that mainlanders were ‘moving better’ (Hage, 2009). The localised regime of im/mobility that emerged in the gaps between policy making focusing on socio-economically important tourist mobilities to the islands and islanders’ continuing need to travel emphasised existential mobility, giving the term ‘lifeline’ a primarily existential meaning.

Grounded in the analysis of lifeline ferries, this article thus underlines the need for more anthropological engagement with the existential dimension of mechanised mobilities. Like other mechanised forms of mobility, ferry mobility operates based on the logic of transport (Ingold, 2011), which is emphasised when policymakers and academics consider primarily its socio-economic importance (Currie and Falconer, 2014; Schiffling, 2015; Transport Scotland, 2012). While this socio-economic dimension is important to discussing the precarity of mechanised mobilities, their existential dimension illuminates the roles they take on in people’s lives. I showed that existential mobility can be a driver of mechanised mobilities, that a lack of agency over their pacing can lead to a sense of existential immobility, and that existential mobility can become a means of agentively navigating differential regimes of im/mobility. Existential mobility connected to a wide range of other aspects in all three ethnographic cases – such as safety, connection and family, recreation and freedom – firmly embedding ferry mobility in people’s lives. These roles and experiences shift constantly. When I first met the women I wrote about in this article in summer 2019, restrictions on mobility such as were imposed during the pandemic were impossible to imagine. Most of them travelled to the mainland frequently – at times experiencing ferry mobility as existential and at times as part of a routine that made them feel existentially stuck. Experiences of travel also shifted during the pandemic, depending, for instance, on how safe islanders felt on Coll compared to the mainland. These shifts highlight the multiple temporalities in people’s lives and show that the existential dimension of mobility is highly dynamic.

Tracing these shifting existential meanings of mechanised mobilities that are discussed as socio-economically framed transport in other disciplines is key to avoid reproducing governing distinctions between ‘essential’ and ‘non-essential’ travel in our analyses. It is a step towards overcoming a persistent sedentarist bias in anthropological thinking on mobility that Cresswell (2021) argues mobility studies in other disciplines are addressing by engaging with the ‘dead time’ of getting from place to place. This seems especially important in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Amidst many complaints about the return of commuting and its environmental impact, there is a small debate in British media on missing commuting when working from home (Beddington, 2023; Fowler, 2020). Revaluing mechanised mobilities, including ferries, in this context (Cresswell, 2021) entails taking seriously their existential dimension.