Seven Photographs of a Vanishing Harbour

**1.** Crane 14, 06:40. No driver's cabin any more — they took the glass box down in March, sold it to a scrap dealer in Vlaardingen for less than I made in a month when I still climbed into one. What's left is a mast, a jib, and a rotating sensor housing that looks, if you catch it against the sun, faintly like a head deciding where to look next. It moves a container every ninety seconds. I used to move one every four minutes and thought I was fast.

**2.** The pilot boat at 07:15, still crewed, still human, because no insurer will certify an uncrewed vessel to bring a two-hundred-metre containership through the Nieuwe Waterweg in a crosswind. This is the harbour's honest map of what we still trust ourselves for: the last hundred metres, the parts with weather in them.

**3.** Frank's old locker, row C, bay 4, still has his name on tape, eleven months after his contract wasn't renewed. Nobody has claimed it. I don't think anyone's told maintenance it's empty. I photograph it because it's the only object in this terminal that hasn't been optimised, and it shows.

**4.** A drone does the container-stack inventory now, four minutes, every gap and mismatch logged. Before automation this took two men a full shift with clipboards, walking the yard, arguing about which stack was whose. I miss the arguing more than I expected to. The drone doesn't argue. It also doesn't miss.

**5.** Control room, 11:00. Six screens, one operator, coffee going cold. She's twenty-six, degree in logistics, has never once walked the yard she's watching. I asked her if she wanted to see it from ground level sometime. She said she'd seen the drone footage, wasn't that the same thing. I didn't have an answer ready, which surprised me.

**6.** I keep photographing gulls because the automation doesn't route around them the way we did — old habit, an old superstition really, nobody wanted a gull under a spreader. The system has no superstitions. Fewer gulls die now, actually, which is the kind of fact that doesn't fit anywhere in how I feel about any of this.

**7.** Crane 14 again, 22:00, empty terminal, floodlit. I found the maintenance log by accident, looking for something else — the safety-pause parameter that halts the swing cycle for 1.4 seconds whenever load sensors disagree by more than a narrow margin, named in the code comments `HOEK_DELAY`, after Ben Hoek, my old foreman, dead six years, who used to stop, always, for exactly that long, hand raised, before every lift where the numbers didn't quite agree — a habit the yard used to tease him for, costing the terminal maybe four seconds an hour, nobody ever worked out why he did it until an engineer, cross-referencing forty years of incident reports for the automation's risk model, found that Ben's pauses correlated with a near-zero rate of load-shift accidents and wrote the delay into the system without changing its name.

Nobody in the control room knows what `HOEK_DELAY` means. It will still be there when the last of us who do are gone. I photographed the code on the engineer's monitor, which he thought was a strange thing to want a picture of, and I didn't try to explain it to him, because I'm not sure explaining it wouldn't have made it smaller.

I didn't take an eighth photograph. Some things you stop documenting once you understand you were never going to lose them, not really, just watch them change address.

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