The Port of Dover lurks in the shadow of the chalk and flint. Today, it operates smoothly within systems that permit people and freight to seamlessly bounce between one country and another: the customs union and the single market. There are many questions about what will happen when—and if—the United Kingdom extricates itself from these systems; how goods will flow, how the port will operate. When quizzed, British politicians have frequently invoked notions of new and emergent digital technologies, which will somehow permit business as usual in Brexit’s brave new world. But most of these promises have been shot down by European politicians as “magical thinking.”

Whenever this phrase is invoked by Brussels, I think of the writer Joan Didion. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion describes the rituals she found herself performing following the sudden and unexpected death of her husband. In extreme shock and grief, her thinking steered into an irrational place where, as she writes, “there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible.”

The outcome of the European referendum, with its narrow margin, came as an enormous shock to the British populace. The then–prime minister, David Cameron, resigned directly in its aftermath. The country remains incredibly divided, newly vulnerable and dealing with an irreversible psychic change about its place in the world. Brexit is an excruciatingly complicated proposition—a thicket of regulations and relationships whose complexity seems to surprise everyone involved. I’ve come to Dover to find out how one aspect of world trade, a major port between Britain and the continent, is reacting when its political leaders, like the grieving Joan Didion, seem to be in denial of the reality of the situation.

The next day I sail from Dover to Calais and back again.

There’s a foggy haze in the air on the walk down to the port. At a T-junction on the seafront there is a huge trompe l’oeil mural by the artist Banksy, depicting a worker in dungarees chipping off one of the twelve golden stars from the European flag. The action of his hammer sends fault lines into the wider structure. It’s not subtle.

The lorries are everywhere, barreling across the junction. Richard Christian, the head of policy and communications at the Port of Dover, tells me that extensive traffic-management systems have been implemented to guide heavy vehicles toward the port via two major roads, the A20 and A2, rather than spilling into the town itself. Very occasionally a lorry driver gets lost down a side road and, mis-calibrating the size of the vehicle against Kent’s built environment, crashes into a bridge.

Daniel Leal-Olivas / AFP / Getty

Digital sensors at Dover Port detect anonymous Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals from local vehicles to map the flow of traffic across the highway system, but ultimately are in service to the roadways that cars and lorries drive along. This “innovative roadway system,” as Christian describes it, continues into the port through a series of curved, raised roads that split inbound and outbound traffic to control flow.