Moby-Duck (2 page)

The next thing you know, it's the middle of the night and you're on the outer decks of a post-Panamax freighter due south of the Aleutian island where, in 1741, shipwrecked, Vitus Bering perished from scurvy and hunger. The winds are gale force. The water is deep and black, and so is the sky. It's snowing. The decks are slick. Your ears ache, your fingers are numb. Solitary, nocturnal circumambulations of the outer decks by supernumerary passengers are strictly forbidden, for good reason. Fall overboard and no one would miss you. You'd inhale the ocean and go down, alone. Nevertheless, there you are, not a goner yet, gazing up at the shipping containers stacked six-high overhead, and from them cataracts of snowmelt and rain are spattering on your head. There you are, listening to the stacked containers strain against their lashings, creaking and groaning and cataracting with every roll, and with every roll you are wondering what in the name of Neptune it would take to make stacks of steel—or for that matter aluminum—containers fall. Or you're learning how to tie a bowline knot and say thank you in both Inuktitut and Cantonese.

Or you're spending three days and nights in a shabby hotel room in Pusan, South Korea, waiting for your ship to come in, and you're wondering what you could possibly have been thinking when you embarked on this harebrained journey, this wild duckie chase, and you're drinking Scotch, and looking sentimentally at photos of your wife and son on your laptop, your wife and son who, on the other side of the planet, on the far side of the international date line, are doing and feeling and drinking God knows what. Probably not Scotch. And you're remembering the scene near the end of
Moby-Dick
when Starbuck, family man, first officer of the
Pequod
, tries in vain to convince mad Ahab to abandon his doomed hunt. “Away with me!” Starbuck pleads, “let us fly these deadly waters! let us home!”

And you're dreaming nostalgically of your former life of chalkboards and Emily Dickinson and parent-teacher conferences, and wishing you could go back to it, wishing you'd never contacted the heavyset Dr. E., or learned of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or met the Ahab of plastic hunters, or the heartsick conservationist or the foulmouthed beachcomber or the blind oceanographer, any of them. You're wishing you'd never given Big Poppa the chance to write about Luck Duck, because if you hadn't you'd never have heard the fable of the rubber ducks lost at sea. You'd still be teaching
Moby-Dick
to American teenagers. But that's the thing about strong currents: there's no swimming against them.

 

 

The next thing you know years have passed, and you're still adrift, still waiting to see where the questions take you. At least that's what happens if you're a nearsighted, school-teaching, would-be archaeologist of the ordinary, with an indulgent, long-suffering wife and a juvenile imagination, and you receive in the mail a manila envelope, and inside this envelope you find a dozen back issues of a cheaply produced newsletter, and in one of those newsletters you discover a wonderful map—if, in other words, you're me.

—Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick

We know where the spill occurred: 44.7°N, 178.1°E, south of the Aleutians, near the international date line, in the stormy latitudes renowned in the age of sail as the Graveyard of the Pacific, just north of what oceanographers, who are, on the whole, less poetic than mariners of the age of sail, call the subarctic front. We know the date—January 10, 1992—but not the hour.

For years the identity of the ship was a well-kept secret, but by consulting old shipping schedules published in the
Journal of Commerce
and preserved on scratched spools of microfiche in a library basement, I, by process of elimination, solved this particular riddle: the ship was the Evergreen
Ever Laurel,
owned by a Greek company called Technomar Shipping and operated by the Taiwanese Evergreen Marine Corporation, whose fir-green containers, with the company's curiously sylvan name emblazoned across them in white block letters, can be seen around harbors all over the world. No spools of microfiche have preserved the identities of the officers and crew, however, let alone their memories of what happened that stormy day or night, and if the logbook from the voyage still exists, it has been secreted away to some corporate archive, consigned, for all intents and purposes, to oblivion.

We know that the ship departed Hong Kong on January 6, that it arrived in the Port of Tacoma on January 16, a day behind schedule, and that the likely cause for this delay was rough weather. How rough exactly remains unclear. Although it did so on other days, on January 10, the
Ever Laurel
did not fax a weather report to the National Weather Service in Washington, D.C., but the following morning a ship in its vicinity did, describing hurricane-force winds and waves thirty-six feet high. If the
Ever Laurel
had encountered similarly tempestuous conditions, we can imagine, if only vaguely, what might have transpired: despite its grandeur, rocked by waves as tall as brownstones, the colossal vessel—a floating warehouse weighing 28,904 deadweight tons and powered by a diesel engine the size of a barn—would have rolled and pitched and yawed about like a toy in a Jacuzzi.

At some point, on a steep roll, two columns of containers stacked six high above deck snapped loose from their steel lashings and tumbled overboard. We can safely assume that the subsequent splash was terrific, like the splash a train would make were you to drive it off a seaside cliff. We know that each of the twelve containers measured eight feet wide and either twenty or forty feet long, and that at least one of them—perhaps when it careened into another container, perhaps when it struck the ship's rails—burst or buckled open as it fell.

We know that as the water gushed in and the container sank, dozens of cardboard boxes would have come bobbing to the surface; that one by one, they too would have come apart, discharging thousands of little packages onto the sea; that every package comprised a plastic shell and a cardboard back; that every shell housed four hollow plastic animals—a red beaver, a blue turtle, a green frog, and a yellow duck—each about three inches long; and that printed on the cardboard in colorful letters in a bubbly, childlike font were the following words: THE FIRST YEARS. FLOATEES. THEY FLOAT IN TUB OR POOL. PLAY & DISCOVER. MADE IN CHINA. DISHWASHER SAFE.

From a low-flying plane on a clear day, the packages would have looked like confetti, a great drift of colorful squares, exploding in slow motion across the waves. Within twenty-four hours, the water would have dissolved the glue. The action of the waves would have separated the plastic shell from the cardboard back. There, in seas almost four miles deep, more than five hundred miles south of Attu Island at the western tip of the Aleutian tail, more than a thousand miles east of Hokkaido, the northern extreme of Japan, and more than two thousand miles west of the insular Alaskan city of Sitka, 28,800 plastic animals produced in Chinese factories for the bathtubs of America—7,200 red beavers, 7,200 green frogs, 7,200 blue turtles, and 7,200 yellow ducks—hatched from their plastic shells and drifted free.

 

 

Eleven years later, ten thousand circuitous miles to the east, a beachcomber named Bethe Hagens and her boyfriend, Waynn Welton, spotted something small and bright perched atop the seaweed at the southwest end of Gooch's Beach near the entrance to Kennebunk Harbor in Maine. Its body was approximately the size and shape of a bar of soap, its head the size of a Ping-Pong ball. Welton bent down and picked it up. A brand name, The First Years, was embossed on its belly. The plastic was “white, incredibly weathered, and very worn,” Hagens would later recall. Welton remembered it differently. The duck had been, he insisted, still yellow. “Parts of it had started to fade,” he says. “But not a great deal. Whatever they'd used for the dye of the plastic had held up pretty well.”

Much depends on this disagreement. If white, the duck Hagens and Welton saw could well have been one of the 7,200 let loose on the North Pacific. If yellow, it was nothing but a figment, a phantom, a will-o'-thewisp. To complicate matters, The First Years had by then discontinued the Floatees, replacing them with a single yellow Floaty Ducky that also bore the company's logo. Yellow or white, the thing did look as though it had crossed the ocean; on that Hagens and Welton agreed. It was fun to imagine: a lone duck, drifting across the Atlantic, like something out of a fairy tale or a children's book—fun but also preposterous. “There were still kids playing on the beach,” Welton remembered. “I thought, okay, some kid lost his toy and would come back for it.” Sensibly, he and Hagens left the toy where they found it and walked on.

The classified ads in the July 14, 1993, edition of the
Daily Sitka Sentinel
do not make for exciting reading, though they do convey something of what summertime in Alaska's maritime provinces is like. That week, the Tenakee Tavern, “in Tenakee,” was accepting applications “for cheerful bartenders.” The Baranof Berry Patch was buying berries—“huckleberries, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries.” The National Marine Fisheries Service hereby gave notice that the winners of the 1992 Sablefish Tag Recovery Drawing, an annual event held to encourage the reporting of tagged sablefish, would be selected at 1 P.M. on July 19 at the Auke Bay Laboratory. “Tired of shaving, tweezing, waxing?!” asked Jolene Gerard, R.N., R.E., enticing the hirsute citizens of the Alaska Panhandle (a region known to the people who live there as “Southeast”) with the promise of “Permanent hair removel [
sic
].” Then, under the catchall heading of “Announcements,” between “Business Services” and “Boats for Sale,” an unusual listing appeared.

The author of the ad was Eben Punderson, then a high school English teacher who moonlighted as a journalist, now a lawyer in rural Vermont. On Thanksgiving Day 1992, a party of beachcombers strolling along Chichagof Island had discovered several dozen hollow plastic animals amid the usual wrack of bottle caps, fishing tackle, and driftwood deposited at the tide line by a recent storm. After ten months at sea, the ducks had whitened, and the beavers had yellowed, but the frogs were still green as ever, and the turtles, still blue.

Now that summer had returned, the beachcombers were out in force, and on the windward side of Chichagof, as on other islands in the vicinity of Sitka, they found toys, hundreds of them—frogs half-buried under pebbles, beavers poised atop driftwood, turtles tangled in derelict fishing nets, ducks blown past the tide line into the purple fireweed. Beachcombing in the Alaskan wilderness had suddenly come to resemble an Easter egg hunt. A party game for children. Four animals, each one a different color, delivered as if supernaturally by the waves: collect them all!

Laurie Lee of South Baranof Island filled an unused skiff with the hoard of toys she scavenged. Signe Wilson filled a hot tub. Betsy Knudson had so many to spare she started giving them to her dog. It appeared that even the wild animals of Sitka Sound were collecting them: one toy had been plucked from a river otter's nest. On a single beachcombing excursion with friends, Mary Stensvold, a botanist with the Tongass National Forest who normally spent her days hunting rare specimens of liverwort, gathered forty of the animals. Word of the invasion spread. Dozens of correspondents answered the
Sentinel'
s ad. Toys had been found as far north as Kayak Island, as far south as Coronation Island, a range extending hundreds of miles. Where had they come from?

Eben Punderson was pretty sure he knew. Three years earlier, in May of 1990, an eastbound freighter, the
Hansa Carrier
, had collided with a storm five hundred miles south of the Alaskan Peninsula. Several containers had gone overboard, including a shipment of eighty thousand Nikes. Five months later, sneakers began washing up along Vancouver Island. The story had received national attention after a pair of oceanographers in Seattle—James Ingraham of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a scientist with a private consulting firm that assessed the environmental risks and impacts of engineering projects (sewage outflows, oil rigs)—turned the sneaker spill into an accidental oceanographic experiment. By feeding coordinates collected from beachcombers into NOAA's Ocean Surface Current Simulator, or OSCURS, a computer modeling system built from a century's worth of U.S. Navy weather data, Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham had reconstructed the drift routes of some two hundred shoes. In the process, the basement of Ebbesmeyer's bungalow had become the central intelligence agency of what would eventually grow into a global network of coastal informants. If anyone knew anything about the plague of plastic animals, it would be Ebbesmeyer, but when the
Sentinel
's moonlighting reporter contacted him in the summer of 1993, it was the first the oceanographer had heard of the toys.