Moby-Duck (25 page)

Moore was planning a short expedition that would take place the following November, and maybe there'd be room for me among the crew. “Do you know how to sail?” he asked. “Because our number-one priority is safety. It can be dangerous out there.” November is still hurricane season in the tropics of the North Pacific, he said.

I did have some sailing experience, I assured him. The summer I was thirteen, back when I was still considering a career in marine biology, my parents had enrolled me in sailing school. Weekday mornings for several weeks, I'd traveled by bus from San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge, to the Sausalito Cruising Club, where behind the protection of a breakwater, I and a handful of other pubescent greenhorns had learned the difference between leeward and windward, starboard and port, luff and leech, to tack into the wind and run before it. On land, at age thirteen, I was a lummox, chubby, bad at sports, asthmatic, bespectacled, overly fond of a particular pair of striped wristbands that always stank of sweat. Out on the water, at the helm of a Laser, a fiberglass sloop, I was half dolphin, half bird. That, at the time I first contacted Moore, was the sum total of my sailing experience.

The synopsis I gave Moore of my training didn't seem to leave a favorable impression, and so in August, the week before the airlift at Gore Point, I flew to Long Beach, California, hoping to close the deal.

“If nothing else, you'll need to know how to tie a clove hitch and a bowline knot,” he said as we stood on the aft deck of the
Alguita,
Moore's custom-made oceanographic research vessel, tied up at his private dock, on an inlet lined with palm trees and patio umbrellas and pleasure boats. Across the street from the dock was the boxy, two-story, many-chambered yellow stucco house, the second-story windows like portholes, to which his parents had brought him home from the hospital as a newborn six decades before. Around it Moore grew—organically, of course—a small, thriving jungle of tropical plants.

In a few weeks he would be sailing to Hilo, where he planned to spend most of the winter, returning to Long Beach in late January. On the passage to Hilo and back he would go trawling yet again for plastic in the Eastern Garbage Patch. This would be the fourth time he'd collected samples there in ten years. Why repeat the same experiment? By comparing old data with new, he hoped to determine the rate at which pelagic plastic was accumulating.

Aboard the
Alguita
that sunny afternoon, you could feel the air of frenzied preparation. A mechanic named Tomas, busy hooking the boat's hydraulic system to an array of solar panels, kept popping out of an open hatch to snatch one of the shiny wrenches scattered about the black rubber mats of the aft deck, then popping back below. When Tomas was up, Moore conversed with him in Spanish—fluently, it sounded to my ignorant ear.
¹⁷
The solar panels were a recent acquisition, paid for with a grant from none other than BP. “We're going to be able to run a three-horsepower motor,” Moore said, “and the gantry crane here, and the six hundred meters of trawl cable here, and the anchor—all with solar power.” Made to order by a Tasmanian shipwright, Moore's fifty-foot aluminum-hulled catamaran is a handsome vessel, handsome as the
Opus
is homely, and its new solar panels would make it state-of-the-art. Since Moore launched it into Hobart Harbor more than two decades ago, the
Alguita
has logged some 100,000 blue-water miles, most of them on research cruises. When he isn't conducting his own research, Moore charters the boat to other scientists. Earlier that summer he'd taken a group of wildlife ornithologists bird-watching in the Sea of Cortez.

During the time I'd travel with him, I'd never get to see Charlie, as everyone who knows him calls him, in the captain's outfit that he sometimes wears—light-blue shirt, little name tag pinned to the breast pocket, the striped epaulets, everything but the white cap with the gold anchor above the black visor. On the day I met him he—potbellied, with the permanent tan and sinewy limbs of a man who spends a lot of time both in and on the water, dressed in a grease-stained khaki shirt with holes at both elbows, the top four buttons undone to expose a grizzled wedge of chest fur—didn't look much like a sea captain. He looked like the organic-farming, utopian beach bum that, when not at the
Alguita
's helm, he is. Almost every day, when he isn't sailing, he surfs. That morning off Huntington Pier, he'd “shredded it up pretty good.” He has a bushy head of sun-bleached brown hair shot through with filaments of gray, but otherwise bears a striking resemblance to the balding actor Robert Duvall. Moore could be Duvall's younger, shorter, tanner, hairier brother. His heavy-lidded eyes and wrinkly neck give him the aspect of a sun-drugged tortoise. He speaks in a gravelly, almost inflectionless yet hortatory drone, as if reading a prepared speech badly from a teleprompter. When he laughs he opens his mouth just a little, once again bringing to mind a tortoise, and makes a coughing sound, as if trying to clear his throat:
heh.

Giving me a tour of the
Alguita
, he delivered a kind of extemporaneous sermon that ranged widely, from the chemistry of polybrominated diphenyl ethers to the social critic Thorstein Veblen to Rell Sunn, the deceased Hawaiian high priestess of surfing. Moore sounded at times brilliant, a font of facts and expertise (“our research indicates that 2.3 billion pieces of plastic go down the L.A. Basin in three days”), and at times like a half-cocked conspiracy theorist (“in our economy a series of short-lived and sickly generations is more profitable than a series of long-lived and healthy ones”).

For a utopian organic farmer without an advanced degree in oceanography or anything else, Moore has been lead author on an impressive number of scientific papers. He has successfully lobbied for stronger regulation of Southern California's plastics industry. Think of Los Angeles, and if you don't live there you probably think of Hollywood, but Los Angeles is the American epicenter of virgin plastics processing. In 2006, the World Federation of Scientists (WFS) invited Moore to Erice, Sicily, to deliver a presentation on plastic contaminants, which the WFS, thanks in part to Moore, has now added as a subcategory to its growing list of planetary emergencies. Also on the list: Missile Proliferation, Cultural Pollution, and Defense Against Cosmic Objects.

Moore was recently inducted into the Explorers Club, the elite association of scientific adventurers whose ranks have included Sir Edmund Hillary, Roald Amundsen, Neil Armstrong, and Jacques Piccard, the deep-sea explorer who, in 1960, with copilot Don Walsh, set the unbroken world depth record—35,800 feet—for a descent in a manned submersible. In 2006, with his wife, Samantha Cannon, known as Sam, Moore attended the club's annual dinner, infamous for its adventurous menus. At the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, Sam and Charlie had been offered such hors d'oeuvres as toasted crickets and kangaroo testicles, then watched as the club's president made a grand entrance on a hired camel.

Back before he became a scientific adventurer, when he was still a humble furniture repairman, one of his regular clients was the Hanjin shipping line, which hired him to restore furniture damaged in transit. He'd restored, for instance, a grand piano that Gregory Peck had shipped to Los Angeles from Marseille. The first time Sam saw her future partner, in the early seventies, he was sitting in the back of a pickup truck outside a food co-op, his hair even bushier than it is now, a joint in one hand, a beer in the other. He has since renounced all mindaltering substances in favor of organic fruit. This renunciation, and Moore's heterogeneous résumé, suggest that his has been a wayward path, that he was personally acquainted with the experience of drift.

Around the same time he started the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, Moore started another nonprofit whose mission is to teach the wayward, drifting youths of Long Beach to grow and tend organic community gardens. He handed me a business card. Long Beach Organic, it said. Slogan: “For gardens, trees, & kids!” He is in effect a kind of nonprofit entrepreneur. At first the organic nonprofit was the more successful of his two ventures, but in recent years, thanks to growing public awareness of the Garbage Patch, the Algalita Marine Research Foundation has surged past organic farming.

Summoning me to follow, he headed up the gangway, across the street, to his organic garden. “Don't bump your head on the cucumber,” he said as we entered this frugivorous, bee-loud, homemade glade, a kind of personal Eden equipped with a solar-powered hot tub and a chlorine-free swimming pool purified by ozone. With compost below and fruit-heavy branches overhead, the air smelled of both ripeness and rot. A giant avocado tree grew up the back of Moore's house like a leafy chimney. That avocado tree was almost as old as he was, Moore said. In the corner, a surfboard leaned against a fence, and a pair of wet suits, one bright blue the other bright red, hung from a clothesline. They looked like melted superheroes. A wooden bridge of the sort you see in tea gardens spanned the chlorine-free pool. Without explanation Moore excused himself, leaving me loitering by his back door, near the entrance to a shed in which could be seen a photo of Moore on his surf board, shredding it up pretty good.

He emerged from his kitchen with a glass of passion-fruit juice freshly decanted from the blender. “Here,” he said, in the manner of a medicine man, “drink that.” There were bits of pulp and seed and who knew what else—gnats, probably—floating around in it, and I hesitated a moment before taking a sip. It was the best juice I'd ever tasted. Then Moore reached up, plucked a dwarf banana from a branch, and peeled it for me as if I were a child. “Try that.” It was the best banana I'd ever tasted, tangy and vegetal as well as sweet.

I'd like to share Moore's faith in the arc of progress, but even there, in the never-never land of the man's garden, I had a hard time imagining the bright future he saw, in which we Americans would trade conspicuous consumption for cradle-to-cradle manufacturing practices, disposable plastics for zero-waste policies and closed ecological loops. I had a hard time because such a future seemed to me inimical to the American gospel of perpetual economic growth, and because my upbringing in Northern California had taught me to distrust utopian strangers who talked about “economic paradigms,” no matter how tasty their bananas. Nevertheless, when Moore offered me a goodie bag—paper, not plastic—of fresh fruit, I accepted it. Off I went, laden with grapes and figs and papayas and bananas and an understanding that Moore and I would meet again the following November, in Hawaii.

My first morning on the Big Island, I reported to the laboratory run by Karla McDermid, marine biologist at the University of Hawaii-Hilo. Students in her marine debris seminar stood around long metal tables analyzing the latest haul of plastic that Moore had collected from the Eastern Garbage Patch. The lab had the feel of a workshop. One team of students was investigating the origins of flotsam and jetsam that had yet to photodegrade—ropes, bottles, sticks of deodorant. “It's from India!” a student at a computer shouted. Another team was sieving through sand retrieved from Kamilo Beach. “That's the world's dirtiest beach, according to Charlie Moore,” McDermid told me. “So dirty that the sand is like plastic sand.” I asked her where Kamilo Beach was. “Down near South Point.”

McDermid—in a button-down blouse and sandals and glasses and pink glass earrings—turned to address the busy room. “If you need beakers, you guys, beakers for floating things, or petri dishes, I'll be back, you just yell at me what you need.” She led me outside, where at the edge of a parking lot an aspiring wildlife veterinarian, Sarah Ward, had volunteered to perform the savory task of pawing through albatross “upchuck balls.” Wearing purple rubber gloves, Ward crouched beside a bucket from which there rose the nauseating stench of death and in which could be seen a partially digested bolus coated in what looked like engine oil. In a way it was engine oil—the oil of an albatross engine. Albatrosses live fifty years or more, and spend 95 percent of those years at sea, and for 90 percent of their time at sea, they're flying—gliding, really. Their wings locked fast, rarely flapping, riding the same winds favored by mariners of the age of sail, they can go thousands of miles without touching down. They even fly asleep. By the estimate of Carl Safina, the naturalist and author of
Eye of the Albatross
, an albatross can clock around four million air miles before it dies. To fuel these epic flights, an albatross's stomach distills albatross prey—squid, fish roe, herring—into an oil almost as caloric as diesel. In the not too distant future, two or three generations hence, when the planet's reserves of fossil fuel begin to run out, perhaps some entrepreneur will start farming albatrosses for their oil.

This sort of avian prospecting would be no innovation. It would be a return to the technology of the nineteenth century, when hunters slaughtered albatrosses for their oil, as well as for their feathers, desirable as millinery plumage. In the breeding grounds of the Japanese island of Torishima, feather hunters killed an estimated five million birds between 1887 and 1902, when the island's volcano erupted, exterminating the hunters; some of the birds, however, survived. On the Northwestern Hawaiian Archipelago, as on other island chains, marauding feather hunters would pillage the rookeries where docile adults refused to quit their nests, pluck a quarter pound of feathers from every bird, and leave behind a heap of carcasses. In many ways, most ways, the lot of the albatross has improved greatly since the nineteenth century. In other ways, not. So far Sarah Ward had found oily tangles of monofilament fishing line and scads of oily squid beaks, which, disembodied, look a great deal like the beaks of birds. While I watched, she found something else, an oily little plastic flower that had perhaps once decorated a child's hair barrette.