Moby-Duck (28 page)

Jeff Ernst volunteered for the job, and the rest of us volunteered to accompany him. Wearing emergency harnesses equipped with rescue beacons that would automatically start flashing should we fall overboard, we made our way forward (froward, as we seafarers say), following the rails, grasping at the wire stays, stumbling to the main mast as the spray came bursting over the bow. There, Ernst threw himself up onto the boom and smothered the lowering sail as if making love to it, or wrestling a crocodile. Meanwhile, Laurent Pool furled the angry canvas until, Ernst having slithered off, it was lashed tight inside a kind of green sleeve.

Taking the helm, Moore hove to, and the
Alguita
came about into the prevailing swell. I stumbled to the head, heaved my dinner into a bucket, then crashed into my berth, and slept through the remainder of the storm.

 

 

Bob Marley was singing over the sound system when I awoke the next morning, telling me not to worry about a thing, because every little thing was going to be all right. Evidence suggested that it would. In the galley, beside the doorstep of the crew's quarters, Sam was making coffee. The sun was shining. Moore was at the helm. Laurent Pool was pissing off the stern. We were still almost fifty miles out. No land in sight. But the waves were calm. Sea state 3 on the Beaufort scale.

We sent the trawl over again, for a fifth time. Forty-five minutes later, when we were reeling it in, a gust plucked Moore's ball cap from his head, the one with the sea turtle on it, and set it adrift. Mournfully, he watched it float away. This wasn't the first time the wind had cast something overboard. The day before, a gust had plucked the nylon-upholstered mattress from a chaise longue. A great commotion had ensued. While Moore brought the boat about, Jeff Ernst, perhaps the most devoted of our captain's youthful votaries, had plunged headlong into the water and, crawl-stroking through the waves without a life vest or an emergency harness or anything besides his swim trunks, rescued the rectangle of nylon-upholstered foam from decades of drift and his captain from embarrassment. The last thing Moore wanted me to witness was him contributing to the Garbage Patch. His cap, at least, was biodegradable, but not by now—as the currents and winds swept it out of reach, making it appear and disappear, lifting it atop a crest, then sending it down into a trough—retrievable.

The fifth lowering came up totally empty—no plastic, no plankton. “Nothing. Nada,” said Moore, failing to hide his disappointment. Was the ocean here that clean and that lifeless? Had the trawl ridden too high? Rinsing out the codpiece, Moore discovered the answer: “a hole big enough to poke your finger through.” He poked his finger through it.

While Moore repaired the hole with needle and thread, Laurent Pool, shirtless, hatless, his bald head shining, stood at the stern, fishing. Before long he landed a rainbow runner, long as my arm, beautiful, silver with bright yellow fins, and a blue stripe equatorially dividing the dorsal from the ventral. As it slapped about on the aft deck, Pool bludgeoned it with a wooden cudgel, then gutted it clean. At midday, when I was up on the cabin roof, on watch, Moore popped open the skylight above the helm and handed me a plate of fresh rainbow runner sashimi salad—raw fish, cubed, drizzled with sesame oil and seasonings. I sat there leaning back on the fiberglass of the
Alguita
, gazing out between the rubber toes of my canvas boat shoes at the blue Pacific, degusting the best, freshest sashimi I'd ever had.

On our last day of sampling, sails raised again, beating north toward the Big Island, we had better luck, or worse luck depending on your point of view: lots of granulated plastic in our samples. Moore, elbows propped on winches, face inches above the sampling bowl, studied the contents like a clairvoyant inspecting tea leaves: “About ten pieces in there, plus some fishing line. A velella baby. Actually, scratch that, I can see a good twenty pieces in there even without looking under a microscope.” He fished around with a teaspoon, poked around with tweezers, plucked out a black ball the size of a jujube. “Hard to tell whether that's a nurdle.”

Our third trawl of the day brought up more plastic still. “Yeah, this has got all the stuff we look for,” said Moore. “Some big stuff. Nurdles.” He plucked an unmistakable nurdle out with his tweezers. “Slightly less than a gyre sample, but this is definitely the worst place we've found around Hilo so far. I think we can definitely say that the debris is statistically associated with the plankton. More plankton, more debris. Certainly looks that way.” In the next trawl, we collected even more plastic.

Success brought about a change in mood, futility giving way to some moderate sense of accomplishment. Amy Young, who'd recently acquired a waterproof camera that she was notably proud of, went around snapping photos. She asked me to give her my best “adventure pose.”

The Big Island came into view: first the clouds that ring the volcanic peaks, then the dark green-black line of land on the horizon slowly growing into cliffs, and then at the edge of the cliffs a row of figures—fishermen with poles, dropping their lines hundreds of feet off the sheer rock into the ocean. As we approached, Moore luffed the sails and announced a swim call. We were to go snorkeling, looking for “hand samples,” semibuoyant flotsam and jetsam suspended in the water column below the surface. On the Greenpeace website I'd seen footage of Moore doing this, swimming around in the Eastern Garbage Patch with a dive mask on, pointing out the derelict objects around him—a toothbrush, a briefcase, a plastic shopping bag. I decided that it would be humiliating and unprofessional of me to sit the swim call out.

After three days in close quarters a camaraderie had developed among the members of the
Alguita
's crew. I'd ended up confessing my fear of sharky waters. Young, who wants to be a scuba scientist, doing her fieldwork underwater, admitted that she, too, was afraid to swim out here, in blue water. Swimming on reefs, she didn't mind; in the shallows of reefs the sharks tend to be of the smaller, fish-eating variety, and you can see them coming. It's in blue water, near rocky coasts, that the sealeaters, who out of hunger or confusion become man-eaters, tend to remove the knobby limbs of scientists enjoying a swim call.

When he goes swimming or snorkeling, Moore wears, in addition to flippers and a mask, red trunks and a shiny blue long-sleeved shirt that together give him the aspect of an aging superhero—Snorkel Man, Captain Plastic. He plunged in flippers first. Most of the crew, Ernst, Hungate, and Pool, quickly followed, outfitted with snorkels and flippers and little green nets of the sort with which people remove dead guppies from fish tanks. Sam was at the helm. Young and I stood on deck, panicking, she in her bikini, me pasty and pale, flippered and masked, in my red trunks. Young, overcoming her fears, made the plunge. Left with no other choice, I followed.

Then I was in the deep ocean, underwater, hair swirling. Bubbles bubbled before my breath-fogged mask. I'd read somewhere that to prevent goggle fogging you're supposed to spit on the plastic before jumping in. Too late for that, and if I opened my mask now, the water would rush in, and I might well lose a contact lens. Better to keep the mask on and peer through the fog. Everything hued to blue except my pasty limbs and the little green net I clutched in my right hand and the colorful swimwear and luminescent limbs of my shipmates. In no time I was sucking ocean through my snorkel and commenced to hyperventilate. Hyperventilation tends to interfere with snorkeling. Hyperventilate with a snorkel on and you tend to snorkel down big mouthfuls of the Pacific. So research has found. Upon surfacing, upon blasting the water from the snorkel, peeping over the waves lapping at my mask, recovering my bearings, I splashed madly—in the sort of way that, I'd read, tends to attract sharks, whose sensory organs are well-attuned to the panic of seals—for the
Alguita'
s swim ladder.
¹⁹

I hauled myself back out, flippers flopping, onto the aft deck, water dripping from my red trunks onto the rubber mats. There, safe, taking slow deep breaths, making sure that my wet trunks weren't clinging to my anatomy in an embarrassing way, plucking the cloth away from my anatomy in the way men do, I felt more ridiculous and more ashamed than ever. And so, having caught my breath, having fetched my little green net from where I'd dropped it while clambering aboard, having spat onto my mask, I gave it another go.

The water met my flippers. My face met the water. Here I was again, overboard. Mask on, no longer foggy, snorkel in my mouth, no longer full of water, I decided to take a look below, and what I saw made me hyperventilate again—no sharks, but nothing else either, no plastic bags, no semibuoyant sneakers, no fish, just blue water shading away toward dark, unfathomable depths. Swimming in the tropics feels, Moore had said, “like you're swimming in the sky.” An apt comparison that in him inspires a kind of reverence and in me, gazing down, a kind of swimsuit-pissing vertigo. Who the hell but a suicide wants to go swimming in the sky? Again I splashed hysterically over to the
Alguita'
s swim ladder and scampered—you might think that it would be impossible to scamper in flippers, but I can attest otherwise—back aboard, and stayed there.

Moore and the rest flippered merrily about with their little green nets, but they, too, came up empty-handed. Moore again seemed disappointed that we hadn't found the miniature garbage patch he'd expected to find—no suitcases, no toothbrushes, no grains of plastic visible to the naked eye. “Next year we'll come at it from the south,” he said, on board, toweling off lustily. There was still some spirit in him. “Maybe the countercurrent here acts as a barrier.” Truth be told, I was disappointed, too; having hunted for plastic on the high seas, I'd found it, but the sprinkling of polymers that had turned up in our sampling jars fell far short of the maelstrom of garbage, the Sargasso of the imagination—refrigerator doors, basketballs, sneakers—I'd been dreaming of. “People always ask me for pictures of the Garbage Patch,” Moore had told me. “You can't take pictures of it.” You have to watch for it, and trawl for it.

After toweling off, we raised the mainsail, and the staysail, and the spinnaker, and—“Tupelo Honey” playing on the sound system, Young playing her bongos, Ernst his guitar, Hungate playing his long blond hair, I standing by the mast, striking adventure poses, adventure shorts and adventure shirt fluttering in the breeze, Moore standing on his captain's chair, head, now hatless, poking from the hatch—we ran before the wind. It was dusk again when we motored into Radio Bay.

Looking down at the Pacific from fifteen thousand feet, on a flight from Hilo to Honolulu, I kept remembering what it felt like to be out there, down there, swimming in deep water, gazing doubtfully and fearfully into the bottomless ambiguities, my vision obscured by the foggy snorkel mask, fishing in vain with my dainty green net. How to reconcile the vertiginous emptiness I'd glimpsed underwater with what I'd seen in Karla McDermid's lab and Pallister's paradise? Or with that photo Ebbesmeyer had shown me back in Sitka—of 252 plastic tidbits extracted from a single albatross cadaver. That photograph was taken, I'd since learned, by a photographer named Susan Middleton and appears in
Archipelago,
a collection of zoological portraits that Middleton and another photographer, David Liittschwager, made on a tour of the Northwestern Hawaiian Archipelago, the remote volcanic chain to which Laysan Island belongs.

Both Liittschwager and Middleton trained with the fashion photographer Richard Avedon, and his influence on their work is easy to see. Instead of depicting animals in their habitats, or in stylized versions of their habitats, the customary approach of wildlife artists since Audubon, Liittschwager and Middleton place their subjects before a white or black backdrop, light them with strobes that vivify the colors, and shoot what Liittschwager describes as “close-up, formal portraits”—a technique borrowed, he admits, from commercial advertising. Their stated aim in
Archipelago
was to “create an intimate connection between the subject and the viewer,” but to my eye what their portraits mostly do is abstract and aestheticize the tropical sea creatures and seabirds they portray. Shot like advertisements, the portraits look like advertisements, and the connection they create resembles the one that advertising creates—more seductive than intimate—between product and consumer. The protected flora and fauna of the Northwestern Hawaiian Archipelago aren't for sale, of course; what is for sale is yet another vision—colorful, desirable, pleasing to the eye, often cute, since the photographers make a point of choosing juvenile specimens—of the natural world.

If one had any doubt about the thoughts with which Middleton and Liittschwager burden the beasts they portray, one only need read the text that accompanies their images. On Seal Kittery, a tiny volcanic atoll, “astonished” by the sight of an endangered native plant, Middleton experienced the ecological equivalent of an epiphany. “I recognized the same sensation I experienced when I saw the Mona Lisa for the first time,” she writes. Her images of the epiphanic plant,
Solanum nelsonii,
are postcards brought back from nature's Louvre. “On Laysan,” where human beings are not the dominant species, “my soul felt nourished,” Middleton writes.

It's not that I don't admire these photographs. I admire them the way I admire portraits of the saints—with the aesthetic appreciation of an apostate. I'm grateful for the glimpse that Liittschwager and Middleton give me of a lipspot moray eel swirling like a flamenco dancer through a crepe cloud of pink sea lettuce. But admiration is different from idolatry, and such photographs create no more intimacy between me and their subjects than the
Mona Lisa
creates between me and Lisa Gherardini, the sixteenth-century Florentine noblewoman who is the ostensible subject of Leonardo's painting. Far more than by Middleton's captions, I'm convinced by Susan Sontag, who in her famous book-length essay
On Photography
writes, “Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, an approach which starts from
not
accepting the world as it looks.”