Moby-Duck (37 page)

Meanwhile, the real flesh-and-blood child, the postmodern child, the Plastic Child has disappeared from view, banished to the other side of the glass screen. There, sprawled on the shag rug, his chin propped on his hands, or slumped into a beanbag chair, he reminds me of John Berger's zoo animals. “The space which they inhabit is artificial,” Berger writes. “Hence their tendency to bundle towards the edge of it. (Beyond its edges there may be real space.) In some cages the light is equally artificial. In all cases the environment is illusory. Nothing surrounds them except their own lethargy or hyperactivity.”

Not long after PBS first broadcast it, Ernie's rubber duckie song went to number sixteen on the Billboard charts. Radio stations were playing it, adults were buying it. And unlike the other
Sesame Street
characters, Ernie's rubber duck was not trademarked. Producers had picked up the prop at a local dime store, which meant that even as it became a recurring character and a pop music phenomenon, it remained in the public domain, free for the taking, no licensing fees required. In a way, its ascendancy confirms Daniel Boorstin's observation in
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
that in America we have arranged the world so that we do not have to experience it, replacing heroes with celebrities, actions with images—and, one might add, animals with television characters.

But does that mean that if Ernie had gone bathing with a white duck or a green one, our iconic ducks would be white or green? I'm not sure. The threads of chance and meaning are hard to disentangle. On the album cover of the LP single of the song, Ernie, for some reason, is holding a different duck, a calico duck, white with burnt-orange spots. Perhaps there is more to the message in this particular bottle than the medium. Perhaps celebrity alone does not explain the yellowness of the duck.

“Ideals of innocent beauty and the adorable have changed little in a hundred years or more,” the historian Gary Cross writes
.
“Many today share with the Victorian middle class an attraction to the blond, blue-eyed, clear-skinned, and well-fed child and are appalled by, uninterested in, and even hostile to the dark, dirty, and emaciated child. Even when humanitarian groups try to shame us into giving money to support poor peoples far away, they usually show us an image of a smiling olive-skinned (not black) girl, a close copy of our ideal of innocence.” So maybe it's just as Curtis Ebbesmeyer suspected. Maybe there is bigotry at play. Is it too much of a stretch to see in the yellowness of the rubber duck a visual reminder of that well-fed, blue-eyed, clear-skinned, yellow-haired Victorian ideal? After all, real ducklings have black, beady eyes, not blue ones like the ducks in Eric Carle's book.

Tuesdays during the seventh month of her pregnancy, my wife and I attended a prepared-childbirth class on the maternity ward of our hospital: linoleum, vinyl chairs, fluorescent lights, a tinted plate-glass window with a view of buildings, strangers, many with impressively inflated abdomens, some also with swollen breasts and feet. On one wall of the classroom hung a poster of an egg, mid-hatch. Contemplating it during the long, tedious hours of instruction, I began to wonder why this particular poster had been hung before our eyes. Was it meant to comfort us? Did we prefer the clean, white orb of an egg to the bloody mammalian mess of one body gushing forth from the wounded nethers of another? On the opposite wall of the classroom hung an enlarged sepia photograph of naked, racially diverse babies; aligned firing-squad-style along a fence over which they appeared to be attempting an escape, they displayed their wrinkly bums for our delight. Children are fundamentally the same, such images suggest, indistinguishable as ducklings despite the color of their skin. They inhabit a world before sex, before race, before history, before self, before humanity. Children, then, are beasts of burden, too—ducklings and bunnies of burden—asked to carry the needful daydreams of adults. The apotheosis of the rubber duck wouldn't be truly complete until the children who had watched that 1970 episode of
Sesame Street
grew old enough to look back forgetfully with longing and loss.

—Joseph Conrad,
The Mirror of the Sea

—Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick

In the fall of 1998, Paul Frankel, a furniture importer in Englewood, New Jersey, was waiting for his ship to come in, and on November 2 he began to wonder if it would. Really, it wasn't the ship Frankel was waiting for but one of the containers it was carrying, a jumbo-size forty-footer full of tables that his company, Collezione Europa, had purchased from a factory in the Philippines. A freight forwarder—the cargo industry's equivalent of a travel agent—had arranged to have Frankel's 237 tables shipped from Manila to Seattle aboard the APL
China
. In the fall of 1998, the APL
China
was one of the largest container ships plying the seas. It was also, so far as maritime engineers were concerned, one of the safest.

Like most successful importers in the age of containerization, Paul Frankel was not given to worrying whether his cargo would reach his warehouse intact, for a simple reason: it almost always did. Sure, every now and then a piece of furniture got scuffed or dinged in transit and had to be repaired by a furniture repairman (a furniture repairman very much like Charlie Moore, in his previous life), but it arrived nonetheless. What made Frankel start wondering now was a fax he received from the headquarters of APL, American President Lines, which, despite what its name suggests, belongs to a shipping company in Singapore. “Please be advised that the APL
China
v. 030 has been delayed due to severe weather encountered enroute to Seattle,” the fax began. “The ship has suffered some weather damage, but we do not yet know the full extent.”

To appreciate the full extent of the damage the APL
China
had suffered, one must first appreciate the full extent of the APL
China
. The
China
was a C-11-class post-Panamax ship, meaning that—at 906 feet long and 131 feet wide—it was too big for the locks of the Panama Canal. Standing on a dock beside it, you would have felt as though you were standing at the foot of an unnaturally smooth cliff, a palisade of steel. The carrying capacity of a container ship is measured in TEUs, or twenty-foot-equivalent units, because a standard shipping container is twenty feet long. One twenty-footer equals one TEU, a forty-footer, two. The
China
had a carrying capacity of 4,832 TEUs. (That of the Evergreen
Ever Laurel
, by contrast, was a mere 1,180 TEUs.)

Imagine a train pulling 4,832 boxcars: it would stretch for nineteen miles, from the southern tip of Manhattan up into Westchester. Or imagine this: both the Main Concourse of Grand Central Station and the Chartres Cathedral would have fit inside the
China'
s hull. Or imagine this: you could have fit Noah's ark inside its hull and had room for another ark of equal size. And the dimensions of the ark set down in Genesis were meant to suggest a vessel of fabulous grandeur, a vessel bigger than any ship built before the flood or since, a vessel—in short—of biblical proportions.

Now imagine if Noah had gone to sea in the APL
China
instead of his ark: A single twenty-foot-container could accommodate hundreds of thousands of insects, tens of thousands of frogs—plague in a box. A twenty-footer could comfortably house six horses, or, uncomfortably, a single elephant. The flood would have posed no danger to whales, but if Noah had wanted to, and if he'd had the skills and materials to carpenter a really big fish tank, he could have squeezed a gray whale into a jumbo-size forty-foot container like the one Paul Frankel was waiting for. If Noah had sailed in the
China
instead of his ark, he might not have been able to save every species on earth, but he could have come close. On the other hand, if Noah's luck were as bad as that of Parvez Guard, captain of the
China,
thousands of the animals he was trying to save would have been lost at sea. (The whale, at least, might have survived.)

Paul Frankel wasn't alone in his wondering. All across North America that autumn, people were waiting for the
China
to come in, and all across North America people began to wonder if it would. Not long after APL's fax arrived at the offices of Collezione Europa, an even more worrisome message reached the offices of Consolidated Transportation Services Inc., a freight forwarder in Carson, California. The message concerned two containers of clothing that the company had arranged to be shipped to New Jersey from Palau, an island five hundred miles east of the Philippines. “Both containers have gone overboard,” the message reported. A few weeks later, another freight forwarder, H. W. Robinson & Co., based near JFK Airport in New York, also received a worrisome fax. “As you may know, the APL
China
encountered heavy weather in the Pacific Ocean on or around October 26, on its voyage from the Far East,” this fax began. “The information we have received thus far indicates the storm was unusually severe with wave heights exceeding fifty feet.”

People at the headquarters of Eddie Bauer began wondering what had happened to the 1,583 cartons of cotton dresses they'd ordered from Sri Lanka. People at Schwinn Cycling & Fitness wondered about the bicycles they'd ordered from Taiwan. People at Pier 1 Imports were wondering about their 236 cartons of acrylic bottle stoppers. And at Azuma Foods, people wondered what fate had befallen 940 cartons of seafood that had been packed onto the
China
inside special, refrigerated containers known as reefers. Most worried of all, perhaps, were executives at Toshiba, who were waiting for nine containers of cordless phones, $4.2 million worth. Paul Frankel's tables, by comparison, had cost him a mere $7,000.

 

 

The
China
had staggered into port in Seattle on November 1. It was a bluebird day, the sun bright and sparkly on the water of Puget Sound. A container ship crossing a harbor on such a day, passing among fishing boats and yachts with the imperturbable majesty of a zeppelin among gulls, is a beautiful sight. The sight of such a ship on such a day suggests that human ingenuity has succeeded in taming the sea, turning Melville's “watery wilderness” into so many watery highways, along which freighters travel as routinely as eighteen-wheelers travel the roads.

A Seattle longshoreman named Rich Austin was dispatched to the
China
salvage operation that day. As he drove into port, the sight wasn't picturesque at all; it was, he remembers, “ominous.” From bow to stern, stacks of containers had toppled like dominoes, some to starboard, some to port. Some containers were crumpled up like wads of aluminum foil, others were pancaked flat. One of the
China
's sixty-two cargo bays gaped like a missing tooth; an entire row of containers, stacked six high and sixteen across, had been swept away.

Later that afternoon, hoisted up in a man basket by a crane, Rich Austin got a better view of the devastation. “It looked almost like a landfill in some areas,” he remembers. Containers had split like dropped melons, spewing cargo: remote-control boats, golf clubs, frozen lobster tails, thousands of plastic air fresheners. Many photographs of the ravaged
China
were taken that week. Photos of bay 1 show boxes stuffed with clothing labels yet to be stitched on. With a magnifying glass, you can read what the labels say: DANNY & NICOLE. Scrolled bolts of cloth protrude from the ruins of a container in bay 15. Striped, child-size shirts of the sort favored by
Sesame Street
's Ernie drape the scaffolding in bay 17. In photos of bay 36, you can see packages of frozen shrimp; in those of bay 58, Kenwood bookshelf stereo systems. Perhaps most impressive of all are the photos of bay 59, which show a smorgasbord of consumer goods—stainless steel pots, bouquets of plastic flowers, white sneakers, gray trousers from the Gap, all intermingled and strewn about. One pair of white sneakers hangs from a rail by its tied laces, like shoes thrown over a telephone wire. “Whatever Americans were consuming at that time, there it was,” another longshoreman, Dan McKisson, told me. “There was Christmas, laying on the deck.”

Salvaging this wreckage was slow, dangerous work, like playing pick-up sticks with thirty-ton sticks. While a pair of cranes lifted stevedores up in man baskets, another crane swung four steel hooks out to them. The stevedores would catch the hooks, latch them one by one into a container's corner castings, the man basket would swing clear, and up and away the snared container would go.