Moby-Duck (43 page)

Yesterday we saw the first blue daytime sky in almost a week—just a portal of it, like a window atop a dome. Now we're close to the fictitious Strait of Juan de Fuca, so close that gulls have begun visiting us and cell phones have reactivated. Late last night in the crew's lounge, there was a party. Bob and Claire, who appear to be teetotalers, did not attend, but Chief Officer Bollig and I did. Ronaldo Cuevas, the bosun—chief of the deckhands, Bacchus of the lounge, a big, round-faced dude wearing a muscle tee and a Fu Manchu—seemed intent on getting me drunk. He refilled my tumbler of wine even when I told him not to. At least I managed to get Joe the Messman to play “The Boxer” on his guitar.

I don't remember much of last night's party, but there is one night from this long, uneventful voyage that I think I will never forget, the one when I took my forbidden nocturnal walk. As I made my way along a catwalk glazed with sea spray and snow, I had to take cover behind a bulkhead every few yards to warm my ears and hands. Above me the containers creaked and moaned and clanged, straining at their lashings with every roll. I had intended to walk all the way to the stern, where cataracts of water rain down from the container lids overhead and the roar of the propeller makes the whole place thunder like a cavern in an old myth. But then I thought better of it. The winds were at Beaufort force 7, near gale, and just as Sir Beaufort promised, the sea had heaped up and foam was streaking off the crests of breakers thirteen to twenty feet tall. You could see only the waves that came heaving and hissing along the hull, blue and foamy and luminous in the house light, but you could sense the rest of the Pacific, and if you looked hard, you could vaguely distinguish the greater darkness of the ocean from the lesser darkness of the starless sky. Standing at the starboard rail—facing south toward the spot five hundred miles away where, on a night far stormier than this one, containers full of clothes and toys and phones and fish and tables had gone crashing overboard—I gazed a long while into both varieties of darkness, the watery and the ethereal one, as if into the tenebrous seas and mists of time. Then, ears aching, hands numb, I turned around, leaned into the wind, and staggered to the crew's lounge for a little human company, a little Filipino television, and a tumbler of cheap red.

—Joseph Conrad,
The Mirror of the Sea

Picture a red beaver, a blue turtle, a green frog, a yellow duck—one set of toys hatched from the same plastic shell. It is February 1992, a month after the spill. The cardboard backs of the packages inscribed with colorful copy have long since dissolved. Carried east by a current known as the North Pacific Drift, the four castaway toys have traveled over two hundred nautical miles along the northern edge of the 45th parallel, the northern edge of the subarctic front, the boundary between the Subpolar and the Subtropical gyres.

The four animals have remained close together, and relatively close to the other 28,796 castaway toys, traveling the current in a diffuse flock, smiling refugees on a possibly interminable road, prisoners in the labyrinth of drift, a labyrinth that is the collaborative work of invisible architects—the spinning of the planet and the heat of the sun, the saltness of the sea and the influence of the winds. When the seas are calm, the zooplanktonic spawn of flying fish try to raft on the toys, as do the spawn of gooseneck barnacles. On the hunt for nutrients, albatrosses, riding the same winds that generate the waves, swoop down. For now the four toys are probably too big for an albatross to swallow.

Squalls come and go. Snow falls in swirling flurries, melting on contact with the ocean's surface, which out here in the Graveyard of the Pacific is cold but not freezing, 5 degrees Celsius, 41 degrees Fahrenheit. Overboard in these waters, a strong swimmer might last a half hour. Though stormy, the North Pacific is in February 1992 calmer than it usually is in winter. The moon is growing full, and on those nights when the skies clear, it paints on the wave crests a triangle of white lines that diminish toward a vanishing point on the horizon. Viewed from the deck of a nearby container ship, the lines of moonshine on the black water seem to climb into the black sky like the rungs of Jacob's ladder.

It is the incongruity of the toys that above all things enchants me. They are incongruously small compared with the deep; incongruously colorful in that gray-green seascape, the red beaver and the yellow duck especially since they have only just begun to fade; incongruously cheerful under circumstances that would drive mad a castaway both sentient and mortal; incongruously human, and childish, and domestic, and pastoral.

Months pass. Winter turns to spring. The days lengthen, the nights shorten, the weather moderates. Storms still roll through, but less often now and with less violence. Passing cargo ships have grown rarer, too; this is the slow season for trade with the Far East. Up and down goes the price of oil, up and down go the profits of toymakers and shipping lines, up and down go the four toys on the Ferris wheel of waves, aspin in space and time.

In June, 690 miles southwest of Sitka, for the first time since the spill, dramatic complications occur. As it collides with the continental shelf and then with the freshwater gushing out of the rainforests of the coastal mountains, and then with the coast, the North Pacific Drift loses its coherence, crazies, sends out fractal meanders and eddies and tendrils that tease the four voyagers apart. We don't know for certain what happens next, but statistical models suggest that at least one of the four voyagers I'm imagining—the frog, let's pretend—will turn south, carried by an eddy or a meander into the California Current, which will likely deliver it, after many months, into the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.

You may now forget about the frog. We already know its story—how, as it disintegrates, it will contribute a few tablespoons of plastic to the Garbage Patch, or to Hawaii's Plastic Beach, or to the dinner of an albatross, or to a sample collected in the codpiece of Charlie Moore's manta trawl.
Bon voyage, petite grenouille!
May the fatal threads of the ocean currents spare you from a plundering albatross and spare an albatross chick from you!

The other three toys turn north. In November 1992, the Alaska Coastal Current carries one of them—the turtle, let's pretend—onto Kruzof Island, where it will remain, caught in the jackstraw, until Tyler Orbison comes sloshing ashore the following summer. You may now forget about the turtle.

Hundreds of other toys make landfall on the Alaska Peninsula that November, as Eben Punderson will later report in the Weekend section of the
Daily Sitka Sentinel.
But thousands, including the duck and the beaver I have asked you to imagine, keep bobbing along on a northerly bearing. At Kayak Island, north of Juneau, the currents make a sharp, westerly left. By January 10, the first anniversary of the spill, the beaver and duck have reached the entrance to Prince William Sound, passing Bligh Reef, named for the notorious sea captain, made famous by the notorious tanker that, running aground, spilled its oil there just three years before the Evergreen
Ever Laurel
spilled its toys.

A few weeks later, traveling the same route, roughly, as Exxon's crude—the same route, roughly, that Pallister and I would take aboard the
Opus
—the toys reach Gore Point's windward shore. A southeaster blows up and a storm surge lobs the beaver over the driftwood berm. Hurricane-force winds lift it aloft, then send it tumbling across the forest floor, then pluck it up again, drop it again, until finally it comes to rest in the lee of a spruce. For fourteen years, there it sits, atop the pine needles, among fishing floats and water bottles, until on July 16, 2007, along comes an erstwhile schoolteacher turned amateur driftologist. He bends back a leaf of devil's club with the toe of his rubber boot and, careful not to strain his surgically repaired lumbar region, crouches down, hollering with ridiculous excitement. You may now forget about the beaver. We know how its story will end—as a lab animal, inside a mass spectrometer, contributing a few tablespoons of data to the oceans of information.

You may not forget about the duck, however. At least not if you're me. If you're me, prey to nocturnal flights of fancy, you will spend many years thinking about that stupid, sun-bleached, ghostly, hollow, iconic, and altogether hypothetical plaything with a body the size of a bar of soap and a head the size of a Ping-Pong ball.

Out on the Alaskan Current, it has escaped the witch's finger of Gore Point and is now headed, along with thousands of other toys, west by southwest toward the Aleutians. Most of those toys, those puerile satellites, will remain, the simulations of OSCURS predict, in the Subpolar Gyre's orbit, completing a lap once every few years, their numbers diminishing with every lap. Some will end up on the rocky shores of the mostly uninhabited Aleutians, others in Siberia. Others, after completing a lap or two, will return to Alaska and join some farrago of wrack in some out-of-the-way cave of ocean. And some—not many, OSCURS tells us, but some—will slip between the Aleutian Islands and into the Bering Sea, where under favorable circumstances an even smaller number—including, let's pretend, the once yellow, now pale duck I'm imagining—will pass through the Bering Strait and into the Arctic. There OSCURS had lost them. And so had I.

 

 

Truth be told, by the time the Hanjin
Ottawa
passed through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I'd had enough of seafaring. At the entrance to Puget Sound a launch motored out, a harbor pilot came aboard. “A Departure, the last professional sight of land, is always good, or at least good enough,” Conrad writes in
The Mirror of the Sea
. “For, even if the weather be thick, it does not matter much to a ship having all the open sea before her bows.” Landfall, in Conrad's time as in ours, is another matter. It cannot be entrusted to the autopilot, nor even to the helmsman or master, which is why the harbor pilot, who knew Puget Sound by heart, appeared on the
Ottawa
's bridge carrying a duffel bag of charts. Occasionally consulting the radar screen, mostly studying the scenery ahead, he called out numerical bearings and the helmsmen called the bearings back in confirmation. The rest of us, even Captain Jakubowski, stood by, gazing through the glass in passive silence, faces luminously masked by the glowing screens, waiting for greater Seattle to appear on the dark horizon, and when it finally did appear on the horizon, like some resurrected twenty-first-century Atlantis rising up out of the water into the night sky, which it polluted deliciously with light, an electrical dawn, my spirits rose too.

It was well after midnight by the time we reached pier 5, Hanjin's container terminal in Seattle. Bob and Claire and much of the crew had gone to sleep, content to disembark the following morning. Not me. As a tugboat nosed the colossal ship toward the dock, I stood at the starboard rail, bags already packed. Ashore, a car and a truck materialized, and longshoremen climbed out. In hard hats and life vests, they took up their positions beside the yellow bollards, waiting for deckhands to throw them the lines. As soon as the ship had tied up, customs agents came aboard, and as soon as they cleared me, I rushed down the gangway onto the deserted sodium-lit pier.
³⁰
Among containers stacked six high in rows, I wandered, searching for the exit.

I'd had enough of seafaring. I was ready to fly—not sail, carbon footprint be damned—to the insular city of the Manhattoes and stay there a good long while. Ready to pend myself up in lath and plaster, tie myself to a counter, nail myself to a bench or clinch myself to a desk, so long as said pending, tying, nailing, or clinching came with decent health benefits and a retirement plan. Ready to circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon in the company of my long-suffering wife and my paternally neglected son.

To my paternally neglected son, when I got home, I'd read the opening chapters of
The Wind and the Willows
, and then, some Sabbath afternoon, I'd take him rowboating not on the life-threatening waters of Resurrection Bay but on the pond in Central Park, just as, in the very first chapter of
The Wind and the Willows
, River Rat takes landlocked Mole rowboating on the downstream backwaters of the river Thames. I, the oarsman, would play the part of River Rat. Young Bruno would be landlocked Mole. As he leaned back in his seat and felt the boat sway lightly under him, I would recite to him, dreamily, in character, the famous line: “Believe me, my young friend, there is
nothing
—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”