Moby-Duck (44 page)

In short, I was ready to come home. But I couldn't. Not yet. What I'd gone searching for had yet to be found. I had one last riddle to puzzle out, one last journey to take—or rather to finish. It had begun one September morning, before I went sailing with Charlie Moore or visited the Po Sing plastics works or crossed the Pacific on the Hanjin
Ottawa
at the height of the winter storm season
.
It would end, months later, after a long hiatus and numerous detours, deep in the interior of the Canadian Arctic on the icy shores of the Northwest Passage.

At the main dock behind Smith Laboratory on Water Street in downtown Woods Hole, the research vessel
Knorr
was preparing to depart. Forklifts zipped around, beeping. Stevedores and deckhands walked the aluminum gangway, busy as leafcutter ants, loading and stowing cargo—provisions, instruments, a big cardboard box containing a new Nordic-Track treadmill for the
Knorr
's onboard gym. Through the main dock's chain link security gates, a silver minivan arrived, and a woman descended from the passenger seat. Forty-six years old
,
she was on this mid-September morning girlishly attired—as if for an afternoon of yachting on Vineyard Sound—in a rose-and-white waterproof jacket, white shorts, white sneakers. She had a pair of sunglasses pushed up into her coppery, shoulder-length hair and clutched a black leather pouch in her left hand. This was Amy Bower, a senior scientist in the Department of Physical Oceanography at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the chief scientist on the first leg of the voyage that was about to begin—voyage 192 it was officially and forgettably called. A photographer asked Bower to pose for a few publicity shots, dockside, against the picturesque backdrop of the
Knorr
.

Since its maiden voyage, in 1968, the
Knorr
had carried scientists to every corner of the ocean, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, the Gulf of Alaska to the Gulf of Maine, the Bay of Bengal to the Bay of Fundy. Aboard the
Knorr
scientists had collected the first images of the wrecked
Titanic
. They'd revealed the secrets of plate tectonics at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. In February 1977, above the Galápagos Rift, they'd sent a camera 8,250 feet down and discovered bizarre organisms improbably well adapted to the infernally hot, infernally sulfurous environs of volcanic sea vents—giant albino clams, giant albino mussels, giant albino crabs, giant albino tube worms growing in thickets, like Martian bamboo, red obscene tulips of flesh blossoming from their tall white stalks. Some scientists speculate that it was not at the stormy surface of the ocean, or in Darwin's lightning-struck pond, but out of such volcanic vents—black smokers, they're called—that life first arose.

In the previous two years alone, the
Knorr
's itinerary had included stops in San Diego; the Galápagos Islands; Valparaíso, Chile; Buenos Aires; Reykjavík; the Caribbean (Bermuda, Martinique, St. John's); and Nuuk, capital of Greenland, which is where the first leg of voyage 192 would officially end. Tourist maps from these ports decorated the hallway outside the ship's mess—“Feel the warmth and softness of the Icelandic wool,” enticed an ad for Helga's Wool Market on the map of Reykjavík. Now nearing retirement, the
Knorr
was nevertheless a beautiful ship, high-prowed like a navy cutter. Its hull, 279 feet long, was the deep blue of the ocean on a world map, its upper decks, white as a wedding cake. A light-blue stripe beribboned its single white stack, and the white faceted sphere of a satellite antenna rose amidships.

On the
Knorr
's fantail, beside the starboard rail, looming above Bower's shoulder as she posed for photographs, appeared another, smaller sphere, painted the yellow of a rubber duck. The size of a wrecking ball, made of syntactic foam interlarded with hollow glass orbs, it sat atop a big steel trellis. Across its northern latitudes, in black block letters, the following message ran.

The photo shoot over, Bower extracted from her black leather pouch a collapsible cane. With an expert flourish of her wrist, like a magic trick, she made the cane spring forth and went tap, tap, tapping up the gangway.

 

 

The week before, I'd driven to Cape Cod in a rented Chevy and checked myself in to the Sands of Time motel. After a fitful night beneath a floral print bedspread in the motel's basement suite, my mind sluggish with caffeine withdrawal but abrim with boyish curiosity, I'd made my way on foot to what had once been a church of the classic New England sort—white siding, white bell tower adorning a peaked roof. From outside it resembled a Puritan chapel whose cross and steeple had been dismasted by an atheistic wind. The interior of the building conjured forth altogether different associations.

Up front, where perhaps a preacher in a black cassock had once detailed the dangers awaiting sinners in the hands of an angry god, there now protruded the flukes of a whale. The beast seemed to have been snared in Sheetrock while attempting to escape. From a nearby computer mounted on a pedestal emanated the otherworldly ululations of humpbacks, and in a glass case beneath a window could be seen replicas of the tube worms that thirty years ago scientists on the
Knorr
had discovered growing along the sea vents of the Galápagos Rift.

The former church now serves as the gift shop and exhibit center of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, whose initials, WHOI, its employees charmingly pronounce
HOO-ee
. Woods Hole, I learned during the week I spent there, is a marvelous place, a veritable distillery of marvels. Passing through it on your way to catch the ferry to Martha's Vineyard, you'd never suspect that this sleepy seaside village—also home to the Marine Biological Laboratory, a Coast Guard station, and branch offices of both NOAA and the U.S. Geological Survey—had once been the Houston of deep-sea exploration and the Los Alamos of submarine warfare.

With remote-controlled vehicles resembling torpedoes, Woods Hole oceanographers have looked for cracks and leaks in the forty-five-mile-long network of aqueducts that deliver drinking water to New York City. Some can read the history of the planet in tubes of sediment, thousands of which are kept, carefully archived, in a climate-controlled warehouse, a sort of library of dirt, whose contents date back decades and may well contain auguries of decades to come. With a mass spectrometer, they can analyze the isotopes in a baleen frond and tell you that the whale to whom it formerly belonged wintered in the tropics and summered in the Arctic. Others are experts on sand, which is more interesting than you'd think.
³¹

I hadn't come to Woods Hole seeking wonders, however. I'd come seeking a guide, some wayfinding oceanographer willing to help me follow the trail of the toys into and out of the Arctic's icy maze. I didn't find one, but I did find Amy Bower, who was willing—so long as I packed quickly and could afford a last-minute plane ticket home from Greenland—to take me to the Arctic's brink. There, at 60.6°N, 52.4°W, just south of the Davis Strait, in the northeastern waters of the Labrador Sea, gateway to the Northwest Passage, birthplace of icebergs, we would deploy a “densely instrumented mooring,” a sort of underwater weather vane almost two miles long in waters two miles deep. The purpose of the mooring was to gather intelligence on Irminger Rings, a variety of “mesoscale eddy” spawned by the Irminger Current, a remnant of the Gulf Stream.

The Labrador Sea, I'd learned by then, is the source of the Labrador Current, which transports cold Arctic water south along the coasts of Newfoundland and Maine. If those beachcombers in Kennebunkport and Curtis Ebbesmeyer were right, if one of the castaway ducks had made it to Gooch's Beach by the summer of 2003, if the duck I'd spent years chasing was in fact a data point rather than a will-o'-the-wisp, it would have ridden the Labrador Current to get there. For me voyage 192 was a free ride, a voyage of opportunity. When I accepted Bower's last-minute invitation, I had no particular interest in Irminger Rings and mesoscale eddies. I had no interest in them because I'd never heard of them. In the dank, dim, florally themed basement suite of the Sands of Time motel, I consulted the oceanographic textbooks I'd stuffed into my suitcase. “Mesoscale eddies are the oceanic analogues of weather systems in the atmosphere,” one textbook said. They are also, it said, “an exciting and relatively new discovery.”

 

 

At nine thirty sharp, the provisions all stowed, the equipment all lashed, the stevedores slipped the lines, and with a blast of its horn, the
Knorr
drifted from the dock. At the starboard rail Bower and I and the four other members of her scientific team waved at the crowd that had come to send us off. In the aimless manner of a councilman on a parade float, I waved at figures I could see but did not know. Bower waved, aimlessly, at figures she knew and loved but could not see.

A seasoned seafarer, on previous research cruises she'd braved winter storms on the North Atlantic and Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden—pirates, armed with grenade launchers, whom the research vessel's crew had managed to repel with a high-powered hose. From her colleagues her fearlessness had earned her the nickname “Hurricane Amy.” She'd published dozens of scientific papers in academic journals, papers with abstruse titles like “Structure of the Mediterranean Undercurrent and Mediterranean Water Spreading Around the Southwestern Iberian Peninsula.” She also happened to have, while performing these feats of seamanship and scholarship, gone almost totally blind.

She first learned she was losing her sight in her early twenties, when, driving to the University of Rhode Island from her mother's house in Maine, aware that her night vision was poor, she'd turned down the dash lights. With the dash lights off, it was easier to see the road ahead, but with the dash lights off, she couldn't read the speedometer. Going seventy on a two-lane highway, she'd come up too fast on a truck and skidded into it. She'd escaped the wreck unscathed, but not her next visit to the ophthalmologist. He informed her that she'd developed a blind spot. It was eventually determined that she was suffering from not one but two congenital diseases, macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa.

The macula, near the center of the retina, “is what you use for fine vision,” Bower told me. When it degenerates, “everything you look at,” everything you try to focus on, “disappears.” Retinitis pigmentosa, meanwhile, attacks your peripheral vision. Bower's loss of sight resembled the meticulous restoration of a painting, only in reverse—a meticulous defacement. Slowly, little by little, from the center and from the edges, her vision was being rubbed away as if by a rag dipped in turpentine. When she looks at you with what remains of her vision, she doesn't appear to be looking at you. She appears to be looking at something to one side of you.

She could sense this morning that the sky was overcast. That over there, to aft, were the gray waters of Vineyard Sound, and over there, to fore, the village of Woods Hole, a blur of Cape Cod clapboard and academic brick. But when she looked straight ahead, at the crowd gathered on the dock, whatever she tried to focus on disappeared. In the crowd were Bower's husband, David Fisichella, and, in his arms, dressed in pink leggings and a fleece sweatshirt, their adopted Guatemalan daughter, five-year-old, black-haired Sara. It was to Sara that Bower blindly waved. That morning Sara had been “acting out” in protest of her mother's desertion, or so Bower believed. “She wanted to wear a bunny costume to bed last night, and when she woke up one of the socks was missing, and she had a total meltdown,” Bower said.

Sending forth from its stack a yellowy stocking of diesel fumes, the
Knorr
circled about and steamed north, past the wooded coast of Martha's Vineyard. From the
Knorr
's mast an American flag snapped in the headwind. Atop the bridge the white bar of the LORAN lazily spun. At the starboard rail, Bower reported the day's forecast: “Four- to five-foot waves out of the northeast. Sounds good to me.”

Meanwhile, 828 miles above the lowering clouds, hurtling through space at 17.4 times the speed of sound, a NASA satellite named Jason-1 was beaming microwaves silently and invisibly down, and eight hundred miles north of Woods Hole a mesoscale eddy was invisibly gathering in the depths of the Labrador Sea.

 

 

“Mesoscale eddies are like watery storms, kind of like tornadoes, only much slower,” Bower tells me that first morning in the
Knorr'
s main lab, as we're steaming past Nantucket, making twelve knots. The main lab is a long room lit by portholes and fluorescent lights and furnished with galvanized metal workbenches surfaced in plywood and bolted to the floor. We're seated at one of these workbenches, in front of our computers, beneath a pair of portholes through which can be seen—though not by Bower—the leaping shapes of the waves. As the ship rolls to port, the portholes seem to fill, just a little, with water. As it rolls to starboard, they seem to drain. Plugged into power strips bracketed to the ceiling, the cords of our computers sway, and from belowdecks come the rumble and throb of the
Knorr'
s four engines.

Not only are mesoscale eddies like watery storms, Bower explains; from the viewpoint of a physicist, they are watery storms—not storms of wind and waves, rain and lightning, all the usual atmospheric jazz, but storms of spinning water. To a physicist, water and air are both turbulent fluids. “Mesoscale” means that, relative to other climatological phenomena, these eddies we're hunting are pretty big—dozens of miles wide—but relative to others, not that big, not megascale big, not thousands of miles wide; not as big as the great oceanic gyres Curtis Ebbesmeyer had taught me about.