Moby-Duck (49 page)

The relationship between seeing and knowing helps explain, I think, why it is I was compelled to chase the yellow ducks lost at sea. In following their trail I've strived to raise, if only by a megapixel or two, the resolution of my own mental model of the world. Of course, as most oceanographers will tell you, a rubber duck isn't a very sensitive instrument. You can't follow it by satellite. It can collect PCBs and other POPs, which is of some scientific use, but it can't measure salinity, or levels of dissolved pollutants like CO
₂
and mercury, or take the water's temperature. “In fact, this data is not very good,” a Woods Hole oceanographer named John Toole told me, a bit apologetically, when I described for him Ebbesmeyer's accidental flotsam studies. Bower's dozen yellow floats would tell us far more about the ocean than a million castaway toys ever could, and her floats, as I learned from John Toole, are just a small part of a global fleet. Since the year 2000 oceanographers have seeded the oceans of the world with more than three thousand of these underwater robots. You can follow their peregrinations online. If the Evergreen
Ever Laurel
had spilled a shipment of profiling floats, we'd know their fates.

Profiling floats can't descend below two thousand meters, however. And unlike polyethylene ducks, they can't ascend into Arctic latitudes, where sea ice makes it impossible for them to communicate via satellite. North of Canada and Siberia are what oceanographers call the Canadian Hole and the Russian Hole. These holes aren't holes in the ice, or holes in the seafloor. They are giant holes in the climatological record. The abyss and the poles remain the last redoubts of oceanic darkness. The data that profiling floats beam home won't banish darkness from the deep once and for all, or resolve the ultimate mysteries of the sea. But slowly, over the next several decades, they may, one hopes, shed a little more light on the ocean's fourth and darkest dimension.

 

 

With a big heave-ho, Ostrom and Valdes hurled Bower's last float into the
Knorr
's wake, where it swirled about in the roiling foam, then righted itself and went bobbing away. In a week or two it would, as Bower liked to say, “phone home.” Months later, I would visit Bower at her office on Cape Cod, and she would pull onto her big computer screen maps on which her floats—all but one successfully launched from her experimental mooring—had traced their wayward routes.

Our last night at sea, shivering on the
Knorr
's bow, Sutherland, Ostrom, Maloof, and I watched the northern lights flicker green and psychedelic across the sky. “Aliens in September,” Maloof said, and Ostrom said, “It's Elvis. I'm telling you that's where he went. He's with us.”

The
Knorr
docked in Nuuk a little after dawn. Waking in my cabin belowdecks, I sensed a strange stillness. We weren't rolling, or pitching, or yawing or indulging in any of the six degrees of freedom. The
Knorr
's engines had fallen silent. And when I ascended to the main lab and looked out the portholes, I'd seen an astonishment—dark brown mountains, frosted with snow: Greenland! Greenland, that white, icy island, huge as a continent, misnamed by that real estate developer Erik the Red. Greenland, which on world maps resembles a wordless thought bubble floating up from the coast of Labrador, as if Canada's mind had gone blank. Bower and I and most of the scientific team spent the day wandering around Nuuk, sampling the reindeer soup, admiring a pair of bergy bits stranded in a fjord. With a startling crack, loud as a rifle report, one of them split in two. The two halves rolled over. Slush sizzled into the water. The next day, on the first of three connecting flights, we flew over the Greenland ice cap, that white Sahara. The flight lasted an hour, and for all but a few minutes of it there was nothing to see from my window seat but ice—no sign of life, no trace of color except the occasional pool of blue melt.

—Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick

Three years after setting out on the trail of the toys, a few weeks before reaching its end, I find myself shoeless and prone on the red helipad of a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker, trying to wriggle my feet into the rubber booties of a yellow survival suit. It's a sunny afternoon in early July, and the icebreaker is tied up at the docks in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, across the harbor from Halifax. Spread out beneath me, the survival suit looks like the neoprene hide of a yellow giant. It's lined with buoyant foam and some sort of silvery, space-age fabric—quilted titanium, perhaps. Also on the helipad struggling to wriggle into survival suits, with varying degrees of success, are thirteen scientists, a few dozen Canadian coasties, the three members of a television news team from Australia, a Swiss reporter for a German wire service, and a Canadian photojournalist whom the Australians have taken to calling “the Snapper.” Tomorrow, aboard this big red icebreaker, the CCGS
Louis S. St-Laurent,
or the
Louis
for short, we will embark on a grand, Arctic expedition.

As the
Louis
makes its annual run through the Northwest Passage, the scientists aboard will search for clues to the planet's history and future—clues written in sediment cores pulled from the seafloor, in water samples collected in a conductivity-temperature-depth rosette, in the migrations of copepods and currents and pollutants. The Australians will shoot footage. The Swiss reporter will file dispatches. The Snapper will snap money shots of polar bears. And I, at long last, will chase the toys into, and I hope out of, the labyrinth of ice.

Or into and out of whatever's left of it. Last year's summertime melt broke all records, exceeding the fears of even the gloomiest climatologists. In satellite photos taken on September 16, 2007, the day before I boarded the
Knorr
, the polar ice cap doesn't look like a cap at all. It looks like the white half of a yin-yang symbol, a swirl of ice opposed by a swirl of open water. The open water stretched from the coast of Siberia to within three hundred miles of the North Pole. No icebreaker in history has attempted what the officers of the
Louis
are attempting this summer—to transit the Northwest Passage in early July. In years past, the sclerotic, ice-clogged channels of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago remained impassable until late July or early August. Not even icebreakers could smash their way through. But at the height of last year's summertime melt, the European Space Agency announced that for the first time since satellites began monitoring the Arctic, the Northwest Passage was almost totally ice-free. Six yachts had sailed right through it, completing in a matter weeks a voyage that a hundred years ago had taken Roald Amundsen three years. Canada's Ice Service is forecasting that this summer's big melt, like last summer's, will begin ahead of schedule—two to three weeks ahead of schedule, to be precise, and so the
Louis
will begin its annual Arctic voyage ahead of schedule too. “It's going to be hot up there,” I overheard a deckhand say this morning. “Last time we were up there it was 24 degrees colder here in Halifax than it was up there”—24 degrees centigrade, that is.

The air up there may be warm; the water, I've been assured, will be plenty cold—below zero in some places, since the freezing point of seawater is two degrees lower than that of fresh. Hence the survival suits. Supervising the safety drill is First Officer Cathy Lacombe. A French Canadian, when speaking English, Lacombe tends to aspirate words beginning in vowels. “In Harctic water you're not going to last two minutes,” she informed us when we mustered on the hangar deck. “It's going to cut your hair and you are going to die.” She held up her own survival suit. “In this you can last four howers.”

Listening closely to Lacombe's speech was a safety inspector dispatched on short notice. “Whatever you do,” he added when she'd finished, “if you're wearing a hooded sweatshirt, get the damn thing off, because that hood is like a wick. It will suck the cold water in, and, again,
you'll die
.”

These aren't the only warnings we've received today. We've been told not to visit the crow's nest without permission because in rough seas we could tumble to our deaths. We've been told not to squeeze, Indiana Jones-style, through a watertight door that has begun to close; do so and the watertight door could amputate a limb, or slice you in half. Once a watertight door has begun to close there's no shutting it off. We've been told that “it's not a good idea to get drunk on a ship.”

Even if you're sober, even if the sun is shining and you're on the helipad of an icebreaker still tied up at the docks and yachts are sailing picturesquely around on Halifax Harbor, putting on a survival suit, I now know, can reduce you to a toddlerlike state of haplessness. While I tug at my suit's recalcitrant zipper with fingers gloved in spongy rubber, across the helipad, trying to extrude his right hand through the elastic cuff of a watertight sleeve, Gerd Braune, the Swiss reporter for the German wire service—balding, bespectacled, mustachioed, looking clerical—is muttering under his breath what I assume are German profanities. Other people are stumbling about like clumsy contortionists, tipsy Houdinis, yellow sleeves flapping. In the manner of a preschool teacher readying her wards for an outing in the snow, Lacombe assists us one by one, the Coast Guard inspector following after her, scribbling observations on a clipboard and checking his watch.

Lacombe, though she has the high voice and haircut of a choirboy, is a big woman, almost as tall as I am, and considerably wider and stronger. When she reaches me, she yanks my suit's zipper to my chin, pulls the yellow hood over my head, and clasps the Velcro face mask across my mouth like a gag. Only my eyes and nose are left exposed to the warm, midsummer Nova Scotian afternoon. I feel like a cosmonaut, or astronaut, or aquanaut—some sort of naut. A cryonaut, I suppose you'd call someone equipped for a dip in the ice. Mummified in yellow neoprene, poaching in my own body heat, waiting to be inspected by the inspector with the clipboard, I find myself thinking that, overboard in a survival suit, if one wished, one could reenact the Arctic journey of the toys, or at least four hours of it. “When seamen fall overboard” in Arctic waters, Melville writes, “they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued in amber.”

 

 

The first leg of our voyage will take us to Resolute (population 229). There, the Snapper, the Australians, and Gerd Braune will all disembark, and several new supernumeraries will come aboard. Among them will be this expedition's architect, a visionary oceanographer named Eddy Carmack. At Woods Hole, whenever I asked about the mystery I was trying to solve, those who didn't summarily dismiss the journey of the toys as “folk science” and me as a fool in possession of an errand, John Toole among them, almost always said the same thing: the person you should really talk to is Eddy Carmack. This turns out to have been good advice.

Carmack, I was pleased to discover, is a believer in driftology. Last January, the day after the Hanjin
Ottawa
tied up in Seattle, I paid a visit to his office at the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, British Columbia. A fan of
Beachcombers' Alert!
Carmack had known Ebbesmeyer since his graduate school days at the University of Washington, where the young Dr. E. was Carmack's teaching assistant in an advanced physical oceanography course. “I just find it fascinating,” he said of Ebbesmeyer's flotsam studies. “High-tech aside, this is telling us stuff million-dollar instruments can't tell us—where stuff really goes.”

Although Carmack has spent much of his career studying the ocean the high-tech way, with conductivity-temperature-depth rosettes, geochemical tracers, and expendable bathythermographs, he's also, every year since the year 2000, studied it the old-fashioned way, by setting bottles adrift. The Drift Bottle Project, he calls this ongoing Lagrangian experiment. With the help of sailors and scientists and Nova Scotian schoolchildren, he's scattered more than four thousand bottles in icy water. Replies have come in from Alaska and Nunavut but also from exotic destinations—Russia, Brazil, England, France, Norway. “Norway, the Faroes, Orkney—those places are bottle magnets for bottles dropped in the eastern Arctic or the Irminger Sea,” Carmack told me.

It's thanks to Carmack and to the Drift Bottle Project that I've been offered a cabin aboard the
Louis
. Officially speaking, I'm not a member of the press corps. Officially speaking I'm an unpaid research assistant, a volunteer bottle tosser. We've all been given a list titled “Crew on Board” and beside my name appear the words “Scientific Staff,” words that I would like to photocopy and send—triumphantly or perhaps vindictively or perhaps, come to think of it, pathetically—to my eleventh-grade chemistry teacher, Ms. H——, who snuffed out, as if they were the blue flames of so many Bunsen burners, the fanciful, marine biological dreams I'd once entertained. In fairness to her, my idea of a marine biologist was a romantic one, influenced far more by Doc from John Steinbeck's
Cannery Row
than by the Krebs cycle or the table of the elements or the melting point of magnesium. As it so happens, Doc, whom Steinbeck based on his friend Ed Ricketts—marine biologist, pioneering ecologist, founding father of fish-boat science—also happens to be one of Eddy Carmack's heroes.