Moby-Duck (5 page)

Looking at the face of my unborn daughter or son adrift on a sonogram screen, I hadn't felt the sorts of emotions expecting parents are supposed to feel—joy, giddiness, pride, all that. Instead I'd felt a fatalistic conviction that either I or the world and probably both would let down that little big-headed alien wriggling around in those uterine grottoes. How safe and snug he or she looked in there. How peacefully oblivious, no doubts and vanities bubbling through his or her gray matter, no advertising jingles or licensed characters or boogeymen, no fantasies, not even dreams—at least none of the sort that would animate his or her postpartum inner life. It seemed cruel somehow, this conjuring act of incarnation, this impulse to summon out of one's DNA a person who'd had no choice in the matter. I'd had a choice, and I'd enthusiastically chosen to become a father. Now that the deed was done, I found my own paternity difficult to believe in. I could no more imagine being somebody's father than I could imagine performing the Eucharist or surgery.

Truth be told, it wasn't only my unborn child whom I was worried for. For months, a quote from one of Hawthorne's letters had been bothering me. It came to mind at unexpected moments—during faculty meetings, or as I trudged home beneath the fruitless pear trees and proprietary brownstones of Greenwich Village, or browsed among aisles of Bugaboos and Gymborees at BuyBuy Baby. It had drifted there, upon my inward seas, like a message in a bottle, a warning cast overboard by a shipwrecked seafarer years ago: “When a man has taken upon himself to beget children,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to Sophia Peabody, his fiancée, in 1841, “he has no longer any right to a life of his own.”

At the hospital, Beth hadn't seemed to share my gloomy presentiments. Supine on the examination table beside me, gazing beatifically at the sonogram screen while a sullen West Indian nurse prodded her ballooning abdomen with a wand, Beth kept giving my hand little squeezes of motherly delight, squeezes that had the peculiar effect of making me gloomier still. Why? Guilt had something to do with it, no doubt. Self-loathing, perhaps. I think also that there exists a kind of chiaroscuro of the human heart whereby the light that another's joy gives off, instead of shining brightly upon us, casts us more deeply into shadow.

Riffling the pages of my atlas, I turned to the North Pacific, found the coordinates—44.7°N, 178.1°E—at which, on that January day or night in 1992, the toys became castaways, and marked the spot with a yellow shred of Post-it. How placid—how truly pacific—that vaguely triangular ocean seemed in the cartographer's abstract rendering. Its waters were so transparent, as though the basin had been drained and its mountainous floor painted various shades of swimming-pool blue. Way over there, to the east, afloat on its green speck of land like a bug on a leaf, was Sitka. And way over there, huge as a continent, was China, where, odds were, someone in some factory was at that very moment bringing new rubber ducks into the world. It was then, as I studied my map, trying in vain to imagine the journey of the toys, that there swam into my mind the most bewitching question I know of—
What if?

What if I followed the trail of the toys wherever it led, from that factory in China, across the Pacific, into the Arctic? I wouldn't be able to do it in a single summer. It would require many months, maybe an entire year. I might have to take a leave of absence, or quit teaching altogether. I wasn't sure how or if I'd manage to get to all the places on my map, but perhaps that would be the point. The toys had gone adrift. I'd go adrift, too. The winds and currents would chart my course. Happenstance would be my travel agent. If nothing else, it would be an adventure, and adventures are hard to come by these days. And if I were lucky it might be a genuine voyage of discovery. Medieval Europeans divided the human lifetime into five ages, the first of which was known as the Age of Toys. It seemed to me that in twenty-first-century America, the Age of Toys never ends. Yes, stories fictional and otherwise can take us on illusory odysseys, but they can also take us on disillusory ones, and it was the latter sort of journey that I craved. It wasn't that I wanted, like Cook and Amundsen and Vancouver and Bering and all those other dead explorers, to turn terra incognita into terra cognita, the world into a map. Quite the opposite. I wanted to turn a map into a world.

—Robert McCloskey,
Make Way for Ducklings

There are two ways to get to the insular city of Sitka—by air and by sea. In my dreams, I would have picked up the frayed end of that imaginary, ten-thousand-mile-long trail that led from Sitka to Kennebunkport and followed it backward, Theseus style, to its source—backward across the Gulf of Maine, backward through the Northwest Passage, that legendary waterway which the historian Pierre Berton has described as a “maze of drifting, misshapen bergs,” a “crystalline world of azure and emerald, indigo and alabaster—dazzling to the eye, disturbing to the soul,” a “glittering metropolis of moving ice.” To Lieutenant William Edward Parry of the Royal Navy, who captained the
Alexander
into the maze in 1818, the slabs of ice looked like the pillars of Stonehenge.

By that summer, the summer of 2005, global warming had gone a long way toward turning Berton's maze of bergs into the open shipping channel of which Victorian imperialists dreamed. The following September, climatologists would announce that the annual summer melt had reduced the floating ice cap to its smallest size in a century of record keeping. Nevertheless, a transarctic journey, even aboard an icebreaker, was out of the question if I wanted to make it to and from Sitka by the first of August.

Instead I'd booked passage on the M/V
Malaspina
, part of the Alaskan Marine Highway, which is in fact not a highway at all but a state-operated fleet of ferries. Sailing from Bellingham, Washington, the
Malaspina
would reach Sitka five days before the Beachcombers' Fair began. If I flew home as soon as the fair ended, I would be in Manhattan a week before the baby arrived—assuming he or she did not arrive early, which, my wife's obstetrician warned us, was altogether possible. Although not at all happy about my plan, Beth had consented, on two conditions: one, that if she felt a contraction or her water broke, I would catch the next flight to New York, no matter the cost; and two, that I would call her by cell phone at least once a day.

Although I would soon be joining up with him in Sitka, I was eager to meet the gumshoe oceanographer in whose footsteps I was following. On my way to Bellingham I made time for a stopover in Seattle. A reporter for the
Oregonian
once referred to Curtis Ebbesmeyer's beachcombing correspondents as “disciples,” and he is an unlikely prophet figure of sorts, mailing out his epistles to the faithful, preaching the circuit of beachcombers' fairs, making oracular pronouncements in the press, pronouncements like, “I think the ocean is writing to us. And I'm trying to figure out what it all means.” Or, “Why do we like to walk on the beach? . . . All the cells inside our bodies realize they're close to their mom.” Or, my personal favorite: “The literature of things that float from here to there is so scattered, it makes no sense until you compress it. Then it begins to take on a glow, like radium.” When you've read too many issues of
Beachcombers' Alert!
back to back, as I had, a faint, sickly glow did seem to radiate from the newsletter's pages. Even its exclamatory title conveys a hint of apocalyptic alarm, and there are troubling ecological portents strewn among all the ruins and marvels.

But Ebbesmeyer is a conflicted prophet. He prefers the role of entertainer, taking corny, avuncular delight in his fabulous stories of messages in bottles and derelict boats. He enjoys the nicknames people have given him over the years, names that make him sound like a character from a comic book—Dr. Curt, Dr. Duck, Dr. Froggie. Jacques Cousteau's movie
Sea Hunt
made Ebbesmeyer first consider a career in oceanography, and he shares with Cousteau a self-dramatizing flair. Every oceanographic study Cousteau conducted was an adventure. Ebbesmeyer, on the other hand, prefers the genre of mystery. He is a great fan of Arthur Conan Doyle, whose rationalistic, Victorian version of the gothic has exerted an obvious influence on the oceanographer's imagination. When bodies or body parts wash up on the shores of the Pacific Northwest, detectives often give Ebbesmeyer a call, and he seems to take macabre delight in investigating these mysteries, mysteries like the case of the dismembered feet, or of the corpse packed into a suitcase.

“Shrill violin sounded from the second-story window at 221B Baker Street,” he begins one dispatch in
Beachcombers' Alert!
written in the form of a lost Sherlock Holmes story, “The Case of the Baobab and the Bottle.” Ebbesmeyer appears in this fictional parody as the “heavyset” Dr. E., driftological specialist in messages in bottles (or MIBs, as he likes to call them), summoned by Holmes and Watson to Baker Street to provide expert testimony. But the oceanographer's real alter ego in the parody is Holmes himself. “He desperately required a puzzle to occupy his mind which saw universes in the most trivial fact,” Ebbesmeyer says of the detective. The same could be said of him.

His own Baker Street is a quiet block in a quiet neighborhood near the main campus of the University of Washington, where back in the sixties he earned his Ph.D. Smaller than the adjacent houses, his bungalow, purchased from the fisherman who built it, exhibits a kind of cultivated slovenliness. Its peaked roof rests atop two squat brick columns. On the day I visited, a white rose trellis, bare and slightly askew, leaned against one of these columns as if left there by a distracted gardener. In the middle of the front lawn, inside a concrete planter box almost as big as the lawn itself, Ebbesmeyer's wife was growing a miscellaneous assortment of vegetables and flowers—lavender, agapanthus, squash—above which the purple pom-poms of onion blossoms swayed atop their stalks. Navy-blue awnings overshadowed the porch, and peering into the semidarkness I could see four matching forest-green Adirondack chairs, lined up, side by side, as if to behold the vista of the lawn. Next to the front steps, a small American flag protruded from a terra-cotta pot. (It had been only a week since Independence Day.) At the top of the steps, a cat dish sat on a ledge beneath a little bell. Ebbesmeyer himself greeted me at the door. “Come in, come in,” he said.

His face was familiar to me from photographs I'd seen in the press and in the pages of
Beachcombers' Alert!
where he makes frequent cameo appearances, displaying a water-stained basketball, hoisting a plastic canister that was supposed to have delivered Taiwanese propaganda to the Chinese mainland, gazing down deifically at the four Floatees perched on his furry forearm. He has a white beard, a Cheshire grin, and close-set eyes that together make his face a bit triangular. In the portrait that decorates the masthead of
Beachcombers Alert!
—small as Washington's on a dollar bill—little pennants of light fly across the lenses of his glasses, which are large and square. Since Ebbesmeyer likes to wear Hawaiian shirts and a necklace of what appear to be roasted chestnuts but which are in fact sea beans, the waterborne seeds of tropical trees that ocean currents disseminate to distant shores, pictures of him often bring to mind cartoons of Santa Claus on vacation.

He brewed us each a cup of coffee and suggested we adjourn to the backyard, which he refers to as his “office.” Passing through his basement, I saw many of the objects I'd read about in
Beachcombers' Alert!
Piled high on a bookshelf were dozens of Nikes. Some of them had survived the 1990 container spill—the first Ebbesmeyer ever investigated—in which 80,000 shoes had gone adrift. Others came from later accidents: 18,000 Nike sneakers fell overboard in 1999; 33,000 more in December of 2002. In January of 2000, some 26,000 Nike sandals—along with 10,000 children's shoes and 3,000 computer monitors, which float screen up and are popular with barnacles—plunged into the drink.