15
The toxicity of PCBs is well established, and their story has become a famous chapter in the annals of environmentalism.
PCBs were first synthesized in 1881 and first brought to market as a nonflammable insulator in electrical transformers, a safer alternative to mineral oils, in 1929. In the U.S., until they were banned in 1979, their primary producer was the Monsanto Corporation, whose sorcerers of the lab, by playing variations on the theme of chlorine and carbon, eventually found myriad other commercial applications for this family of compounds. They polymerized it and sold it as an insulator for copper wiring. They added it to varnishes and paints. By the 1970s, PCBs were ubiquitous, despite mounting empirical evidence of their toxicity. In response to that evidence, Monsanto and its competitors deployed the tactics pioneered to great success by the tobacco companies: they produced studies that minimized the risks and confused the public. In the industrialized nations of the West, commercial production of the substances had all but ceased by 1989, but to this day in the environment PCBs remain ubiquitous, seeping out of landfills and superfund sites and electrical transformers, persisting in sediments and drifting on the surface of the sea.
What's so bad about PCBs? Until the mid-eighties, according to the industry, nothing. Fears flamed by academic and government scientists were overblown, Monsanto and its competitors claimed. Finally, in 1987, they surrendered. In a study funded by the EPA, independent scientists evaluated the literature and deemed the evidence for the “carcinogenicity of PCBs” to be “over whelming,” and a peer-reviewed, industry-funded study found that “every commercial PCB mixture tested caused cancer.” For oceanographers the data were more troubling still: “It is very important to note,” the EPA notes, “that the composition of PCB mixtures changes following their release into the environment. The types of PCBs that tend to bioaccumulate in fish and other animals and bind to sediments happen to be the most carcinogenic.”
And PCBs aren't only carcinogenic. They impair the immune system, increasing vulnerability to opportunistic viruses. They reduce fertility. In laboratory tests conducted on monkeys, they've been shown to stunt “neurological development,” specifically “short term memory and learning.” They concentrate in breast milk. And according to the laws of biomagnification, the predators at the top of the food chain carry the heaviest contaminant burden. The killer whales of the North Pacific are among the most intoxicated mammals on earth. So are human populations that eat a fishy diet. So are the albatrosses that nest on Laysan Island. Look again at the plastic duck Bryan Leiser found just north of Gore Point; you won't see any of this. You'll see a faded, sea-battered bath toy, an icon of childhood. “Everything tells a story,” Ebbesmeyer likes to say. Perhaps, but not all stories are visible, no matter how illimitably long you study the evidence. Some stories only a mass spectrometer can tell.
16
Additionally you will pass a sign reading MARK TWAIN MONKEY POD TREE. In his Hawaiian travelogue, Twain makes mention of riding a mule to the summit of Kilauea, of visiting the scene of Captain Cook's death, of trying in vain to procure coconuts by hurling rocks at them, of enjoying himself lecherously at a hula dance, of investigating the burial cave of a dead Hawaiian king (where he and his traveling companion blundered upon a skeletal hand in a burial canoe). He even makes mention of a cistern tree that collects freshwater and a mango tree that collects exceptionally delicious mangoes. But nowhere does he mention planting a monkey pod tree, or of planting any other sort of tree. Perhaps he did and neglected to mention it. The tree that he supposedly planted blew down in a hurricane in 1957. This impostor grew from a salvaged shoot.
17
Whether or not it was now, Moore's Spanish hadn't always been perfect: he'd intended to name his research foundation after an endangered species of Mexican seaweed that he thought was called
algalita
. In fact, the Spanish for the weed is
alguita
âlittle algae. Hence the name of his catamaran. Until his fateful detour into the North Pacific in 1998, protecting and restoring kelp forests had been one of the foundation's main missions.
18
In the spring of 2010, cetologists in Washington State would use similar forensic methods, investigating the stomach of a thirty-seven-foot-long gray whale that had washed up, dead, near Seattle. Among the items they found: duct tape, electrical tape, fabric (miscellaneous), sock, sweatpant leg, towel, fishing line, golf ball, green rope, nylon braided rope, red plastic cylinder, black fragments, CapriSun juice pack, miscellaneous bag material (times twenty-six), red plastic stake, sandwich bag, ziplock bag, rubbery string, surgical glove, “unknown shell-like material, possibly natural.”
19
It didn't help that in a book on oceanography, I'd recently learned why NOAA research vessels no longer permit swim callsânot long ago, a scientist swimming in the Caribbean lost a leg to a tiger shark. Nor did it help that Amy Young had told me about a surfer friend of hers who'd lost a ham-size hunk of thigh to the jaws of a shark. Nor did it help that, aboard the
Alguita,
I'd been reading and admiring Peter Matthiessen's
Blue Meridian
, about a search for the great white. Matthiessen includes many impressively detailed accounts of attacks by what South Africans call the “white death.”
20
Like those facing the Laysan albatross, the threats to monk seals, a biologist named Bud Antonelis explained to me, are legion. There's the increase in shark predation caused in part by the dredging of lagoons. There's the loss of breeding grounds to rising, warming seas. There's the toxic waste dumped by the U.S. military, the toxoplasmosis contracted from cat pee, the spread of West Nile virus. Of all the perils monk seals face, the most memorable one to my mind is this: changing phocine demographics have led to a shortage of females, and in response to this shortage horny bull seals have grown murderously, pedophilically aggressive, drowning and suffocating female pups while attempting to mate with them, thereby reducing the female population further still. And although the number of entanglements has fallen since the cleanup efforts began, the rate of entanglement in 2004 was actually seven times higher than in 2000. What accounts for the spike? During El Niño years such as 2004, the boundaries of the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone shift south, engulfing the monk seal's habitat. Even in more typical years, the ocean deposits an estimated fifty-two tons of debris on the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
21
If I don't make it to Kamilo Beach then at least I'd like to make it to Green Sand Beach, which I read about in
The Rough Guide to Hawaii
: “It is greenish in a rusty-olive sort of way, but if you're expecting a dazzling stretch of green sand backed by a coconut grove you'll be disappointed. The only reason to venture here is if you feel like braving a four-mile hike along the oceanfront, with a mild natural curiosity at the end.” The green sand is pulverized olivine. Olivine sounds like a cosmetic product or else a butter substitute but is in fact a mineral forged in volcanoes.
22
Later, traveling alone in Guangzhou, I would hire a twenty-two-year-old freelance translator who called herself Amy, a name she preferred to the Chinese one her parents gave her. Her ideas of America were strongly influenced by her favorite television show,
Sex and the City
, the appeal of which was obvious: the lives of its characters were like fantasy versions of Amy's own. She too was a single, independent woman who'd come to the big city seeking excitement and glamour, and although she'd so far attained more of the former than the latter, she was by China's standards a success, an entrepreneurial escapee from Guangdong's formerly rural countryside, lifted up by her good English from the life of drudgery to which some of her friends and family are still condemned. When she was growing up, everyone in her town worked in the fields. Now they work in a factory making electrical cables, she said.
She was the first woman in her family to have gone to college, the first to have moved away, the first to have traveled abroad on business (to Hong Kong, Vietnam, and once to Stuttgart). Even though she struggled to pay her rent, she was helping to put her younger brother through school. Evenings she taught English to salespeople. By day she worked as a translator and sourcing agent for foreign businessmen who came to inspect factories or find suppliers. “My mother's Buddhist,” she told me, “but I'm not anything,” except, that is, “a workaholic.” She almost never returned home to visit her familyâno trains go there, you have to take three different buses, and furthermore, the mosquitoes there are really big. “It's crazy!” she said of the mosquitoes. “Crazy” was her favorite English word. The characters on
Desperate Housewives
were “really crazy.” Her friends told her she was crazy for working so much. Someday, she'd like to live abroad, preferably in Australia, though she'd settle for Germany. In the meantime, she spent most of her free time on her cell phone or at her computer, surfing the Web, keeping up with her clients via Skype, the Internet phone service. Afraid that she wasn't skinny or pretty enough, yet unafraid to speak her mind (“Put me in your book!” she said when I told her I was a writer), she reminded me a lot of the young Americans I used to teach.
23
Vendors sell black-market goods openly on the streets of Guangzhou. One night outside my hotel there, a man would approach me with what looked like a deck of cards, fanning them with his thumb and saying, “Would you like some girls?” Each card showed a different photograph.
24
MGA Entertainment, the maker of Bratz dolls, insisted at the time that the National Labor Committee had mischaracterized the conditions in this factory, though similar practices have been documented at other Guangdong toy factories.
25
As the ferry made its way up the Pearl River, there would materialize out of the smog, like ghost ships, idle barges and little junks and great container ships awaiting repair. At one point the span of a bridge suddenly loomed overhead, an unfinished bridge; the span terminated in midair. Zooming toward China, I paged through Jonathan D. Spence's
In Search of Modern China,
and stumbling upon the following passage, written in the early 1800s by a scholar named Gong Zizhen, I thought of the Pearl River's smog: “When the wealthy vie with each other in splendor and display while the poor squeeze each other to death; when the poor do not enjoy a moment's rest while the rich are comfortable; when the poor lose more and more while the rich keep piling up treasures; when in some ever more extravagant desires awaken, and in others an ever more burning hatred; when some become more and more arrogant and overbearing in their conduct, and others ever more miserable and pitiful until gradually the most perverse and curious customs arise, bursting forth as though from a hundred springs and impossible to stop, all of this will finally congeal in an ominous vapor which will fill the space between heaven and earth with its darkness.”
26
About that breakdown and vanishing act, it's the old, familiar story: the parent, sometimes a sad-sack father, sometimes a clinically depressive mother, takes flight from his or her life of quiet desperation and runs off in search of some Northwest Passage of the mind or heart. My mother searched for hers every few years and finally, failing to find it, tried unsuccessfully to overdose on tricyclic antidepressants. There was institutionalization. She recovered, partially. Today she lives alone, unemployed, in a condominium her exhusband, my father, bought for her so that she would stop showing up, needy and homeless, on his sons' doorsteps. On the rare visit I pay her, she will occasionally try to resurrect that old alliterative sobriquet, Donovan Duck, speaking in a baby voice, as if I were still two, as if time could be turned back. Every so often, my mother will dig out a snapshot of me as a child and mail it to me. Her reasons for choosing a particular photograph are always a bit mysterious. I study them for significance. Not long ago, she sent a photograph in which, naked, ten months old, sitting in the bath across from my brother, I appear to be attempting to gnaw through my rubber duck's skull. The picture is dated January 1973.
27
Writes the art historian Anne Higonnet, “The modern child is always the sign of a bygone era, of a past which is necessarily the past of adults, yet which, being so distinct, so sheltered, so innocent, is also inevitably a lost past, and therefore understood through the kind of memory we call nostalgia.”
Take a look, for instance, at one of the most famous representations of childhood, Gainsborough's
The Blue Boy
, for which the painter dressed up a neighbor's son in a luxurious costume so dazzling it seems spun from sky. To a contemporary eye, the lad's blue satin suit, beribboned shoes, and lace collar look old-fashioned, but no more so than the painting itself. It was painted in 1770, after all, when people favored such fancy getups, we assume. In fact, the outfit was already old-fashioned in Gainsborough's time, as was the pristine natural landscape over which the boy so aristocratically presides. What to a contemporary eye appears to be the portrait of a noble scion, commissioned no doubt by his proud parents, is actually a bit of
mise-en-scène
, an eighteenth-century precursor to photographs of children dressed like shepherdesses or cowboys and posed before painted scrims at Coney Island or Sears.
A hundred years after Gainsborough painted
The Blue Boy
, the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais gave the world another famous portrait of childhood,
Bubbles
. Here again is a child fancifully dressed in a lace collar and an antiquated suit, this time of green velvet rather than blue satin. Millais's preschooler is younger than Gainsborough's tween, and he is also cuterâporcelain-faced, pink-lipped, with a curly mop of strawberry blond hair. Whereas the Blue Boy gazes directly at the viewer, assuming the conventional, almost cocky pose of an adult, Millais's moppet has been transfixed by the bubble he has just blown from a pipe. He is, it seems, assuming no pose at all. The original title of the painting was
A Child's World
âthat realm so unlike our own into which the painting offers a voyeuristic glimpse. Rather than presiding over a landscape, the boy sits on a block of weathered stone in a garden of potted plants, the sort of place one might encounter in the pages of Beatrix Potter. The scenery has grown more domestic, more suburban, but it still evokes a bygone, preindustrial past. Thanks to Pears Soap, which purchased the copyright to
Bubbles
and turned it into a print advertisement, Millais's mass-produced image eventually eclipsed Gainsborough's museum piece in the iconography of childhood, adorning collectible plates and ephemeral toiletries as well as the pages of magazines. Soap bubbles have been a symbol of innocence ever since.
In her amply illustrated study
Pictures of Innocence
, Anne Higonnet identifies several subgenres of child portraiture. Along with children in costumes (the genre to which
Bubbles
and
The Blue Boy
belong), there is, for instance, the genre of children with pets. Antique costumes, Higonnet argues, make the child seem timeless; pets make them seem like animalsâless conscious than us, less human, more natural: “Usually the pets are small and cuddlyâkittens, puppies and bunnies were favorite choicesâcueing the viewer's interpretation of the child.”