But as far as I could tell, the only thing Mary knew of the ocean-current models was a pair of GPS waypoints—one from NOAA and one from the University of Hawaii. Was that going to be it? Get to a waypoint and take a quick peek around? I had heard Mary say that her NOAA contact had suggested we “call him when we’re out there.” But now even that would be difficult. There was a satellite link on board, reserved for nonpersonal use—but it had stopped working before we even made it out the Golden Gate.
And what of “further testing collection technologies”? So far, we were innocent of any such initiative, except for Robin’s project on the wheelhouse roof. He was working—at Mary’s suggestion, I think—on jury-rigging a wide, rigid net that, were we to drag it through a dense swath of garbage, might snag a share. This was technology development on the Kaisei: a warmhearted, wisecracking retiree gamely slinging a screw gun.
I had noticed something else on the wheelhouse roof. It was the Beach, stored from last year. This was the innovative wave-action device purpose-designed by Project Kaisei to isolate plastic confetti from the ocean water.
It was a slope-topped plywood box. Someone on the ship had built it during the previous summer’s voyage. Now it was tied down just aft of where we stood at the wheel, steering the ship. For a long time I hadn’t noticed it. Because it looked like a plywood box.
The dinghy zipped by on an intercept course for another scrap of debris. Robin reached out with two fingers together, as if he were going to pinch the ocean.
“It’s like you’re standing on the beach and picking up one tiny, tiny bit of sand,” he said.
20 AUGUST—34°42′ N. 140°19′ W
In the middle of the night, I dream that I am at the wheel of a great ship, sailing the Pacific Ocean. The cold air is thick with moisture. The rigging creaks with the roll of the ship. Water hisses along the lee rail.
In the afternoon, Mary told us that we had passed the NOAA waypoint. It had gone by without fanfare, earlier that day or the previous night. Aside from the debris watch, no measurements were taken that I knew of. We had found no mother lode there, and so had moved on, setting course for the University of Hawaii waypoint.
The water, choppy and gray, was free of trash. We appeared to be having trouble finding not only a good stretch of garbage but also the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre itself. We were sailing on strong winds, which suggested that the high-pressure zone that is associated with the Gyre was farther west than usual. Would we never get to sail the seas of plastic? Mary maintained that there was trash in the water here, but that we couldn’t see it because it had been pushed below the surface of the water by the increased wind and higher waves.
Nikolai Maximenko, the University of Hawaii oceanographer with whom Mary was working, later confirmed for me that this effect exists. But it was also increasingly apparent that day that the Garbage Patch was anything but uniform. It varied from spot to spot, heterogeneous and changing.
But that didn’t matter. What mattered was getting farther west while we still could, and finding more trash.
21 AUGUST—34°44′ N. 142°44′ W
One week at sea. I spent half my waking hours dreaming of land. Land, which wouldn’t move. A nice sidewalk, with the Doctor walking down it. The other half I spent in witness to the plain wonders of the open ocean and the numberless, fractal layers of its moving surface. Or I spent it out on a yard, wrestling a sail in the shining void.
We now lived for what we had all feared: going aloft. We waited for the call, edging toward the ratlines, ready to scramble upward, to the lower topsail, to the upper topsail, to the topgallant, perhaps a hundred feet above the deck. We edged out along the spars like arthritic monkeys, clinging to the yard with our bellies, as the Pirate King had shown us. I now depended on what I had dreaded would be the worst part of going aloft: the roll and pitch of the ship. I waited for the moments when it seemed to lift me upward in my climb, for the seconds when it glued me to the yard, when I could with confidence use both hands to tie a knot, unconcerned that I might be flung backward into blue nothingness, with only a short stretch of line to connect my waist to the rest of the world.
And I liked my shipmates. We were in that long moment of becoming friends, when the foreign and the familiar become, for a time, the same thing. Robin was revealed as a serial trickster, helpless before the opportunity to tell an off-color joke or to make joyous mockery of himself, of us, of everything. He told us old stories from his job, of being called into the principal’s office—as a teacher—for some mischief inflicted on his students. Art, Robin’s good friend, was a weather-beaten man in his seventies, with the thick brogue of a New England fisherman—yet he was a surfer and science teacher living in Hawaii. He climbed the ratlines and slid down the shrouds like someone much younger, hopping onto the deck, an ancient mariner flashing the hang loose sign. Then there was Adam, the shambling, culinary animal who inhabited the pitching metal box of the galley, fending off sliding pans and trays, deploying his ninja kit of cooking knives with focused abandon.
On Saturday evening we had a party. The concepts of “Saturday” and “evening” had long since lost their meaning in the constant cycling of the watches, but “party” was an idea that still held. It marked our entrance into the heart of the Gyre. At last, the air was warm, subtropical, the ocean glassier, almost smooth, the ship’s deck glowing in the late sun. Joe, the engineer, cut the engine, and the Kaisei bobbed on the lazy swell.
Art climbed onto the roof of the upper lounge and improvised a modified passage from Moby-Dick, in which he evoked a search for the “great white ball of trash.” We had seen a whale earlier that day, cause for some minor thronging. The truth in Art’s joke, though, was that we would have been far more excited by a whale-size clump of trash.
Then Robin led us in a cheer, screaming something in Japanese, to which we responded with screams of Banzai! again and again, filling the ocean air with our cries. Only later did he admit that he had been screaming something, I think, about wanting to sleep with your sister.
Handles of vodka and rum appeared from hiding places belowdecks—it was supposed to be a dry ship—and the grog, a steel pot of fruit punch, was spiked and spiked again. Mary raised a mug, her face uncertain at where all this was headed, and made a few announcements. She reminded us why we were out here. It was about the plastic, about proofing the models, about finding the current lines. The data we were gathering was important, she emphasized.
Nikki, one of the more forcefully dedicated volunteers, chimed in. We needed to get more people on debris watch, she said. In her opinion, two crew members on lookout in the bow was not enough. She thought we should have someone aloft as well. “We need to find a way to maximize our data,” she said, smacking her hands together.
Little empiricist flags shook themselves out all over my brain. Maximize?
Our observations were already of dubious scientific value. For one thing, the haul might vary widely based on how each watch went about its lookout work. Even something as simple as whether they faced forward from the bow, or out to the side, or aft, might suggest modulations in garbage density that didn’t exist. And there were diverse opinions about how small an object could be and still count as an object, as opposed to a bit, or particle. While objects and fragments would be described in the log, and the time and coordinates of their sighting recorded, bits would simply be added to a running tally for the period of the watch. It had taken a good ten watches of debris-watching before consensus on such issues had coalesced. This achieved, our log of debris sightings, though quantitatively suspect, had a chance of some qualitative value, describing the ebb and flow of debris concentrations as we passed through them.
Now it was proposed that we maximize our data with additional lookouts. But this would throw the whole enterprise out of whack, if indeed it had ever been in whack. We would sight more of what was passing by the boat, and the log would show an increase, but the change would have nothing to do with a change
in the water—only with how many people were on deck. Already, the log was showing the wounds of previous maximizations, in which Nikki had chosen to provide an extra set of eyes to someone else’s debris watch. From the crosstrees, she had rained zeal and possibly duplicate sightings.
Kelsey, who had done her Berkeley thesis on marine debris, piped up before I did, pointing out that it was consistency that mattered, not a higher number per se. Nikki made an impassioned counterargument, centered on what a rare opportunity it was to be here in the Gyre. Then Art and Henry joined in, and Kaniela, and in this way, aboard the brigantine Kaisei, near latitude 34°36′ North and longitude 143°21′ West, at approximately 1930 hours, the scientific method was reinvented from the waterline up. Had there only been a high school science class present, it would have been one of the purest, most spontaneous moments of experiential education ever to unfold.
Empiric consistency won the day. The two-member debris watch was reratified, and the scientific community resumed its celebrations. By dark, we were sitting on the storage lockers on what Kaniela called the “poop deck,” where we debated the etymology of the term, and whether this actually was one, and whether a non-poop deck could be converted into a poop deck by way of pooping, and so on. Then we were checking the sternlines Kaniela had set in hope of catching fish, and there were clouds of aromatic smoke, and we greeted every unfamiliar footfall with the paranoia of teenagers, even though some of us had not been teenagers for more than forty years.
I went to bed before it got very far. I had learned my lesson in Chernobyl, and was preemptively horrified at the idea of being hung over for our next watch, which started in four hours. So I missed the moment when someone realized that the fishing line had gone unnaturally taut, missed the moment when the monster was heaved on board: a mahimahi, easily three feet long, glistening and prehistoric. I slept through it all, slept through the commotion of Kaniela and George, the young assistant engineer, wrestling the incompletely killed mahimahi down the corridor, past my cabin, to the freezer; slept through the sounds of them mopping down the corridor, which even in their drunken state they realized had become a crime scene spattered with fish blood. I woke only for the watch change, every one of team Bravo late on deck, and one or two of us still badly drunk. At the helm, Kelsey responded to an order for a five-degree course correction with wild spins of the wheel to starboard, then compensated with even wilder spins to port. Walking forward to check the boat, I found George passed out with his fly open, lying on the netting below the bowsprit, his safety harness duly clipped in, a strangely beatific sprawl, the dream-like ocean flying by underneath.
23 AUGUST—33°36′ N, 146°36′ W
We were in it.
Nick raced back and forth in the dinghy, in full Ocean Conservancy mode, fishing out buckets and detergent bottles and jugs, laundry baskets and the odd hard hat. He filled out reports for the International Coastal Cleanup, typed the debris log into his laptop, and climbed up to the maintop to watch for large objects and current lines. It was infectious. You might feel suddenly alert and purposeful: Nick had entered the room.
The day’s best catch was a large ghost net. George and the captain and I hauled it up the side, an ungodly tangle of net and rope and mesh, maybe three feet in diameter, that must have weighed at least 150 pounds. As it plopped on the deck, dozens of tiny crabs spilled from its recesses, flakes of cobalt blue that scuttled along the planking. They were the color of the Pacific. We threw them back. For all I know, such crabs only survive in the central Pacific if they have the animal of a ghost net to live in; and we, the destroyers, had pulled their host out of the water and consigned the survivors to certain doom in the crushing depths. We paid it no mind. In the future, ghost nets may be protected, just as whales and manatees are. But for now, it’s open season.
I crouched by the ghost to inspect it. What did it look like? A brain? A jellyfish? A great mound of intestines? Ropes of every color and weave and composition and thickness knotted and twisted into one another. Several bright plastic lozenges—floats, or markers—lurked in the jumble, marked with Chinese or Japanese characters. Some of the knots in the ghost’s component nets had clearly been tied by human hands, but others had to be the work of the ocean, tangled flights of topological insanity that bound one piece of junked rope or netting to the next.
Mary was watching. “I do hope we’ll be able to show you something better than that,” she said. She seemed to have little patience for the ghost nets, which were plastic-poor. It was plastic that she wanted, the current lines above all.
The current lines had become the Great White Ball of Trash prophesied by Art. Mary was confident that these strings of concentrated garbage, thrown together by the inner workings of the Gyre, were out here. The previous year’s voyage had encountered them, she told us, and she was sure we could find one now.
I was getting tired of hearing about them. We were in the Garbage Patch—shouldn’t we just be interested in what it was like? Instead, there was the sense that Project Kaisei only wanted the stuff. We needed something to show for our efforts. I wondered if this was symptomatic of a nonprofit bent on impressing its public or its funders. Would they be disappointed if we returned without a towering pile of trophy refuse? So we wanted more plastic, more dramatic densities, concentrations that we could really sink our teeth into. It was a more sophisticated way of believing in the plastic island, that idea that drove us all batty with annoyance. And I felt it kept us from appreciating the Garbage Patch as it was: just as vast and as problematic as we had expected, but deeply unspectacular. It required more than your eyes to grasp it. You had to think.
In this, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a cautionary tale in environmental aesthetics. We seem to require imagery to go with our environmental problems. If we don’t have an image to be horrified by, we can’t approach the problem in our minds. But sometimes the imagery distorts our thinking, or becomes a substitute for approaching the problem in the first place. And when there simply is no adequate image, we substitute others, creating islands where none exist.
No island, no carpet of plastic—yet we had without question entered the Garbage Patch. We had sailed a thousand empty miles into nowhere, finally reaching this place. And what did we find here, so removed from humanity? Far more trash than you see in San Francisco Bay. More than you see in your own back alley. Every minute on the water, every thirty seconds, a bottle, a bucket, a piece of tarp, a sprinkle of confetti, multiplied by the countless square mileage of the Gyre. And yet if you looked across the surface of the ocean, it was unremarkable. Would-be debunkers need not resort to pointing out, as they do, that you can’t find an image of the Garbage Patch on Google Earth. They should point out that you can’t find images of the Garbage Patch anywhere.
This is because it isn’t a visual problem, and this conflict between the reality of the problem and its nonvisual nature is at the root of the plastic island misconception. A metaphor is needed, a compelling image to suggest the scale and mass of the problem.
So let us explode the plastic island once and for all, and call it a galaxy. The Garbage Patch is like the Milky Way, an impossibly massive spiral that, because of its very vastness, is also phenomenally diffuse. Most of our galaxy is empty space. You could pass right through it without ever bumping into a star or a planet. The most massive object in the universe visible to the naked eye is made mostly of nothing.
If you were trying to figure out what a galaxy was, you would be plenty interested in the empty space between the stars, in whether or not it was truly empty, and in how the distribution of stars changed as you passed through the spiral arms. Like this, you might start to get an idea of your galaxy’s shape, structure, and size. (Note: Your galaxy is many times the size of Texas.)
Similarly, if we had been dragging sample nets and taking real data, a stretch of empty Gyre water would have been just as interesting to us as one decorated with plastic, not least because access to the Garbage Patch is so diffic
ult. In all of history, how many research missions had been to the Eastern Garbage Patch to study marine plastic? The folks at Algalita tell me it’s about a dozen. The pool of existing data is therefore so small, and the character and dynamics of the Garbage Patch so poorly understood, that it felt negligent merely to obsess about finding the highest concentrations. But that is what we were doing. And if we were here to test cleanup methods, well, shouldn’t those methods apply even in more diffuse areas? We were missing an opportunity to help inch the science forward.
And the science needed inching. A few hours on bow watch were enough to leave any thoughtful deckhand bursting with questions. Where were the plastic bags, for instance? On land, the Garbage Patch was often linked with plastic shopping bags. But here we saw no plastic bags. Were they below the surface? Had they broken up into small fragments? Were they all in the Western Garbage Patch, toward Japan? Or was it simply a myth that plastic bags make it out to the Gyre?
What about the stuff we were seeing? Where was it from? For most objects, it seemed impossible to tell. But there were more items with Chinese or Japanese words on them than with English, and a few with Russian, too. Anecdotally, this reinforced the idea that the Eastern Garbage Patch might be composed disproportionately of refuse from the western rim of the Pacific. Perhaps the Western Garbage Patch, the evil twin of the one we had now entered, was home base to material from the coast of the United States and Canada. If only we could have sailed another three thousand miles, I might have found all those Capri Sun pouches I went through in sixth grade.
It was also difficult to make even casual judgments about whether the trash we were seeing had come from land or from sea-borne sources. The common wisdom is that three-quarters of ocean plastic comes from consumer sources on land. This is borne out in places like Hawaii’s Kamilo Beach, which catches the southwest edge of the Garbage Patch, and where lighters and toothbrushes and combs dominate. But for much of what we saw on the Kaisei, provenance was hard to determine.
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