by Donovan Hohn
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.
Nike’s maritime fortunes are not unusually calamitous; thousands of containers spill from cargo ships every year, exactly how many no one knows, perhaps 2,000, perhaps as many as 10,000. No one knows because shipping lines and their lawyers, fearing bad publicity or liability, like to keep container spills hush-hush. But few commodities are both as seaworthy and as traceable as a pair of Air Jordans, each shoe of which conveniently comes with a numerical record of its provenance stitched to the underside of its tongue, and which—soles up, ankles down, laces aswirl—will drift for years. It helped, too, that Nike had thus far been cooperative. A lawyer gave Ebbesmeyer the serial numbers for all the shoes in the 1990 spill and then taught him how to “read the tongue.”
Now, in his basement, Ebbesmeyer selected a high-top at random. “See the ID?” he asked. “ ‘021012.’ The ‘02’ is the year. ‘10’ is October. ‘12’ is December. Nike ordered these from Indonesia in October of ’02 for delivery in December.”
Next he pulled down a black flip-flop, and then a matching one that he’d sliced in half. Inside the black rubber was a jagged yellow core resembling a lightning bolt—a perfect identifying characteristic. If Ebbesmeyer had discovered the coordinates of this particular spill, the sandals would have provided a windfall of data. Unfortunately, the shipping company had “stonewalled” him “like usual.” He didn’t really hold it against them, he said. For a container ship’s crew—an “Oriental” crew especially—a spill incurred a “loss of face” that could easily lead to a loss of job, a price the oceanographer considered too steep, no matter how precious the data.
It took Ebbesmeyer a year of diplomacy and detective work to find out when and where the Floatees fell overboard. Initially, the shipping company stonewalled him like usual. Then one day he received a phone call. The container ship in question was at port in Tacoma. Ebbesmeyer was welcome to come aboard, on one condition: he had to swear to keep secret the names of bot
h the ship and its owner.
For four hours, Ebbesmeyer sat in the ship’s bridge interviewing the captain, a “very gracious” Chinese man who had a Ph.D. in meteorology and spoke fluent English. The day of the spill, the ship had encountered a severe winter storm and heavy seas, the captain said. The readings on the clinometer told the story best. When a ship is perfectly level in the water, its clinometer reads 0 degrees. If a ship were keeled on its side, the clinometer would read 90 degrees. When this particular spill occurred, the clinometer had registered a roll of 55 degrees to port, then a roll of 55 degrees to starboard. At that inclination, the stacks of containers, each one six containers tall, tall as a four-story townhouse, would have been more horizontal than vertical. Perhaps Dr. Ebbesmeyer would like to have a peek at the logbook, the captain discreetly suggested. He’d already opened it to January 10, 1992. There were the coordinates, the magic coordinates.
THE GREAT PACIFIC GARBAGE PATCH
OSCURS could now reconstruct, or “hindcast,” the routes the toys had traveled, producing a map of erratic trajectories that appeared to have been hand-drawn by a cartographer with palsy. Beginning at the scattered coordinates where beachcombers had reported finding toys, the lines wiggled west, converging at the point of origin: 44.7°N, 178.1°E, south of the Aleutians, near the international date line, where farthest west and farthest east meet. The data that Ebbesmeyer’s beachcombers had gathered also allowed NOAA’s James Ingraham to fine-tune the computer model, adjusting for such coefficients as “windage” (an object with a tall profile will sail before the wind as well as drift on a current).
At first, before they’d sprung leaks and taken on water, the toys rode high, skating across the Gulf of Alaska at an average rate of seven miles per day, almost twice as fast as the currents they were traveling. Among other things, the simulation revealed that in 1992 those currents had shifted to the north as a consequence of El Niño. If the toys had fallen overboard at the exact same spot just two years earlier, according to OSCURS, they would have taken a southerly route instead of a northerly one, ending up in the vicinity of Hawaii. In 1961, they would have drifted along the California coast.
Though with far less certainty, OSCURS could forecast as well as hindcast, and in this respect, Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham were like meteorologists of the waves. Because the weather of the ocean usually changes more slowly than the weather of the skies, they were also like clairvoyants. OSCURS was their crystal ball.
By simulating long-term mean surface geostrophic currents (those surface currents that flow steadily and enduringly, though not immutably, like rivers in the sea) as well as surface-mixed-layer currents that are functions of wind speed and direction (those currents that change almost as quickly as the skies), OSCURS could project the trajectories of the toys well into the future. According to the simulator’s predictions, some of the animals that remained afloat would eventually drift south, where they would either collide with the coast of Hawaii in March of 1997 or, more likely, get sucked into the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.
“Gyre is a fancy word for a current in a bowl of soup,” Ebbesmeyer likes to say. “You stir your soup, it goes around a few seconds.” The thermodynamic circulation of air, which we experience as wind, is like a giant spoon that never stops stirring. To make Ebbesmeyer’s analogy more accurate still, you’d have to set that bowl of soup aspin on a lazy Susan, since the earth’s rotation exerts a subtle yet profound influence on the movements of both water and air, an influence known to physical oceanographers as the Coriolis force. The Coriolis force explains why currents on the western edges of ocean basins are stronger than those along their eastern edges—why the Gulf Stream, for instance, is so much stronger than the Canary Current that flows south along Africa’s Atlantic coast.
Comprising four separate arcs—the easterly North Pacific Drift, the southerly California Current, the westerly North Equatorial Current, and the northerly Kuroshio (the Pacific’s equivalent of the Gulf Stream)—the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre revolves between the coasts of North America and Asia, from Washington State to Mexico to Japan and back again.1 Some of the toys, OSCURS predicted, would eventually escape the gyre’s orbit, spin off toward the Indian Ocean, and circumnavigate the globe.
Others would drift into the gyre’s becalmed heart where the prevailing atmospheric high has created what Ebbesmeyer christened “the Garbage Patch”—a purgatorial eddy in the waste stream that covers, Ebbesmeyer told me, as much of the earth’s surface as Texas. When he is being fastidious, Ebbesmeyer will point out that there are in fact many garbage patches in the world, the one in the North Pacific being simply the largest, so far as we know. For that reason he sometimes refers to it as the Great North Pacific Garbage Patch. Other times, in Beachcombers’ Alert! and elsewhere, he’ll distinguish between an Eastern Garbage Patch lying midway, roughly, between Hawaii and California, and a Western Garbage Patch, lying midway, roughly, between Hawaii and Japan. In fact, both patches are part of what most oceanographers call the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone—a bland term of art made blander still by its initials, STCZ. The scientific community’s love for acronyms and abbreviations, rivaled only by that of government bureaucrats, helps explain why Ebbesmeyer has enjoyed much more celebrity in the popular press than he has influence in the scientific community. He possesses a showman’s gift for folky coinages, but also, perhaps, a showman’s tendency to sensationalize. “It’s like Jupiter’s red spot,” he said. “It’s one of the great features of the planet Earth but you can’t see it.”
He’d never visited the Garbage Patch himself, but he had received eyewitness reports from sailors. “They’d be sailing through there with their motors on—not sailing, motors on,” he said. “No wind, glassy calm water, and they start spotting refrigerators and tires, and glass balls as far as you could see.”
Anecdotal evidence suggested that similar atmospheric highs had created garbage patches in the five other subtropical gyres churning the world’s oceans—including the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre, which circumscribes the Sargasso Sea, so named because of the free-floating wilderness of sargasso seaweed that the currents have accumulated there. Later, skimming through Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, in a chapter about the Sargasso Sea, I’d come upon a helpful explanation for patches of garbage like the one at the heart of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. “The only explanation which can be given,” Captain Nemo says of the seaweed engulfing the Nautilus, “seems to me to result from the experience known to all the world. Place in a vase some fragments of cork or other floating body, and give to the water in the vase a circular movement, the scattered fragments will unite in a group in the centre of the liquid surface, that is to say, in the part least agitated. In the phenomenon we are considering, the Atlantic is the vase, the Gulf Stream the circular current, and the Sargasso Sea the central point at which the floating bodies unite.” Nemo’s explanation is mostly accurate, with this one correction: the circular current is the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre, of which the Gulf Stream describes only the north-by-northwesterly arc. A Sargasso of the Imagination, I thought as I listened to Ebbesmeyer describe the Garbage Patch. The phrase comes from a scene in The Day of the Locust, in which Nathanael West is describing a Hollywood backlot jumbled with miscellaneous properties and disassembled stage sets.2
There is no wilderness of seaweed at the center of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, which circles around the deepest waters on the planet, which are therefore among the least fertile. It is a kind of marine desert. If you went fishing in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, all you’d likely catch aside from garbage is plankton, a class of creatures that includes both flora (phytoplankton, tiny floating plants that photosynthesize sunlight at the water’s surface) and fauna (zooplankton, tiny floating animals that live off the tiny floating plants or each other). My Ocean Almanac calls phytoplankton “the pasture of the sea” because it is “the first link in the sea’s food chain.” Ten thousand
pounds of phytoplankton will ultimately produce a single pound of tuna. The word plankton comes from the Greek planktos, meaning “wander” or “drift,” because that is how they get about, going wherever the currents carry them. In going adrift the castaway toys had become a species of giant ersatz plankton. So, in a way, had I.
OSCURS’s simulations predicted that relatively few of the bathtub toys would have ended up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The majority would have stayed well to the north, closer to the site of the spill, caught in the North Pacific Subpolar Gyre, which travels counterclockwise beneath a low-pressure system between the coasts of Alaska and Siberia. Smaller and stormier than the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, the Subpolar Gyre does not collect vast quantities of trash at its center. In counterclockwise gyres of the Northern Hemisphere, the currents don’t spiral inward to create convergence zones. They spiral divergently outward, toward shore. Convergence zones tend to collect flotsam. Divergence zones tend to expel it. Floatees trapped in the Subpolar Gyre, Ebbesmeyer’s research showed, would have remained in orbit, completing a lap around the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea once every three years, until a winter storm blew them ashore or they strayed through the Aleutians onto one of the northerly currents flowing through the Bering Strait.
There, OSCURS lost them.
Ingraham had not programmed his model to simulate the Arctic. To follow the animals into the ice, Ebbesmeyer had to rely on more primitive oceanographic methods. He went to a toy store and purchased a few dozen brand-new Floatees to use as lab animals in various experiments. Several specimens he subjected to the frigid conditions inside his kitchen freezer in order to find out whether cold would make them crack (it didn’t). Others he bludgeoned with a hammer to see what it would take to make them sink (a lot). Even breached and taking on water, they remained semibuoyant.