Moby-Duck

by Donovan Hohn

  For the first time since I entered Alaska aboard the Malaspina a week ago, the rain clouds have cleared. A strong breeze is blowing inland across the sparkling waves. To our right, there is the sound of the surf, to our left the soughing of the trees. Peering into them I see only shadowy depths of green. The beach here is more gravelly than sandy. It’s like walking over peppercorns. Our boot soles crunch, and I fall into a kind of trance.

  No matter how crappy the pittance the tide leaves, no matter how ominous the riddles in the sand, beachcombing has its delights. There is pleasure in setting your senses loose. At the sight of something half-buried, the eye startles and the imagination leaps. At the edge of the waves flickers a silver flame. A hundred yards off, from beneath a pile of driftwood, glows a small, fallen sun. Then, at the moment of recognition, there is a kind of satisfying latch. The silver flame? An empty bag of Doritos, torn open. The small sun? A red, dog-chewed Frisbee. The strange becomes suddenly familiar once again, though never quite so familiar as before. The beach can strip familiar objects clean of their usual associations, a wild beach especially. And occasionally the strange remains strange. Occasionally the object you’ve inspected is unrecognizable or exotic or mysteriously incongruous. Occasionally that surf-tossed bottle turns out not to have been left by a camper but jettisoned from a Malaysian shrimp boat crossing the Andaman Sea.

  Today, there are no messages in bottles, no computer monitors or Nikes, no toys. According to Ebbesmeyer, the beachcombing this year has not been good. It all depends on the winter storms. Then, too, there hadn’t been a good container spill that he knew of since a batch of hockey gloves went overboard in 2003. I clamber over the jackstraw, finding there a predictable assortment of water bottles and spent shotgun shells, but also a polystyrene ice cream tub, a plastic length of hose, nylon nets, huge cakes of Styrofoam, all of which I dump into Ebbesmeyer’s bag.

  “Aw, man,” Ebbesmeyer says of the Styrofoam. “That’ll break up into a billion pieces. Aw, man. That’s the worst stuff. In Seattle you can’t recycle Styrofoam. Pisses me off. So what do you do with it? See all those little cells? The irony is, it’s made of polystyrene, which sinks, and they foam it to make it into something that floats. That’s what I think of when I see that stuff, all the windrows of Styrofoam, coffee cups with barnacles growing on them. You say you’d love to get it off the beach, but there’s no way.” He tells me about a container that spilled a shipment of filtered cigarettes. “There are about ten thousand polymer fibers per butt—that’s, what? Ten to the order . . . about ten billion fibers for just one container.” His eyebrows spring up above his glasses.

  Luckily for them, none of Eric Carle’s ten rubber ducks runs into a Laysan albatross. The encounter would not be pretty. The Laysan albatross is probably the most voracious plastivore on the planet. Three to four million cigarette lighters have been collected from seabird rookeries on Midway, and naturalists recently recovered 252 plastic items from the carcass of a single Laysan albatross chick. During a lecture he gave yesterday at Sitka’s Rotary Club, Ebbesmeyer showed a slide of them, those 252 items. At first the photograph calls to mind stained glass. Then as you look closer, you start spotting familiar objects strewn amid the shrapnel. Two cigarette lighters and a dozen-odd bottle caps appear to be good as new. Somewhere among those 252 items may be the remains of a Floatee.

  At the edge of the ebbing surf, we come upon the fresh footprints of a bear. The beach ends, the shoreline giving way to a labyrinth of wave-washed boulders into which the footprints continue. “Stonehenge for bears,” says Michael Wilson, a Canadian geoarchaeologist who later this week will deliver a lecture titled “Natural Disasters and Prehistoric Human Dispersal: The Rising Wave of Inquiry.”

  Wilson, in Sitka sneakers and jeans, follows the footprints into the boulders, talking loudly. The wind is behind us, and we assume that the bear will keep its distance, but you can tell that Ebbesmeyer’s feeling nervous. I am too. We both start glancing into the trees. Wilson’s spotted something, something big and blue, and runs ahead to see what it is, the red windbreaker tied around his waist trailing like a cape. Now we’re following two pairs of footprints, Wilson’s and the bear’s. His discovery turns out to be an empty plastic barrel with the word “toxic” printed on the lid—an empty drum of boat fuel, most likely. It appears to be watertight. Wilson thumps it like a bongo then hoists it up above his head and roars like one of the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  We’d like to take the barrel back with us, but, deciding that the damn thing is just too big, end up leaving it where we found it, among the rocks. As we turn to retrace our steps I think of Wallace Stevens’s anecdotal jar: The wilderness rose up to it, / And sprawled around, no longer wild.

  Some of the archaeologists in our beachcombing expedition have studied the midden heaps of shells that prehistoric seafarers left around the Pacific Rim. Garbage often outlasts monuments, and if a millennium or three from now, archaeologists come looking for us, they may well find a trail of plastic clues.

  I have yet to reach the end of my own trail of clues. The toys first made landfall on Kruzof Island in the autumn of 1992. So far only a thousand or so of them have been recovered by beachcombers. The rest are still out there, circling the Gulf of Alaska, or riding an ice floe through the Arctic, or lying under wrack and sand in some out-of-the-way cave of the ocean. And at least one or two could be stranded in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, circling around among ghost nets and fishing floats and refrigerator doors. Ebbesmeyer believes that patch betokens nothing less than the “end of the ocean.” If he’s right, then the yellow duck I’ve been chasing is not only an icon of childhood but a genuine bird of omen, and the legend of the rubber ducks lost at sea is not merely a delightful fable suitable for children but a cautionary environmental tale. I don’t yet know whether to believe Ebbesmeyer’s auguries. There are more riddles to solve. For now, though, I’ve followed the trail—and pushed my luck—far enough.

  In 1827, returning from another failed attempt to find the Northwest Passage, Lieutenant Parry, upon learning that he was to become a father, sent a letter home to his pregnant wife: “Success in my enterprize,” he wrote, “is by no means essential to our joy, tho’ it might have added something to it; but we cannot, ought not to have everything we wish.”

  On Kruzof Island, for the first time since Bellingham, my cell phone is picking up a signal. Certain that I’ll be able to catch up with the rest of our search party, or at least with the slow-moving Dr. E., I fall back and call Beth. Just to be safe I’ve decided to fly home from Alaska three days sooner than planned, I tell her, gazing out at lapping waves. A week after my return, following a difficult, 30-hour labor, she’ll give birth to a son, the sight and touch of whom will dispel my usual, self-involved preoccupations and induce a goofy, mystical, sleep-deprived euphoria. Holding our pruny, splotchy, meconium-besmirched, coneheaded son, she’ll cry, and when she does, so will I. These will be tears of joy, of course, but also of exhaustion and awe and, truth be told, of sadness. Holding my son for the first time, I will feel diminished by the mystery of his birth and by the terrible burden of love, a burden that, requiring hopefulness, will feel too great to carry, but which I will take up nonetheless.

  In the meantime, back on Kruzof Island, there is Fred’s Creek to cross.

  Loaded down with our plastic bag of scavengings, Ebbesmeyer is standing at the creek’s edge, contemplating the water and the rocks, looking for the way. It’s shallow, Fred’s Creek, but he’d rather not get his feet wet. Nor would I. To his right, the creek comes spilling out of the forest, descending terraces of rocks, flowing under mossy, fallen trees. To his left it widens into a miniature delta, carving liliputian canyons in the sand, flowing around rocky islands, before emptying into the Pacific. He places his foot on a partially submerged stone, which shifts beneath his weight. Reconsidering, he heads once again to the sylvan narrows. I spring from rock to rock, enjoying the acrobatic challenge, making it across the creek�
��s mouth in a few hops, boot soles wet but the cuffs of my quick-dry Adventure pants dry. By now, the rest of our party is out of both earshot and sight. Up in the trees, balancing, a scavenged walking stick in one hand, white bag of plastic trash in the other, blue ball cap visible through the branches, Ebbesmeyer is still midstream, having a hard go of it. “Throw me the bag,” I call to him, and he does. It lands with a splash at the creek’s edge. I met the oceanographer in person only a week ago, but for the moment I feel oddly protective of him, oddly filial. I watch the trees for bears. Finally he’s made it to the other side. Together we walk to the landing on the beach and wait for Larry Calvin to come for us.

  THE SECOND CHASE

  The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from schoolmaster to sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it.

  —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

  A KEEN TRANSITION

  All I knew about Chris Pallister when I decided to go to sea with him was that he ran some sort of nonprofit called GoAK (pronounced GOay-kay ), an acronym for Gulf of Alaska Keeper, and that this group was doing some sort of beach cleanup at some place called Gore Point, and that during the course of this cleanup a number of Floatees had been found—the first new finds I’d heard about since returning from Kruzof Island two years before. Plastic frogs had been found, Pallister told me when I called him from Manhattan, plastic turtles had been found, beavers, and, yes, ducks too. His “big boat” was already at Gore Point, he explained, serving as a sort of floating bunkhouse for GoAK’s crew, but that weekend he would be heading there in his “little boat.” If I could get my ass to Anchorage by Friday, I was welcome to tag along. He could use a deckhand, he said, and it would be nice to have the company.

  I looked for Gore Point in my Atlas of the World and failed to find it. A little research revealed why. Gore Point (population 0) is one of the wildest places left on the American coastline, and one of the last places on the planet you’d expect to have a garbage problem. Unegkurmiut Indians used to spend their winters there, and supposedly you could still find signs of them (a scar on a tree trunk where some hungry soul had scraped the bark away to get at the nourishing cambium beneath; the faint concavity a house pit had left in the mossy earth). But the last of the Unegkurmiut—their numbers decimated by smallpox, the survivors lured off by ill-paid work in the canneries of the Alaska Commercial Company—vacated the premises more than a century ago. There had been no permanent residents since. Gore Point was now part of Alaska’s Kachemak Bay State Wilderness Park. Despite the pretty scenery and the charismatic megafauna to be seen there, few nature lovers bother to visit the park’s outer coast, which can be reached only by helicopter, floatplane, or boat, and then only when the weather permits, which it often does not.

  In Beachcombing the Pacific, Amos L. Wood divides North America’s Pacific coastline into twelve regions, providing “a detailed analysis” of each. As beachcombing territory, the region encompassing Gore Point “ranks high.” It ranks high because the Gulf of Alaska’s divergent currents unload lots of flotsam onto those wild shores, but also because few casual beachcombers are dogged enough, or reckless enough, to go there. The region is, Woods writes, “about the most inaccessible of any around the North Pacific Rim, and thus is the least traveled.” Gore Point also happens to lie six hundred miles downcurrent from Sitka—six hundred miles farther, in other words, along the trail I was following.

  At the time Pallister extended his invitation, I was in no condition to go beachcombing on any Pacific beach, accessible or otherwise. I was, in fact, recovering from back surgery—minor, routine, noninvasive back surgery, but back surgery nonetheless; a microdiscectomy to be exact, necessitated by an acutely herniated disc that had impinged agonizingly on my sciatic nerve, and even more agonizingly on my not-so-well-laid plans. Happenstance, it turns out, is a terrible travel agent. The previous spring, after many months of preparation, I’d quit my teaching job in order to continue the journey I’d begun. I’d asked the Orbisons to take me with them on their annual beachcombing trip, and they’d agreed. But on the eve of their departure, I found myself in a Manhattan hospital, back-wrecked on a gurney, listening to an anesthesiologist explain to my wife that he had no idea whether or not his specialized services were covered by my insurance plan, then adding, under his breath, while searching for a vein, that he could really use a drink. The surgery had nevertheless gone well. For the previous ten days, the pain shooting from my spine to the tips of my toes had been so great, I’d been unable to walk or stand or sit. When the anesthesia wore off, aside from the aching suture, my pain was gone. I could walk. I could stand. I could beachcomb.

  After a week of postoperative convalescence, while the Orbisons were scavenging in sea caves, I’d begun making calls in hopes of finding some other Alaskan willing to give me a free ride. I wasn’t inclined to be picky. My frantic queries eventually led me to Marilyn Sigman, director of the Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies in Homer, a fishing village on Cook Inlet. Sigman led me to GoAK and Chris Pallister. It is no doubt ill-advised to volunteer as a deckhand while recovering from back surgery, even routine, noninvasive back surgery. But I was desperate. Pallister was embarking for Gore Point that weekend with or without me. I’d already gone adrift. There was no turning back. Like it or not, I was a professional duckie hunter now. I wasn’t about to spend the summer convalescing in Manhattan, not when there were Floatees to be found.

  At my postoperative examination, I told my surgeon that I had some “urgent business” in Anchorage, leaving out the part about a voyage to inaccessible coasts. Inspecting his handiwork, which was healing nicely, my surgeon said he guessed it would be okay for me to travel, so long as I didn’t lift anything heavier than ten pounds, doctor’s orders. No bending from the waist. No sitting for prolonged periods of time. For the next six weeks, there was an elevated risk of reherniation, he said.

  “Promise me you’ll ask for help with your luggage,” he said. I promised. “Promise me you’ll get up and walk around during the flight to Anchorage. Book an aisle seat.” I promised. He wrote me a new scrip for Vicodin and another for anti-inflammatory steroids, just in case. The following morning I stuffed a pair of brand-new Sitka sneakers into a brand-new ergonomic backpack with wheels, asked the cabdriver if he’d mind loading said backpack into the trunk, kissed Beth and our almost-two-year-old son Bruno good-bye, and flew, hell-bent, to Anchorage.

  RESURRECTION BAY

  South of Gore Point, where tide rips collide, the rolling swells rear up and sharpen into whitecaps. A moment ago, Chris Pallister was rhapsodizing about the miraculous anatomy of dolphins, which he’d read about in Discover. “The metabolic calculus wasn’t enough to account for their speed in the water!” he hollered. “They’ve got all kinds of physical traits and adaptations for diving at depths! They’ve got a cortex that’s kind of like a sponge!” Then we slammed into a steep ten-foot wave that sent Pallister’s toilet kit flying from the dash, a tube of toothpaste and a disposable razor scuttling across the cockpit floor. I scurried to retrieve them. Now the second ten-foot wave hits. I stumble back to my station in the copilot’s seat, port side, behind the busted windshield wiper, and ransack my shoulder bag for yet another one of the ginger candies I’ve brought along as an over-the-counter remedy for seasickness. Quiet with concentration, Pallister decelerates from fifteen miles per hour to eight, strains to peer through a windshield blurry with spray, tightens his grip on the wheel, and like a skier negotiating moguls coaxes his little home-built boat, the Opus, through the chaos of waves. Our progress becomes a series of concussions punctuated by troughs of anxious calm. In this, I have begun to gather, it resembles the rest of Pallister’s life.

  Speaking with him on the phone from Manhattan, I’d pictured Pallister as the sort of all-American nature guy you see in advertisements for energy bars or camping equipment, clad in Gore-Tex or a flannel shirt, portaging a mountain bike or kayak through rugged terr
ain, or mesmerizing with his border collie beside a campfire while a gazillion digitally enhanced stars twinkle overhead. Instead, eleven hours after kissing my wife and kid good-bye, I was met in baggage claim at Anchorage International by a small fifty-five-year-old self-employed insurance attorney in khaki Adventure pants and a grass-green windbreaker emblazoned, where the breast pocket would go, with the yellow logo of the University of Alaska-Anchorage. His dark brown hair was cut, monkishly, in a straight line across his forehead as if with the aid of a carpenter’s level. He had a crooked smile, the left corner of his mouth sagging so that he seemed to be scowling even when he wasn’t. The chrome frames of his glasses looked difficult to break. Through them he squinted up at me and, in reference to the self-portrait I’d e-mailed him, said, “Yeah, I guess that says FS.”

  To make myself easy to identify, I’d worn a red ball cap bearing the initials of the high school where I had until recently taught, initials that were artfully but somewhat illegibly entangled, like those on a Yankees cap. “Yeah, I guess you’re pretty tall,” Pallister added, still squinting, his right eye squinting more than his left so that he reminded me of Popeye. “And yeah, you do look kind of young for your age.”

  This is an understatement. In my twenties, I was mistaken for a teenager; now, in my midthirties, for a college undergraduate. In coat and tie I bring to mind a parochial schoolboy. My condition—chronic juvenilia, it should be called—owes mainly to a congenital shortage of facial hair and a congenital excess of cheek. I have the face of a schoolboy and the back of a middle-aged man.

  I’d forewarned Pallister about my recent surgery, and my doctor’s orders. He’d promised to do all the heavy lifting. He was well-acquainted with back trouble, he told me, loading my ergonomic backpack into the backseat of his estranged wife’s Toyota. He’d had spinal surgery seven times—for sciatica, stenosis, and injuries he’d suffered in a traffic accident. The surgery had left a white scar that wormed out of his shirt collar up the back of his neck and disappeared, at the base of his skull, into his hair. “I’m five-foot-eight but I used to be five-foot-nine,” he’d later tell me. “All that surgery chopped me down an inch.”