Moby-Duck

by Donovan Hohn

  What should we value in a place? Beauty, Emerson said, for in the “immortal” beauty of nature a sensitive poet might perceive the discreet but harmonizing designs of “the mind of God.” And the organ with which both beauty and Divinity could best be perceived was, for Emerson, the eye. “The eye,” he wrote “is the best of artists.” Herein, I would suggest, lies one of the seeds of our present confusion. Beauty, like beautification, can be deceiving.13

  If beauty is the paramount value of a place, what sort of aesthetic adjustor gets to make the assessment, especially now, post-Darwin, when it’s hard to credit the notion that in nature we can glimpse “the mind of God”? If Brad Faulkner finds Gore Point more beautiful with its midden heap than without, and Pallister more beautiful without than with, who resolves the dispute? Perhaps then we should measure the value of a place by its usefulness. Usefulness to whom? A miner? A beachcomber? An ecotourist? An albatross? A copepod? A chronically restless artist, such as Rockwell Kent, seeking contact with primal energies? Our generation? Generations of the future?

  Such distinctions might seem academic, but how we imagine a place determines how we value it, and how we value a place determines how we allocate our tax dollars or charitable donations—what actions we choose to take, which places we choose to save and what it means to save them. Is beautification tantamount to salvation? Sometimes, perhaps, but not always. And in the information age, which is also the age of images, and the age of public relations, and therefore the age of make-believe—when beautification can be deceiving, when what appears to be a crying Indian turns out to be a con artist for hire—our relationship to the natural world is, it seems to me, more vexing than ever. Our eyes alone are not enough.

  THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIS PALLISTER

  Four weeks after my voyage to Gore Point, for the first time in twenty years, I’m in San Francisco, my hometown, vacationing with Beth and Bruno, when Chris Pallister’s call finally comes: the airlift is on, and if I want to witness it, I’d better get back to Alaska, pronto. Wincing at the price, and at the environmental impact of all this jet travel, I go ahead and book yet another round-trip ticket to Anchorage.14

  Ryan Pallister meets me outside baggage claim, at the wheel of his father’s red Pathfinder. The next day we three drive to Homer, stopping for lunch at a Dairy Queen. The elder Pallister boys are driving down with a friend. When we reach Homer, late in the afternoon, the NOAA forecast is ominous—thirty-five-knot winds, eleven-foot seas. There’s a gale warning in effect, and a small-craft advisory in effect. If he goes ahead with the airlift, Pallister could end up paying $4,000 a day for the amphibious barge to lay up at anchor, waiting for this storm to blow through.

  If the NOAA forecast weren’t enough, Otto Kilcher, uncle of the one-named pop-folk crooner Jewel and the owner of the amphibious barge, calls to say that his water pump is acting up. He can fix it, but it might take a few hours, and he wants to know if his mechanic should keep working through the night. Are they leaving in the morning or aren’t they? Pallister decides to give it a day. “Jeeesus Christ!” he says, when he gets off the phone with Kilcher. “Things look like they’ve unraveled now!” He and his boys are staying with an acquaintance in Homer. I retire for the night to the Driftwood Inn, wondering whether I’ve just blown several hundred dollars on a last-minute flight to Alaska.

  Out at Gore Point, aboard the Cape Chacon, Ted Raynor makes his daily entry in his logbook: “Otto Kilcher and the crew are supposed to be here late tonight. But there’s a gale warning out for tonight and tomorrow so who knows if they’ll make it. They and the helicopters are supposed to get the garbage loaded tomorrow. Fat chance.”

  The following morning the forecast hasn’t improved, but the barge’s water pump has. Otto Kilcher’s meter is now running, and a local TV news team is already on its way down from Anchorage. This might be GoAK’s only shot. If Pallister waits another day, the forecast could improve, but it could worsen. He decides to chance it. The elder Pallister boys will fly out ahead in a floatplane to help Leiser and Raynor ready the Super Sacks. Pallister and Ryan, his youngest, will come out tomorrow night on the barge, weather permitting. There’s an extra spot on the floatplane, mine if I want it. If the barge is delayed by bad weather, I could end up stuck at Gore Point and miss my return flight home, at considerable expense. I’ve never ridden in a floatplane. I, too, decide to chance it.

  The Pallister boys, invariably polite, let me have the good seat, up front beside the pilot, a tall, lanky fellow named José de Creeft, whom we meet beside his dock on the lake that serves as Homer’s unofficial airport. De Creeft wraps our luggage in garbage bags and stuffs them into the plane’s hollow pontoons. We buckle ourselves in, clap miked headsets over our ears, and go taxiing across the water. Through the blurry discus of the prop I watch a pair of swans and a gray cygnet paddle in a hurry out of our path. Then the motor accelerates into a deafening whine, then we are aloft, the silver waters of Kachemak Bay flashing far below. De Creeft pilots us through a foggy notch in the snowcapped Kenai Mountains. Here and there through the fog you can see waterfalls pouring from ledges, feeding into the Red River far below. “Been raining,” De Creeft says through his headset mike. “Lot of water coming out those rivers.” We bounce around a little. “Tends to be pretty squirrelly in here for the wind,” De Creeft says.

  With disorienting speed we reach the fjords of the outer coast. Soon Gore Point’s leeward lagoon comes into view. Toylike at first, the Cape Chacon and the Johnita II grow life-size as we make our descent. De Creeft touches down, skis up to the Cape Chacon, unloads our bags, and minutes later is taking off again, anxious to make Homer ahead of the anticipated storm. The plane’s drone fades into the distance and the wake of silence it leaves behind is immense.

  With no time to waste, we work late loading 1,800-some-odd garbage bags of flotsam and jetsam one by one into Super Sacks. My postoperative convalescence now complete, I help out, too. Rain has puddled in the folds of plastic, and when we lift a bag it pours off, drenching us. When we finally call it quits, we are all wet and exhausted and eager to learn what tomorrow will bring.

  “It is now 11:04 P.M.,” Raynor will write in his logbook at bedtime. “Bryn and I are aboard for what I hope is the last night at Gore Point.”

  Waking early, I am relieved to see, out a port window, in the dark, a pair of lights like eyes above the water. Dawn breaks to reveal Otto Kilcher’s amphibious bow-loading barge, a one-hundred-foot steel box called the Constructor, anchored on the far side of the lagoon. It is shaped something like a very long black shoe, the white tower of the wheelhouse resembling a spat. To the east the sky begins to turn all peachy, then the upper slopes of the western mountains go from black to green. As the sun rises, the brightening line of green slides slowly to sea level, the darkness withdrawing like a sheet. There are few clouds overhead, and only a mild breeze blowing, which goes to show how much you can trust NOAA forecasts out here on the unpredictable coast.

  As we’re tugging on our Sitka sneakers and preparing to board the Zodiacs, Ted Raynor, like a high school football coach before a big game, gives us an unfortunate pep talk: “Mother Nature’s saying, ‘Please, please finish what you started. Please give me the big O.’ We’ve got her stroked and stoked and now we’ve just got to finish her off.”

  A visitor who happened by Gore Point this morning might well wonder if a reenactment of the Valdez oil spill is under way. Here again is the barge, here again the garbage bags of debris, here again the remediation contractors assembled on the pebble beach. All that’s missing is Exxon’s oil. Slumping into overstuffed Super Sacks as if they were Barcaloungers, dressed in jeans and Polarfleece, Raynor and his crew gaze west, beyond the yacht and barge, to the Kenai Mountains, above which, any moment now, they expect the helicopter to appear. It’s foggy on the other side of those mountains. You can barely see the clouds, rising over the crests like foam over a brim. “God’s smiling,” Raynor remarks of the favorable weather. “God’s s
aying, ‘Thank you. Thank you for cleaning up Gore Point.’”

  A half hour later, he isn’t so sure what God is saying. The helicopter was supposed to have arrived by ten. It’s getting on ten thirty. Has something gone wrong? Is Homer weathered in?

  “Wait a minute,” Raynor says. “I think I see it.”

  “Where?” asks Leiser, who’s already thrown on a hard hat, in anticipation.

  “There, to the left of that notch. See it?”

  Everyone squints.

  “Sorry,” says Raynor. “False alarm. Just a cloud.”

  The Pallister boys rise from their Super Sacks, walk down to the surf, and begin amusing themselves with strands of bull kelp, whipping the slick green ropes toward the water as if casting lines. Then they drop the kelp and skip a few rocks. Then they sit down on the beach and study the horizon. I do likewise.

  At last, from the direction opposite from the one expected, the unmistakable throb of a rotor can be heard, growing louder. Almost in unison, we rise, turn around, and shade our eyes with our hands, waiting for the helicopter to burst from behind the treetops. But then the noise fades. The treetops toss around in the wind. We continue to stare. “They must be doing a flyover of East Beach,” Leiser says. “Probably the TV crew wants an aerial shot.” The treetops keep tossing. At this distance the rotor sounds like a neighbor’s lawn mower. Now, thundering, it appears, swooping magnificently past, dark blue, alive with gleams, flying low enough that it’s easy to read the words MARITIME HELICOPTER written in white along its underbelly. Here in the wilderness it seems angelic. The pilot banks over the lagoon, over the Johnita II, over the Constructor, where Chris Pallister stands on the deck looking up.

  To my surprise and Pallister’s relief, the airlift went almost perfectly according to plan. Out of the treetops the orange hook came snaking down on its 125-foot cable. One of the elder Pallister boys, wearing a hard hat, leaped forth and snatched it. The other lashed on a bundle of Super Sacks and fishing floats. Meanwhile, Raynor stood by filming with his camcorder or snapping photographs. I stood by scribbling notes. Doug Leiser stood by barking something into his handheld CB, something only the helicopter pilot could make out. Then we all stepped back in anticipation, ready to dive into the devil’s club should the Super Sacks, like a berserk wrecking ball, swing our way.

  Two hundred feet above us the helicopter pilot, Drew Rose, began slowly, artfully, to ascend. The cable drew taut. The loop of rope threaded through the handles of the Super Sacks drew taut. The plastic of the Super Sacks crackled and stretched. The rainwater that had the previous night puddled into their folds gushed off. Then came the oddly beautiful moment of levitation, when this bulging, cumbersome bouquet of derelict flotsam, still dripping rain, spinning and swaying a little, took improbably to the air, snapping a few spruce branches as it went, and vanished into the blue asterisk of sky. In the quiet that followed the helicopter’s departure, the Pallister boys began readying the next load. Meanwhile, across the isthmus, aboard the Constructor, Pallister and his youngest son, Ryan, were receiving Drew Rose’s delivery.

  And so the day passed. For six hours, the helicopter flitted back and forth among the treetops like a bee among blossoming stalks, its busy collecting interrupted by surprisingly few unforeseen events. Once, late in the afternoon, as the helicopter passed over the isthmus, a portion of a dock fender, made of galvanized rubber, broke loose and plummeted out of the sky, landing among the chocolate lilies near the forest’s edge with an anticlimactic plop. And once, on the Constructor’s deck, after Pallister had unburdened it of Super Sacks, the swinging, thirty-pound hook clocked him in the forehead, drawing a trickle of blood. But the injury wasn’t serious, and by the time the airlift ended, he’d recovered his wits enough to sit down on a driftwood log before the television camera and give Channel 2’s blond anchorwoman a valedictory interview in which he thanked GoAK’s donors without mentioning them by name and hailed the tireless and triumphant labors of his crew.

  He looked strangely melancholy for a man who after many long months of arduous preparation, enduring many unforeseen events, had just regained a paradise. He seemed even smaller than usual. His smile still looked like a scowl. He still had that pop-eyed squint. His monkish hair was molded into the bowl shape of his hard hat. Watching him, I thought of what the television audience wouldn’t see—the lonely condominium to which Pallister would soon return, the estranged wife who, several months later, would file for divorce, the toxins adsorbed onto all that flotsam, toxins that continued to circulate through our watersheds and through the ocean’s currents despite GoAK’s labors.

  I thought, too, of the day, back in July, on my first visit to Gore Point, when, while Pallister stayed behind to finish his repairs to the Johnita II, the rest of us had motored around the Gore Peninsula in search of debris. Northwest of Gore Point’s leeward lagoon, we’d landed in Takoma Cove. High tide there reaches all the way to the surfgrass, green droopy bursts of which grow thick along the forest’s edge. Unlike that of Gore Point, Takoma Cove’s littoral zone teemed with flora and fauna. On the small dark-sand beach were outcroppings of rock, lumpy and pocked as meteors. In their concavities tide pools had formed, and over every tenable surface grew a slippery green pelt of sea sac (Halosaccion glandiforme ). Below the waterline, the bulbs of the sea sac swelled into fingers that seemed to be feeling around as they swayed in the surf. Above the waterline, they lay limp—golden-green deflated balloons—atop constellations of limpets and barnacles. Just past the tideline, in a clump of surfgrass, one of the Leiser boys, Bryan, discovered yet another Floatee, a duck. Unlike those specimens entombed in the Gore Point midden heap, this one seemed to have only recently arrived, tossed up into the surfgrass, perhaps by the last storm. Had it been at sea all that time, circling between Alaska and Kamchatka? Had it spent a season on Attu Island, near the end of the Aleutian chain? Or had it been here on the Kenai Peninsula all along, washing in and washing out? There was no telling.

  Bryan Leiser already had in his possession a complete set of toys, and, knowing how badly I wanted a duck of my own, a duck found in the wild, he gave me this specimen. Truth be told, when I set out on my quest I hadn’t expected to find any one of the four varieties of bath toy I was chasing, let alone a duck. I studied Bryan Leiser’s gift for answers, gazing into its blank, banana-white eyes, wondering where it had gone and what it had seen—a silly thing to wonder, since it hadn’t seen anything, since it was nothing more than polyethylene, but I wondered nevertheless, because fancy is often more powerful than fact. There were other questions I wished the dumb thing could answer: Was it coated in pollutants? Had it taken dominion over the slovenly littoral wilderness of Takoma Cove the way the anecdotal jar in the Wallace Stevens poem takes dominion over the woody wilderness of Tennessee?

  Since the afternoon I’d spent on Kruzof Island, I’d reread Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar.” It was more ambiguous than I remembered. When the speaker places the jar in Tennessee, the wilderness is no longer wild, he tells us. Why not? After all, this isn’t ajar of dioxin or DDT. It is, the speaker makes emphatically clear, empty, like “a port in air.” The jar does not exterminate the birds and bushes of Tennessee.

  Literary historians have speculated that Stevens had in mind a particular brand of jar, now obsolete, then common, with which a Tennessean could lay up fruits of the harvest. The brand name? Dominion, a word now fraught with contentious environmental connotations thanks to the King James translation of Genesis 1, verse 26: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” The most mysterious thing about the poem to my mind is this personification of the jar. You’d think that the speaker, in placing it there, had taken dominion. How can a mere jar, even one embossed with the brand name Dominion, take dominion?

  Here’s what I think. It on
ly takes dominion in the mind of the speaker, by changing the look of the scenery—not the ecology of the scenery, or the chemistry of the scenery, mind you, but the look of it. What the jar exterminates is the appearance of wilderness, the idea of wilderness. The wilderness is “slovenly,” whereas the jar is anything but. It’s gray, bare, round, inanimate, man-made. It is, above all, a symbol of human order imposed on nature’s entropy. It creates a kind of round center that the previously centerless wilderness seems to surround, but only when viewed by the godlike speaker does this center hold. Perceived by a bird, the jar would be, what? An inedible bit of kiln-fired clay? A nice place to build a nest?

  Stevens’s orderly poem, organized into shapely quatrains, with its irregular but nevertheless discernible iambic meter and its internal rhymes, is itself a jar of sorts, and so for that matter is a wilderness park. Much as Stevens’s jar takes “dominion everywhere,” the State of Alaska had taken dominion over the Kachemak Bay Wilderness. We might conclude, given the contrast Stevens draws between the sterility of the gray jar and the vitality of the slovenly wilderness, that the poem favors the latter. This is hard to say. The poem itself isn’t wild, after all. And in other poems about the natural world, “The Snow Man” for instance, Stevens’s speakers gaze into natural landscapes but fail to detect the mind of God, or the evidence of design, or of harmony, and they see the beauty of such places as a human creation, a projection of the imagination onto a kind of blankness.