Moby-Duck

by Donovan Hohn

  A hairline crack ran around the duck Bryan Leiser gave me, and I could see the shadow of seawater sloshing around inside its translucent body. I shook as much seawater out as I could without beheading the thing completely, and zipped it into the pocket of my raincoat. Back in New York, I stashed it in my freezer, subjecting it to Arctic temperatures, performing an experiment. The beaver I’d found I sent to an environmental toxicologist, Lorena Rios, at the University of the Pacific, who’d agreed to analyze it, pro bono, with her mass spectrometer, a machine that, by measuring the mass of molecules, thereby distinguishing among them, can see chemicals invisible to the human eye. Months later Rios would send me the results: her tests would accurately identify the polymer—polyethylene. They would also detect twelve different polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that my beaver had adsorbed on its journey to Gore Point15.

  Did Pallister feel a sense of satisfaction, the blond anchorwoman wanted to know.

  “It’s satisfying,” Pallister said, squinting into the camera on its tripod, his rubber boots planted on the gravel beach, a microphone clipped to his fleece collar. Visible behind him was the Constructor, thousands of white bags piled high above the bulwarks, and beyond them the dark lagoon, and beyond that the snowcapped peaks of the Kenai Mountains—a dramatic backdrop that would no doubt do wonders for GoAK’s fund-raising efforts. “Satisfying, but it sure was a grind,” Pallister said. “Right now I’m just tired.”

  THE THIRD CHASE

  In passing, it is worth noting that the morality of an act cannot be determined from a photograph. One does not know whether a man killing an elephant or setting fire to the grassland is harming others until one knows the total system in which his act appears. “One picture is worth a thousand words,” said an ancient Chinese; but it may take 10,000 words to validate it. It is as tempting to ecologists as it is to reformers in general to try to persuade others by way of the photographic shortcut. But the essence of an argument cannot be photographed: it must be presented rationally—in words.

  —Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons

  Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea—mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.

  —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

  SOUTH POINT

  The southernmost edge of Hawaii is also the southernmost edge of the United States of America and feels like the southernmost edge of the world. Two months after the airlift at Gore Point I traveled there, staying in Na‘ālehu, whose name means “the volcanic ashes.” Na‘ālehu is the southernmost town on the Big Island, and for frugal reasons I took a room at the Shirakawa Motel, the southernmost motel and quite possibly the cheapest one on the entire Hawaiian chain. Just up the road from the southernmost motel is a bar advertised as the southernmost bar, a restaurant advertised as the southernmost restaurant, and a bakery advertised as the southernmost bakery. Geographical extremity seems to me of dubious relevance to baked goods, but the tourists come by the busload to sample a morsel of southernmost bread.

  The windward side of the Big Island is not what most of us imagine when, finding ourselves stuck in traffic or a bad job, we dream our Hawaiian dreams. Downtown Hilo, once the capital of a booming sugar trade, reminded me of cities in the American Rust Belt, only with palm trees and rain, lots of rain—a sunbaked, rain-soaked, tropical Sandusky. To get to Na‘ālehu from Hilo, you drive over the Kilauea volcano, which is active but tame, the lava bubbling forth in a steady simmer but never, in recent history, shooting forth a shower of fire and brimstone. You pass through dilapidated towns made derelict by the collapse of Hawaii’s sugar industry, past bungalows with corrugated metal roofs, past a barn-size movie theater with a sea turtle painted on its corrugated metal roof and a closed sign hanging in its dark entrance even on Saturday nights (or at least on the particular Saturday night I saw it), past walls of lava rock stacked in the manner of fieldstones in rural New England.16

  Then you reach the Shirakawa Motel, advertised by a rusty metal sign protruding out of the foliage. The Shirakawa Motel is a dilapidated compound of buildings also roofed in metal and encircled by a jungle of banana trees, and palm trees, and monkey pod trees, and ti plants, which have big droopy leaves and resemble the sort of tropical flora one encounters in the waiting rooms of dentists. The sky here is smoky gray and the rain falls in torrential outbursts lasting, at least on the afternoon I checked in, roughly seven minutes. It is falling now, loud as drumsticks on the canopy of leaves. And now it has stopped. Within moments, butterflies emerge to suck nectar from the flowering bushes, the flowers of which resemble little red starbursts.

  My room is monastically spare—no television, no telephone, no clock, only a tattered orange paperback copy of The Teaching of Buddha, left out, like the Gideon Bible, as if to entice converts, on the round table between the two saggy queen-size beds. On the cover of The Teaching of Buddha is a setting sun. The binding has cracked and pages have come loose. Someone has stuck some of the loose pages randomly back in. The frontmost page is page 166, which begins midparagraph: “Was it a man or a woman? Was it someone of noble birth, or was it a peasant? What was the bow made of? Was it made of fiber, or of gut?” In my present bewildered state of mind, these seem like good questions.

  From outside my little room come the sounds of insects—cicadas, perhaps, or crickets, or some tropical variety of noisy insect I’ve never heard of. A dog is barking. The striated world visible through the slanted jalousies above the queen-size beds is bright and green. Someone is playing Jawaiian reggae. Chickens run wild in southern Hawaii. This is the sort of habitat in which they evolved, after all. We think of chickens as animals indigenous to a Nebraskan farmyard, but they emerged from tropical forests like those encroaching all around the Shirakawa Motel. Every so often I can hear a rooster crow. They crow at dusk and dawn both. The flora and fauna here are as lush as the economy and the architecture are moribund. If the residents left, it wouldn’t be long before the motels and movie theaters vanished into the foliage. Yes, this feels very much like the edge of the world. It feels much farther from the tourist-infested boulevards of Waikiki than it is—the boulevards of Waikiki, where, a few days ago, I saw white Christmas lights twinkle in the palm trees and street vendors peddle ukuleles made in China and the eternal flames of gaslit tiki torches burn on the facades of the big hotels.

  One morning I drive farther south still, to the stretch of coastline known as South Point. The lush jungle gives way to feral sprays of sugarcane. Then to ranchland. The sun comes out. The road is cracked. Horses and cattle graze on windswept pastures over which loom rows of derelict windmills—an alternative energy plan gone bust. I drive on, until the pavement ends, at which point I park my rental car and continue on foot down a red dirt road that branches and splits among green hills carved by storm surges and rain. Every now again an SUV or pickup will rattle past. At the terminus of the land blue breakers obliterate themselves prettily against gnarled tumors of black igneous rock. I keep walking, searching, combing, stumbling over the crumbled lava rock in my canvas boat shoes, canvas boat shoes now dusted with red dirt. I follow the shoreline, the sun beating down. I wish I’d brought more water.

  A week ago, if you had stood on these lava rocks amid the crashing waves and stared out to sea, you would have seen a catamaran under sail. And if you had aimed a telescope at that catamaran you might well have seen, dressed in Adventure pants, unzipped at the knee into Adventure shorts, baring my pale ankles, me, cross-legged atop the catamaran’s cabin, on watch, scanning the horizon for obstacles and debris. And if you’d aimed your telescope at the cockpit, a foot or two below me, you would have seen, through the tinted windshield beaded with spray, at the helm, in his big captain’s chair, Captain Charles Moore considering a dashboard aflicker with soundings and readings and bearings.

  CAPTAIN MOORE

  It had taken months of nagging and cajoling and begging to persuade Charles Moore that I was worthy to sail under his command. He’d
had bad experiences with other landlubber journalists. A film crew for Vice magazine, shooting an online video about the Garbage Patch, had been particularly, almost mutinously, annoying, worried more about getting good shots than about standing watch or hauling in sheets or reefing sails or washing dishes. When I first reached Moore, by cell phone, from my classroom, back before I’d given up schoolteaching for seafaring, he’d said, gruffly, “There are no passengers aboard the Alguita; only crew.”

  Fine by me, I’d told him, thinking of Melville’s Ishmael, who whenever he goes to sea always goes as a sailor, before the mast, on the forecastle deck, never as a passenger. It was early spring, that afternoon, and on my chalkboard was a stanza of Dickinson’s “There’s a certain slant of light,” between the lines of which I’d marked out the stresses of Dickinson’s irregular hymn meter, and in the pockets of my corduroy blazer were chalk nubbins and red pencils, and outside my classroom windows, on Manhattan’s East 16th Street, the fruitless pear trees were in bloom, and on the sidewalk below, schoolchildren, just dismissed, were purchasing colorful balls of Italian ice from a cart, and in my mind the tropics of the North Pacific were a vague, blue dream.

  Moore was planning a short expedition that would take place the following November, and maybe there’d be room for me among the crew. “Do you know how to sail?” he asked. “Because our number-one priority is safety. It can be dangerous out there.” November is still hurricane season in the tropics of the North Pacific, he said.

  I did have some sailing experience, I assured him. The summer I was thirteen, back when I was still considering a career in marine biology, my parents had enrolled me in sailing school. Weekday mornings for several weeks, I’d traveled by bus from San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge, to the Sausalito Cruising Club, where behind the protection of a breakwater, I and a handful of other pubescent greenhorns had learned the difference between leeward and windward, starboard and port, luff and leech, to tack into the wind and run before it. On land, at age thirteen, I was a lummox, chubby, bad at sports, asthmatic, bespectacled, overly fond of a particular pair of striped wristbands that always stank of sweat. Out on the water, at the helm of a Laser, a fiberglass sloop, I was half dolphin, half bird. That, at the time I first contacted Moore, was the sum total of my sailing experience.

  The synopsis I gave Moore of my training didn’t seem to leave a favorable impression, and so in August, the week before the airlift at Gore Point, I flew to Long Beach, California, hoping to close the deal.

  “If nothing else, you’ll need to know how to tie a clove hitch and a bowline knot,” he said as we stood on the aft deck of the Alguita, Moore’s custom-made oceanographic research vessel, tied up at his private dock, on an inlet lined with palm trees and patio umbrellas and pleasure boats. Across the street from the dock was the boxy, two-story, many-chambered yellow stucco house, the second-story windows like portholes, to which his parents had brought him home from the hospital as a newborn six decades before. Around it Moore grew—organically, of course—a small, thriving jungle of tropical plants.

  In a few weeks he would be sailing to Hilo, where he planned to spend most of the winter, returning to Long Beach in late January. On the passage to Hilo and back he would go trawling yet again for plastic in the Eastern Garbage Patch. This would be the fourth time he’d collected samples there in ten years. Why repeat the same experiment? By comparing old data with new, he hoped to determine the rate at which pelagic plastic was accumulating.

  Aboard the Alguita that sunny afternoon, you could feel the air of frenzied preparation. A mechanic named Tomas, busy hooking the boat’s hydraulic system to an array of solar panels, kept popping out of an open hatch to snatch one of the shiny wrenches scattered about the black rubber mats of the aft deck, then popping back below. When Tomas was up, Moore conversed with him in Spanish—fluently, it sounded to my ignorant ear.17 The solar panels were a recent acquisition, paid for with a grant from none other than BP. “We’re going to be able to run a three-horsepower motor,” Moore said, “and the gantry crane here, and the six hundred meters of trawl cable here, and the anchor—all with solar power.” Made to order by a Tasmanian shipwright, Moore’s fifty-foot aluminum-hulled catamaran is a handsome vessel, handsome as the Opus is homely, and its new solar panels would make it state-of-the-art. Since Moore launched it into Hobart Harbor more than two decades ago, the Alguita has logged some 100,000 blue-water miles, most of them on research cruises. When he isn’t conducting his own research, Moore charters the boat to other scientists. Earlier that summer he’d taken a group of wildlife ornithologists bird-watching in the Sea of Cortez.

  During the time I’d travel with him, I’d never get to see Charlie, as everyone who knows him calls him, in the captain’s outfit that he sometimes wears—light-blue shirt, little name tag pinned to the breast pocket, the striped epaulets, everything but the white cap with the gold anchor above the black visor. On the day I met him he—potbellied, with the permanent tan and sinewy limbs of a man who spends a lot of time both in and on the water, dressed in a grease-stained khaki shirt with holes at both elbows, the top four buttons undone to expose a grizzled wedge of chest fur—didn’t look much like a sea captain. He looked like the organic-farming, utopian beach bum that, when not at the Alguita’s helm, he is. Almost every day, when he isn’t sailing, he surfs. That morning off Huntington Pier, he’d “shredded it up pretty good.” He has a bushy head of sun-bleached brown hair shot through with filaments of gray, but otherwise bears a striking resemblance to the balding actor Robert Duvall. Moore could be Duvall’s younger, shorter, tanner, hairier brother. His heavy-lidded eyes and wrinkly neck give him the aspect of a sun-drugged tortoise. He speaks in a gravelly, almost inflectionless yet hortatory drone, as if reading a prepared speech badly from a teleprompter. When he laughs he opens his mouth just a little, once again bringing to mind a tortoise, and makes a coughing sound, as if trying to clear his throat: heh.

  Giving me a tour of the Alguita, he delivered a kind of extemporaneous sermon that ranged widely, from the chemistry of polybrominated diphenyl ethers to the social critic Thorstein Veblen to Rell Sunn, the deceased Hawaiian high priestess of surfing. Moore sounded at times brilliant, a font of facts and expertise (“our research indicates that 2.3 billion pieces of plastic go down the L.A. Basin in three days”), and at times like a half-cocked conspiracy theorist (“in our economy a series of short-lived and sickly generations is more profitable than a series of long-lived and healthy ones”).

  For a utopian organic farmer without an advanced degree in oceanography or anything else, Moore has been lead author on an impressive number of scientific papers. He has successfully lobbied for stronger regulation of Southern California’s plastics industry. Think of Los Angeles, and if you don’t live there you probably think of Hollywood, but Los Angeles is the American epicenter of virgin plastics processing. In 2006, the World Federation of Scientists (WFS) invited Moore to Erice, Sicily, to deliver a presentation on plastic contaminants, which the WFS, thanks in part to Moore, has now added as a subcategory to its growing list of planetary emergencies. Also on the list: Missile Proliferation, Cultural Pollution, and Defense Against Cosmic Objects.

  Moore was recently inducted into the Explorers Club, the elite association of scientific adventurers whose ranks have included Sir Edmund Hillary, Roald Amundsen, Neil Armstrong, and Jacques Piccard, the deep-sea explorer who, in 1960, with copilot Don Walsh, set the unbroken world depth record—35,800 feet—for a descent in a manned submersible. In 2006, with his wife, Samantha Cannon, known as Sam, Moore attended the club’s annual dinner, infamous for its adventurous menus. At the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, Sam and Charlie had been offered such hors d’oeuvres as toasted crickets and kangaroo testicles, then watched as the club’s president made a grand entrance on a hired camel.

  Back before he became a scientific adventurer, when he was still a humble furniture repairman, one of his regular clients was the Hanjin shipping line, wh
ich hired him to restore furniture damaged in transit. He’d restored, for instance, a grand piano that Gregory Peck had shipped to Los Angeles from Marseille. The first time Sam saw her future partner, in the early seventies, he was sitting in the back of a pickup truck outside a food co-op, his hair even bushier than it is now, a joint in one hand, a beer in the other. He has since renounced all mindaltering substances in favor of organic fruit. This renunciation, and Moore’s heterogeneous résumé, suggest that his has been a wayward path, that he was personally acquainted with the experience of drift.

  Around the same time he started the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, Moore started another nonprofit whose mission is to teach the wayward, drifting youths of Long Beach to grow and tend organic community gardens. He handed me a business card. Long Beach Organic, it said. Slogan: “For gardens, trees, & kids!” He is in effect a kind of nonprofit entrepreneur. At first the organic nonprofit was the more successful of his two ventures, but in recent years, thanks to growing public awareness of the Garbage Patch, the Algalita Marine Research Foundation has surged past organic farming.

  Summoning me to follow, he headed up the gangway, across the street, to his organic garden. “Don’t bump your head on the cucumber,” he said as we entered this frugivorous, bee-loud, homemade glade, a kind of personal Eden equipped with a solar-powered hot tub and a chlorine-free swimming pool purified by ozone. With compost below and fruit-heavy branches overhead, the air smelled of both ripeness and rot. A giant avocado tree grew up the back of Moore’s house like a leafy chimney. That avocado tree was almost as old as he was, Moore said. In the corner, a surfboard leaned against a fence, and a pair of wet suits, one bright blue the other bright red, hung from a clothesline. They looked like melted superheroes. A wooden bridge of the sort you see in tea gardens spanned the chlorine-free pool. Without explanation Moore excused himself, leaving me loitering by his back door, near the entrance to a shed in which could be seen a photo of Moore on his surf board, shredding it up pretty good.