Moby-Duck

by Donovan Hohn

  He emerged from his kitchen with a glass of passion-fruit juice freshly decanted from the blender. “Here,” he said, in the manner of a medicine man, “drink that.” There were bits of pulp and seed and who knew what else—gnats, probably—floating around in it, and I hesitated a moment before taking a sip. It was the best juice I’d ever tasted. Then Moore reached up, plucked a dwarf banana from a branch, and peeled it for me as if I were a child. “Try that.” It was the best banana I’d ever tasted, tangy and vegetal as well as sweet.

  I’d like to share Moore’s faith in the arc of progress, but even there, in the never-never land of the man’s garden, I had a hard time imagining the bright future he saw, in which we Americans would trade conspicuous consumption for cradle-to-cradle manufacturing practices, disposable plastics for zero-waste policies and closed ecological loops. I had a hard time because such a future seemed to me inimical to the American gospel of perpetual economic growth, and because my upbringing in Northern California had taught me to distrust utopian strangers who talked about “economic paradigms,” no matter how tasty their bananas. Nevertheless, when Moore offered me a goodie bag—paper, not plastic—of fresh fruit, I accepted it. Off I went, laden with grapes and figs and papayas and bananas and an understanding that Moore and I would meet again the following November, in Hawaii.

  THE BELLY OF THE ALBATROSS

  My first morning on the Big Island, I reported to the laboratory run by Karla McDermid, marine biologist at the University of Hawaii-Hilo. Students in her marine debris seminar stood around long metal tables analyzing the latest haul of plastic that Moore had collected from the Eastern Garbage Patch. The lab had the feel of a workshop. One team of students was investigating the origins of flotsam and jetsam that had yet to photodegrade—ropes, bottles, sticks of deodorant. “It’s from India!” a student at a computer shouted. Another team was sieving through sand retrieved from Kamilo Beach. “That’s the world’s dirtiest beach, according to Charlie Moore,” McDermid told me. “So dirty that the sand is like plastic sand.” I asked her where Kamilo Beach was. “Down near South Point.”

  McDermid—in a button-down blouse and sandals and glasses and pink glass earrings—turned to address the busy room. “If you need beakers, you guys, beakers for floating things, or petri dishes, I’ll be back, you just yell at me what you need.” She led me outside, where at the edge of a parking lot an aspiring wildlife veterinarian, Sarah Ward, had volunteered to perform the savory task of pawing through albatross “upchuck balls.” Wearing purple rubber gloves, Ward crouched beside a bucket from which there rose the nauseating stench of death and in which could be seen a partially digested bolus coated in what looked like engine oil. In a way it was engine oil—the oil of an albatross engine. Albatrosses live fifty years or more, and spend 95 percent of those years at sea, and for 90 percent of their time at sea, they’re flying—gliding, really. Their wings locked fast, rarely flapping, riding the same winds favored by mariners of the age of sail, they can go thousands of miles without touching down. They even fly asleep. By the estimate of Carl Safina, the naturalist and author of Eye of the Albatross, an albatross can clock around four million air miles before it dies. To fuel these epic flights, an albatross’s stomach distills albatross prey—squid, fish roe, herring—into an oil almost as caloric as diesel. In the not too distant future, two or three generations hence, when the planet’s reserves of fossil fuel begin to run out, perhaps some entrepreneur will start farming albatrosses for their oil.

  This sort of avian prospecting would be no innovation. It would be a return to the technology of the nineteenth century, when hunters slaughtered albatrosses for their oil, as well as for their feathers, desirable as millinery plumage. In the breeding grounds of the Japanese island of Torishima, feather hunters killed an estimated five million birds between 1887 and 1902, when the island’s volcano erupted, exterminating the hunters; some of the birds, however, survived. On the Northwestern Hawaiian Archipelago, as on other island chains, marauding feather hunters would pillage the rookeries where docile adults refused to quit their nests, pluck a quarter pound of feathers from every bird, and leave behind a heap of carcasses. In many ways, most ways, the lot of the albatross has improved greatly since the nineteenth century. In other ways, not. So far Sarah Ward had found oily tangles of monofilament fishing line and scads of oily squid beaks, which, disembodied, look a great deal like the beaks of birds. While I watched, she found something else, an oily little plastic flower that had perhaps once decorated a child’s hair barrette.

  Back indoors, down the hall, in another lab, five students in white lab coats, bent before Leica dissecting microscopes, searched petri dishes for minuscule grains of plastic. The samples had previously been sieved, and each student was working with particles of a different magnitude—one with 0.70-micron particles, another with 0.99-micron particles. With tweezers they poked around, sorting particles by color and type, separating nurdles from monofilament from foam from film. Once sorted, the particles would be set aside to dry. Once dry, they’d be weighed on a scale so sensitive that even a breeze blowing over its surface could tip the balance. The goal of these forensics: to determine as irrefutably as possible the plastic-to-plankton ratio in the Eastern Garbage Patch.

  While I was marveling at the painstaking process, the door swung open and in walked a surfer chick. She had long, apparently unwashed blond hair pulled back into a messy Rastafarian knot. Circumscribing her head was a knitted band in a black, yellow, red, and green Rastafarian motif. Tucked into her knotted hair above the Rastafarian headband was a pair of sunglasses. She was wearing plaid Bermuda shorts and a black tank top, and carrying a skateboard under her arm. Her name was Amy Young. She’d crewed on the Alguita before, and had a word of warning for me: bring Dramamine. “I’ve been out on a lot of boats,” she said, in a surprisingly high-pitched, surprisingly childish voice, “and Alguita’ s different even for a small boat, because it’s wider. That boat got me.” I had brought Dramamine and, at Moore’s behest, one of those flesh-colored transdermal motion-sickness patches that you’re supposed to stick behind your ear. I’d also brought some of those ginger candies that had saved me aboard the Opus.

  Back in McDermid’s main lab, in a short-sleeved blue-and-white shirt ornamented in some sort of vaguely Balinesian pattern, Charlie Moore was delivering, for the benefit of a local TV news crew, a spiel similar to the one he’d given me in Long Beach: “The ocean obeys the basic law of ecology, which is that in an ecosystem everything is used. But humanity is breaking that basic law.” Or: “We say we’re throwing stuff away, but there is no away. The ocean is away.” He described seeing, on “a night dive” a thousand miles off the coast of California, caught in the beam of his waterproof flashlight, a plastic grocery bag. “I’m still upset,” he said. “As a member of the human race I find it embarrassing.”

  One of McDermid’s students found, among the flotsam she was sorting, a stick of men’s deodorant denuded of its label and, camera still rolling, McDermid handed it to Charlie. “Is that a hint?” he asked, uncapping it and swabbing his armpits, then said, “I think I smell better.”

  It was a good performance, humorous yet full of the factoids and sound bites that make news producers happy. It was also a performance he’d given many times before, most recently the previous morning, on the Today show. There was one datum that was news to me: sailing from Long Beach to Hilo, detouring yet again into the Eastern Garbage Patch, he’d collected samples containing forty-six times as much plastic as plankton, an eightfold increase since 1999. In 1999, plastic had outnumbered plankton by a factor of six.

  Moore, environmental Barnum that he is, presented to the camera a bag of plastic sand collected on Kamilo Beach. It looked like the colorful gravel you used to see at the bottoms of decorative fish tanks. By comparing Moore to Barnum, I don’t mean to suggest that he’s a charlatan; I mean to suggest only that he plays his role exceedingly well. Now, in the information age, which is readily transfo
rming into the disinformation age, if you wish to combat, as Moore does, the armies of corporate publicists waging endless ad campaigns, including green-washing campaigns of the sort devised by Keep America Beautiful, then you have to be media savvy, and like a guerrilla warrior on the information battlefield you have to exploit your adversaries’ weaknesses. The problem is that in the universal propaganda arms race that has manifested from the disinformation age, no one trusts anyone, and doubtful citizens are free to luxuriate in distractions, while overconfident citizens are allowed to pick and choose whichever factoids and sound bites confirm their self-serving predispositions. Make-believe, I was beginning to think, is inescapable.

  Holding up the bag of plastic sand, Moore explained into the reporter’s microphone the mission of the research cruise on which he and I were about to embark. We were going to determine whence this bag of plastic sand came. From fishermen Moore had heard that a “feeder cell,” a sort of miniature garbage patch, had formed fifty miles south of Hawaii in an eddy of convergent currents, an eddy that was in turn generated by the winds that spin between the crests of the Big Island’s two active volcanoes, Mauna Loa and Kilauea. From NOAA oceanographers he had procured satellite images showing the convergence zones of the North Pacific. Mostly the convergent currents lie to the north, east, and west of Hawaii, at the heart of the Subtropical Gyre. But on Moore’s colorful satellite-generated maps, fifty miles south of South Point, there was a dot of purple, the color that, as a caption to the satellite images explained, represented a zone of “greatest convergence.” It was into this zone that we would sail.

  Before leaving McDermid’s lab, Moore made it known that the Alguita’s crew was still one deckhand short. Amy Young, surfer chick, was quick to sign on. “I’m totally stoked,” she said. I swear, that’s exactly what she said. Filling out our crew would be two other students in McDermid’s marine debris course, Jeff Ernst, a puckish, towheaded kid with a wispy, towheaded soul patch, and Cory Hungate, a buff surfer dude who liked to go around topless, showing off his pneumatic pectorals between which lay, suspended from a hemp lanyard, a pendant fish hook. Carved from bone, the fish hook is an artisanal symbol of Polynesian culture when worn by a native Hawaiian. When worn by a haole like Hungate, it is perhaps a symbol of either dudeliness or douchiness. Then there was Moore’s wife, Sam Cannon, and co-captain Laurent Pool. A marine biologist with the Audubon Society and a seasoned sailor, Pool had the look of a Jazz Age bohemian. He kept his balding head shaved, sported a pair of little wire-rim spectacles, and, when not on the windy deck of a sailboat, protected his bare scalp with a feathered fedora. Then there was me.

  INTO THE CONVERGENCE ZONE

  We sailed out of Radio Bay at dusk, intent on making South Point by morning. Conditions at our departure: sea state 3 on the Beaufort scale, wind a little under ten knots, skies cloudy but opalescent, casting a rime of shine on the Alguita’s brightwork. Even tablespoons of rain puddled on the cabin roof caught the light, and the tinted Plexiglas portholes in the cabin’s roof, when the angle was right, turned into celestial mirrors. To shore you could see the green island and the white honeycombs of vacation condominiums. The trade winds were blowing, and conditions promised to worsen when we emerged from the lee of the Big Island, but our main worry, said Moore, was the volcanic smog, or “vog.” “Vog Keeps Students Indoors; Mountain View Gets ‘Worst Ever Seen’ Emissions,” ran the front-page headline in that morning’s Hawaii Tribune-Herald . Vog smells sulfurous, and for good reason; it consists mostly of sulfur dioxide. The trade winds would speed us along, but they could also blow the vog into our path, or whip up rough conditions. “We can’t just beat our way through a trade wind,” Moore said just before we slipped the lines. “We have to finesse our way through.”

  Moore divided the crew into pairs and put a watch schedule into effect. Watch lasted four hours. My watch partner was Moore himself, not, I think, because he particularly enjoyed my company or wished to give me extra journalistic access but because he distrusted my seamanship. Moore asks every “prospective research team member” to fill out a questionnaire. My score on this questionnaire, it should be stated, was pathetically low. Did I hold any seaman’s documents? No. Did I have CPR and/or first-aid certification? No. Was I a certified scuba diver, a licensed ham radio operator, a scientist? No, no, no. Yes, I had a valid U.S. passport. Yes, I would be “willing to take an active part in the actual operation of the ship.” Yes, I could swim, though I’d rather not do so if there were sharks about. Yes, I had taken “a basic boating course.”

  In Hilo, on the eve of our embarkation, as Moore, Sam, and I were walking back to the Alguita from dinner at a nearby restaurant, I pulled from my pocket a little length of rope I’d been carrying around in my pocket and executed my bowline. “Good,” Moore said. “Now let’s see the clove hitch.” My clove hitch was shakier. I’d only really mastered it during a layover in Minneapolis en route to Hilo. We happened to be standing by a koi pond, beside a highway, and between us and the koi pond was a railing around which, a bit doubtfully, I executed a clove hitch. Moore gave the bight a tug. “Good enough.” The Big Island was loud that night with the singing of coqui frogs, an invasive species that had reached Hawaii, the thinking goes, by stowing away on landscaping plants shipped from Puerto Rico. “A lot of stars for Hilo,” Moore had said, considering the night sky. He swung his hand up as if saluting an angel or an albatross and squinted one eye, sighting down the length of his arm. “We’re at 19 degrees north, so that’s definitely the North Star.” He slid his arm over a little. “And that’s Cassiopeia.” Kokee, kokee, a frog sang from a nearby bush. “Kokee,” Moore sang back.

  We took the graveyard shift, Moore and I, standing watch between ten and two, by day and by night. In fact, except when he was stealing a few hours of sleep, Moore was effectively on duty, very much the captain of his ship. I spent that first watch up on the stippled, supposedly slipproof fiberglass roof of the Alguita’s cabin. Most of the crew was out there—not yet weary or seasick, full of anticipation, thrilled by watery beginnings, wearing transdermal patches behind our ears. The clear night sky teemed with stars, some of them shooting. You could see the Milky Way. The tinted Plexiglas hatch above the helm swung open, and out, like a gopher, popped Charlie Moore. He was standing on his captain’s chair. Across his brown ball cap swam a sea turtle and the words NEW ENGLAND AQUARIUM. He had a pair of binoculars, which he trained to starboard. Excitedly, he pointed out to the rest of us the simmering lavas of Kilauea. Even without binoculars you could make out the orange tendrils and ropes and balls and droplets of molten rock splashing and leaping forth from the black horizon of the land.

  That first night at sea, when my watch ended, I did not sleep well. Each of the Alguita’s two cabins is set down in one of the two aluminum hulls. Captain’s quarters are in the port hull, crew’s quarters in the starboard hull. I was sharing the crew’s quarters with Jeff Ernst and Amy Young. Their berths were up on a kind of loft, right under the tinted Plexiglas hatches. Between their pillows oscillated a little plastic fan. My berth was way down in the humid depths, below the waterline. It was hot down there, but I couldn’t complain; consigned to bunks on the port side of the main cabin with only a curtain for privacy, co-captain Laurent Pool and surfer dude Cory Hungate had drawn the worst lot.

  I woke, just before seven, to the sound of music, and stumbled, sleepy, rank with sweat, in a caffeine-deprived stupor to the aft deck. Ernst was strumming an acoustic guitar, Young accompanying him on bongos. The manta trawl, already overboard, was still unspooling from the white steel A-frame crane that spanned the stern. It was easy to see how the manta trawl got its name. The resemblance was obvious: from the side of the trawl’s boxy aluminum maw flared hollow aluminum wings that, together with the long tail of netting, brought the giant ray to mind. The netting terminated in a cylinder called a cod end. Considering me through a pair of silvered sunglasses, her hair balled up inside a knit cap, Young stopped drumming and said, in h
er girlish voice, “You going to get some sun on those pasty legs? You’ve got a library tan, friend.”

  Laurent Pool, shirtless, bald head shining, about to take his morning piss off the stern, stopped to consider whether he might end up tainting the sample we were presently collecting and availed himself of the head instead—an unnecessary detour, it seemed to me; wasn’t the ocean full of the eliminations of whales and seals and copepods? Having made a hundred miles during the night, we were right on schedule, right off South Point. You could see up on the green foothills of the Big Island a row of white windmills. If an explorer such as Captain Cook were to have arrived here and discovered this radiant, towering display, I wonder what he would have made of it. I suppose he would have taken the windmills for armaments, or monuments.

  Moore was out on the aft deck, too, snapping digital photos of the tropical sunrise, dressed in a pair of baggy black shorts, and flip-flops, and a big baggy tank top that hung from his midriff like a tent. On it was a cartoon finch. His face was whiskery, and his expression seemed by turns melancholic, stoical, or bemused. The wind was up, now twenty to twenty-five knots. Motors off, we were under sail. The waves sloshed pleasantly against the hull. “Quite a lot of potential wind power they’ve got up there,” Moore said of the windmills on South Point, shadowing his eyes. “Most of those are derelicts.”

  Stickers from other institutions and organizations dotted the windows of the Alguita’s main cabin: Scripps, Woods Hole, Waterkeeper, American Chemical Society (not to be confused with the American Chemistry Council), a website called Pursuebalance.org. Leis made from real flowers hung around a brass wall clock, beneath the sound system. In the galley, above the sink, strung along a piece of kitchen string, were those little colorful plastic tabs that clip shut bags of sliced bread. Moore tried to reuse them instead of throwing them out. Tucked on a few small shelves, the Alguita possessed a cozy library, with such volumes as Pacific Coast Pelagic Invertebrates, Stars and Planets, Royce’s Sailing Illustrated, and even a tattered pulp paperback copy of Moby-Dick. During the course of our research cruise, as we sailed through oceans, no one went for so much as a dip in this library, at least not while I was looking, though I did notice Laurent Pool reading a book he’d brought with him: Ishmael, a didactic ecological novel named for its main character—not a greenhorn embarking on a whaling trip, nor the outcast son of Abraham, but a telepathic gorilla, who thinks lots of profound ecological thoughts. In Pool’s opinion, Ishmael was primo stuff. The rest of us were otherwise preoccupied, by trawling, and by music, and by the scenery.