Moby-Duck

by Donovan Hohn

  “You okay with that?” Bower, determined but worried, and looking at him askance, maximizing her vision, asks Ostrom.

  “Look, it’s crappy out there,” Ostrom says. “But this is what you’re going to see for the next three days. The sooner we do this the better. This sea state’s just going to keep filling over the next five hours. I mean it’s not going down.”

  Later, up on the bridge, looking out into the rainy mist, Captain Sheasley says to his third mate, “Once we’re on station, we’ve got to check the motion. These guys are going to be out there setting things off the stern. We don’t want these guys out there pitching, getting stern slapped.”

  On the fantail, Ostrom, Valdes, and Sutherland, all bundled up in parkas, start loading the yellow floats into the SALPs. Ostrom has on a red, fur-lined hunter’s cap. “Fascinating isn’t it,” he says of the SALPs in a tone of utter boredom, his cap’s earflaps flapping in the wind. “Ninety percent of science is appearance. Doesn’t work, but hey, it looks cool. No data, but that sure was cool.”

  In the main lab, Bower posts an audio postcard on the website for the visually disabled: “Two hours from the mooring site,” her podcast begins. “We’re in a race with the weather.”

  At 2200 hours, up on the bridge, Captain Sheasley instructed the helmsman to idle the engines and turn on the exterior lights, which gave the aft deck a theatrical brightness. Beneath the A-frame crane there gaped an opening in the bulwarks. Until an hour ago, a safety chain had stretched across it. Now the chain had been undone, and there was nothing between the deck and the sea; walk through the A-frame portal of the crane, step into the yawing darkness, and you’d fall into water two miles deep. Every so often a wave came crashing up over the stern, glazing the deck with a slippery veneer that went rippling out the scuppers. This was the stage, the turbulent precipice, on which the night’s action would play out.

  It was raining, not heavily, but painfully—a cold, needling rain. The deckhands all wore rubber boots with steel toes, and hard hats and orange, insulated waterproof jumpsuits decorated with hi-viz reflective tape. I wore a hard hat too, and waterproof pants that I’d purchased from an army surplus store on Cape Cod. I had on my Sitka sneakers, and my yellow PVC slicker over another raincoat made out of recycled plastic bottles, and under that, an insulated coat, and over the slicker a life vest, and on my hands, gloves, and under the hard hat, a woolen one. The gloves, it was now painfully clear, weren’t waterproof.

  Bower stood by, in the lee of the main lab, helping Kate Fraser enter data into the mooring log—“the diary of the balloon.” Will Ostrom was in charge now. Even Captain Sheasley was under Ostrom’s command. In the staging area between the winch and the stern, Ostrom transformed into an angry dynamo of action, darting about the heaving deck with the agility of a gymnast, barking out orders and flashing crane signals to the deckhands manning the ropes and rigging and heavy machinery with which, expensive instrument by expensive instrument, meter by meter, the mooring would be assembled and unspooled: “Tie that down!” Ostrom shouted at Dave Sutherland, who was manning a slip line. “Hold it fast! Clear it! I said clear it!” He pointed at me: “You! On the winch!” I climbed up to the control panel and watched Ostrom through a grid of steel, there to protect me from the backlash of a snapping cable. “Pay it out! Pay it out!” Ostrom boomed, pointing down. With cold fingers I pushed the little toggle forward, and with a diesel-electric moan the wire on the drum began to unspool. “Stop!” Ostrom commanded, flashing a fist, but I was slow to react. “For fuck’s sake, I said stop!”

  Over the next several hours, I would come to appreciate that cartoon depicting Ostrom as a devil in a jumpsuit, and why it was Sutherland had called that photo “will_overseer.” There was, nevertheless, something beautiful about Ostrom’s grace and expertise. He seemed like a conductor with his symphony in full swell, or a chef in his kitchen, or a quarterback in motion. He was an adept of improvisational physics, judging by sight the weight of an object that had been hoisted into the air, anticipating its swing.

  We began with the great yellow sphere that sat on its trellis by the starboard rail. It measured sixty-four inches across. Its buoyancy would exert 2,832 pounds of upward pressure. Atop it, at its north pole, was a satellite transponder and a beacon. Sutherland climbed up on the trellis and switched the transponder and beacon on. The latter began to flash, once every ten seconds. Deckhands undid the sphere’s lashing. From the winch, the cable now ran up through the A-frame’s block and then out around the starboard rail, where the bosun cotter-pinned it to a grommet at the sphere’s south pole. Sutherland, obviously better at this job than me, took over on the winch. My new job was to keep the line from fouling on the rail. As I leaned against the cold steel, and stretched my arms out over the water in a seemingly beseeching gesture, cable slack across my numb and pruning palms, the waves heaving past seemed close enough to touch. They had been gray all day long, but here, up close, in the glare of the deck lights, they were turquoise and crystalline, shot through with light, and tempting somehow—so close, so beautiful, so cold, so deep. Out beyond the edge of the light, a glaucous gull floated contentedly on a swell, a white dot of sentience in the icy dark.

  Now a deck crane lifted the yellow sphere into the air, dangling it like a colossal Christmas tree ornament or the yo-yo of a god, then swung it over the side, and let it fall. The splash was tremendous, a great diadem of droplets bursting from beneath it. The cable came alive in my hands, and I pulled it taut. It felt as though I’d hooked an enormous fish, an enormous, yellow, spherical fish. The sphere drifted out and then aft, and I drifted with it, following it to the stern, keeping the cable clear of the rail, until Ostrom gave the yell, “Let it go!” and I set the cable free. Away the sphere went over the waves, its beacon flashing, and my heart leapt with a curious exhilaration. Its yellow form was bright against the blue waves, which is why, of course, oceanographers paint their floats and buoys the color of a rubber duck, the color that in the gray-green welter of the sea is easiest to spot. It was the only bright thing out there, the only symmetrical thing out there, the only human thing—or at least the only human thing visible to the naked eye.

  Measured in meters and minutes, the night slowly unspooled. My hands grew numb, the sphere’s flashing beacon fainter and fainter as it receded behind the intervening waves, a distant star that you had to wait to catch a glimpse of. And then it was gone, and with it went the last remnants of my exhilaration. It was impossible to stay warm and dry. The cold rain and the cold wind sneaked in at my collar and cuffs. Besides the rain, there was the spindrift. Everything was wet, and blurry. Water blurred my vision, fatigue blurred my mind. I wished I’d taken a nap that afternoon.

  A foot or two from the stern’s edge, the men in jumpsuits wrestled instruments onto the black cable—the current meters, the thermometers, the SALPs loaded with yellow floats—and then coaxed them overboard one by one. It seemed a wonder that none of them tumbled after. Every so often, Ostrom would yell commands in my direction—“Donovan, man the air tugger!” “Donovan, up on the winch, give Dave a break!” “When I point down, you pay it out, goddammit!” These were the easy jobs, but in my numb, sleep-deprived inexperience, they seemed plenty hard, and grew harder as the night wore on. At the winch, I stood braced with worry, muttering to myself, “Down means out, down means out,” trying my best to keep my mind from wandering when all it wanted to do was wander off to sleep.

  Late—how late exactly I don’t know, at three in the morning, or maybe four—Ostrom pointed at a rope and commanded me to take it over there, to the corner, behind the deck crane, and coil it up, neatly, the way he’d shown us that sunlit afternoon our second day at sea. The rope was a tangled mess, and that corner of the deck was slippery with grease. I hydroplaned around in my boots. Time seemed to slow, and the world to diminish, until there was nothing but me and that damn rope, my adversary, locked in slippery battle. It took me forever to untangle the thing. I kept falling down, stu
mbling into the crane, or into the starboard rail, where the waves no longer seemed tempting, but menacing. I was shivering uncontrollably by then, feeling the first symptoms of hypothermia. At last there lay before me on the greasy deck something resembling a coil—a mess, a sloppy pile of only vaguely concentric circles. Fearful of Ostrom’s wrath, like some marlinspike Sisyphus, I started over again. My second attempt improved only slightly on my first. Good enough, I decided. But what was I supposed to do with the rope’s tail? There was a trick Ostrom had showed us. You wrap it around the coil two times, or was it three? Then what? Fuck it. I gathered the sloppy coil into my arms, dropped it into the wooden chest where the ropes were kept, and deserted to the mess for a mug of hot coffee.

  Unlike the rest of us, Amy Bower remained exhilarated throughout the long night. In the lee of the main lab, in turtleneck and parka, happily sipping hot cocoa from her mug marked with a knotted rubber band, she asked Fraser questions—“The second SALP is over now?”—and Fraser, as best she could, narrated the action playing out before Bower’s blind eyes. I was standing beside her, sipping my coffee, when Bower made a chipper remark: “Look at that,” she said. “It’s first light!”

  She was right. Without my noticing, the sky had gone from black to charcoal gray. A moment later you could begin to distinguish the grayness of the water from the grayness of the sky. I was cold as ever, tired as ever, but when Ostrom commanded me to take another turn at the winch, I didn’t mind as much now that day had begun to dawn. When, a little before 0600 hours, the mooring’s anchor tumbled overboard, there was no sense of finale, only relief. Ostrom continued to shout commands: coil that rope, pick up that wrench. At last, he dismissed us, and the moment he did he underwent a kind of metamorphosis. A devil no more, he became his former amiable if curmudgeonly self.

  Out of gratitude and pride, I stayed up to help Bower enter data from the mooring log into her computer, reading it aloud. The winds were now gale force, just as the forecast had predicted. Under steam again, the Knorr was rolling more steeply than ever. When the portholes in the main lab filled, it took a surprisingly long while before they began to empty. Even there, inside, I couldn’t stop shivering, and my head had begun to throb. Bower was chipper as ever.

  “I think I need to sleep,” I told her, and she apologized for keeping me.

  For the first time on that rocky voyage, I stumbled to the head and vomited. Then, fully clothed, I crashed onto my bunk and slept fourteen hours straight. When I woke up, the storm was mostly over, and it was night again.

  Our last day at sea, we found our elusive Irminger Ring, or so Jason-1 and an expendable bathythermograph alleged. The discovery was anticlimactic. The seas had calmed. And yet below us, if the data were to be believed, there raged a watery storm. We human beings are such visual creatures that for a semi-scientifically literate layperson like me, believing in invisible if observable phenomena—mesoscale eddies; rising CO2 levels measured in parts per billion; rising sea levels measured in millimeters; electrons, dark matter, quarks; the waves through which cell phones and satellites communicate—requires a leap of faith, or at least a leap of trust.

  Out there on the fantail of the Knorr, on the last day of our voyage, in seas far less stormy than they’d been the day before, trying in vain to perceive some trace or sign of the watery storm below, I couldn’t help but feel a bit envious of the naturalists of centuries past, those scientific voyeurs who, with microscopes and telescopes, made discoveries everywhere they looked, perceiving ecosystems in drops of water, cosmologies in the dying rays of intergalactic light. Several years ago, reading Darwin’s Journal of Researches, I was struck by how anachronistic—how innocent, even—the god-toppling biologist’s exuberant curiosity seemed. His journal entries were rhapsodies of descriptive prose. Forms of the words “interesting” and “surprising” toll among his sentences like a refrain of wonderment. “I was much surprised to find particles of stone above the thousandth of an inch square, mixed with finer matter,” he writes of a handful of dust.

  The relationship between seeing and knowing helps explain, I think, why it is I was compelled to chase the yellow ducks lost at sea. In following their trail I’ve strived to raise, if only by a megapixel or two, the resolution of my own mental model of the world. Of course, as most oceanographers will tell you, a rubber duck isn’t a very sensitive instrument. You can’t follow it by satellite. It can collect PCBs and other POPs, which is of some scientific use, but it can’t measure salinity, or levels of dissolved pollutants like CO2 and mercury, or take the water’s temperature. “In fact, this data is not very good,” a Woods Hole oceanographer named John Toole told me, a bit apologetically, when I described for him Ebbesmeyer’s accidental flotsam studies. Bower’s dozen yellow floats would tell us far more about the ocean than a million castaway toys ever could, and her floats, as I learned from John Toole, are just a small part of a global fleet. Since the year 2000 oceanographers have seeded the oceans of the world with more than three thousand of these underwater robots. You can follow their peregrinations online. If the Evergreen Ever Laurel had spilled a shipment of profiling floats, we’d know their fates.

  Profiling floats can’t descend below two thousand meters, however. And unlike polyethylene ducks, they can’t ascend into Arctic latitudes, where sea ice makes it impossible for them to communicate via satellite. North of Canada and Siberia are what oceanographers call the Canadian Hole and the Russian Hole. These holes aren’t holes in the ice, or holes in the seafloor. They are giant holes in the climatological record. The abyss and the poles remain the last redoubts of oceanic darkness. The data that profiling floats beam home won’t banish darkness from the deep once and for all, or resolve the ultimate mysteries of the sea. But slowly, over the next several decades, they may, one hopes, shed a little more light on the ocean’s fourth and darkest dimension.

  With a big heave-ho, Ostrom and Valdes hurled Bower’s last float into the Knorr’s wake, where it swirled about in the roiling foam, then righted itself and went bobbing away. In a week or two it would, as Bower liked to say, “phone home.” Months later, I would visit Bower at her office on Cape Cod, and she would pull onto her big computer screen maps on which her floats—all but one successfully launched from her experimental mooring—had traced their wayward routes.

  Our last night at sea, shivering on the Knorr’s bow, Sutherland, Ostrom, Maloof, and I watched the northern lights flicker green and psychedelic across the sky. “Aliens in September,” Maloof said, and Ostrom said, “It’s Elvis. I’m telling you that’s where he went. He’s with us.”

  The Knorr docked in Nuuk a little after dawn. Waking in my cabin belowdecks, I sensed a strange stillness. We weren’t rolling, or pitching, or yawing or indulging in any of the six degrees of freedom. The Knorr’s engines had fallen silent. And when I ascended to the main lab and looked out the portholes, I’d seen an astonishment—dark brown mountains, frosted with snow: Greenland! Greenland, that white, icy island, huge as a continent, misnamed by that real estate developer Erik the Red. Greenland, which on world maps resembles a wordless thought bubble floating up from the coast of Labrador, as if Canada’s mind had gone blank. Bower and I and most of the scientific team spent the day wandering around Nuuk, sampling the reindeer soup, admiring a pair of bergy bits stranded in a fjord. With a startling crack, loud as a rifle report, one of them split in two. The two halves rolled over. Slush sizzled into the water. The next day, on the first of three connecting flights, we flew over the Greenland ice cap, that white Sahara. The flight lasted an hour, and for all but a few minutes of it there was nothing to see from my window seat but ice—no sign of life, no trace of color except the occasional pool of blue melt.

  THE LAST CHASE, PART TWO

  It’s a Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the ice-bound stream of Time.

  —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

  NORTHWEST PASSAGE

  Three years after setting out on the trail of the toys, a f
ew weeks before reaching its end, I find myself shoeless and prone on the red helipad of a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker, trying to wriggle my feet into the rubber booties of a yellow survival suit. It’s a sunny afternoon in early July, and the icebreaker is tied up at the docks in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, across the harbor from Halifax. Spread out beneath me, the survival suit looks like the neoprene hide of a yellow giant. It’s lined with buoyant foam and some sort of silvery, space-age fabric—quilted titanium, perhaps. Also on the helipad struggling to wriggle into survival suits, with varying degrees of success, are thirteen scientists, a few dozen Canadian coasties, the three members of a television news team from Australia, a Swiss reporter for a German wire service, and a Canadian photojournalist whom the Australians have taken to calling “the Snapper.” Tomorrow, aboard this big red icebreaker, the CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent, or the Louis for short, we will embark on a grand, Arctic expedition.

  As the Louis makes its annual run through the Northwest Passage, the scientists aboard will search for clues to the planet’s history and future—clues written in sediment cores pulled from the seafloor, in water samples collected in a conductivity-temperature-depth rosette, in the migrations of copepods and currents and pollutants. The Australians will shoot footage. The Swiss reporter will file dispatches. The Snapper will snap money shots of polar bears. And I, at long last, will chase the toys into, and I hope out of, the labyrinth of ice.

  Or into and out of whatever’s left of it. Last year’s summertime melt broke all records, exceeding the fears of even the gloomiest climatologists. In satellite photos taken on September 16, 2007, the day before I boarded the Knorr, the polar ice cap doesn’t look like a cap at all. It looks like the white half of a yin-yang symbol, a swirl of ice opposed by a swirl of open water. The open water stretched from the coast of Siberia to within three hundred miles of the North Pole. No icebreaker in history has attempted what the officers of the Louis are attempting this summer—to transit the Northwest Passage in early July. In years past, the sclerotic, ice-clogged channels of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago remained impassable until late July or early August. Not even icebreakers could smash their way through. But at the height of last year’s summertime melt, the European Space Agency announced that for the first time since satellites began monitoring the Arctic, the Northwest Passage was almost totally ice-free. Six yachts had sailed right through it, completing in a matter weeks a voyage that a hundred years ago had taken Roald Amundsen three years. Canada’s Ice Service is forecasting that this summer’s big melt, like last summer’s, will begin ahead of schedule—two to three weeks ahead of schedule, to be precise, and so the Louis will begin its annual Arctic voyage ahead of schedule too. “It’s going to be hot up there,” I overheard a deckhand say this morning. “Last time we were up there it was 24 degrees colder here in Halifax than it was up there”—24 degrees centigrade, that is.