Moby-Duck

by Donovan Hohn

  From behind his little spectacles, Carmack’s eyes seemed to twinkle a little. It was then that he’d told me about the Drift Bottle Project, fetching a beer bottle from a bookshelf, saying, “So here is the Canadian version of the rubber duckie.” Then he shared with me one of his preliminary findings: “The Arctic is moving faster.”

  Down the hall, on a colleague’s computer, he pulled up satellite footage of the polar ice cap. The footage began in September 2007, the same month that I’d voyaged to the Labrador Sea. Watching this grainy, pixelated, black-and-white, yin-yang, stop-motion montage of ice swirling and expanding and contracting inside the Arctic Basin, I was reminded, weirdly, of watching a fetus on a sonogram screen. “This shows you what an ice catastrophe last year was,” Carmack said. “I mean it broke all records. Smashed them. It was hell up there.”

  Now, months later, one evening, before the bar opened for business, in the Louis’s main lounge, in heavy ice, the bubblers screaming, somewhere in Franklin Strait, Carmack delivered a lecture in which he expounded and expanded on the preliminary findings he’d shared with me seven months before. His was among the last in a series of lectures. When he boarded the Louis in Resolute, he’d brought with him, in addition to Erin Freeland-Ballantyne, a number of supernumeraries whom he referred to as VIPs—luminaries of oceanography, all dressed, like him, in matching fleece cardigan vests onto which was embroidered the logo of this expedition—the C30 project, Carmack had called it, for Canada’s Three Oceans. His idea for the second leg of our voyage was to turn the Louis into a kind of icebreaking, traveling oceanographic lyceum.

  During the lectures the VIPs delivered, I learned many interesting facts—for instance, that in the “microbiome” of the human body, only a portion of our cells, genetically speaking, are human in origin. The rest are bacterial. (While learning this, I found myself looking down, examining my midriff, into which, in the main mess, I’d recently deposited some potatoes, carrots, and buttery cod. The cloth between the buttons of my quick-dry adventure shirt was puckering over the waistband of my quick-dry adventure pants in an unflattering way, and I tried to smooth the puckers flat.) I learned that herring are shrinking but also that eighty-two “jumbo squids” had recently been caught in Canadian waters, and that these squids were members of an invasive, southern species. (To my mind this didn’t sound so bad—less herring, more calamari.) I learned that approximately every ten years the prevailing winds of the Arctic shift, a phenomenon known as the Arctic Oscillation, and that this wind regime plays a role in the movement of ice.

  In the main lounge of the Louis, Carmack stood before a screen onto which a computer projected various slides. The computer also projected slides onto Carmack. As he paced back and forth over the carpeting, rocking in his mocassins, knitting and unknitting his fingers, smiling his sphynxlike smile, maps and diagrams played across his plaid shirt and jeans and cardigan vest, and made the lenses of his little spectacles shine.

  Around five million years ago, Carmack told us, the Isthmus of Panama, without the efforts of Teddy Roosevelt, had been a strait, conducting equatorial currents freely between the Pacific and the Atlantic. Only after the Isthmus of Panama closed, and deflected the currents in both the Pacific and the Atlantic, did the oceans come to resemble the oceans of today, “with high-pressure centers in the subtropics and low-pressure centers in the subarctic, and clockwise currents traveling around the subtropical gyres and counterclockwise gyres flowing around the high latitudes north of the subtropical front.” Over the past five million years, two distinctly different kinds of oceans had formed.

  There is on the one hand the ocean most of us have heard of and thought about. The one we like to go bathing in, on the beaches of Coney Island or Costa Rica or the Côte d’Azur. This is the “thermally stratified ocean,” where variations in temperature and salinity and therefore in density make layers of water mingle and move. Then, on the other hand, there’s the northern ocean, which is “permanently stratified by the accumulation of freshwater.” Much of the freshwater—sixteen thousand cubic kilometers of it or so per year—comes from the comparatively fresh currents that flow into the Arctic from the Pacific through the Bering Strait. Another thirty to forty thousand cubic meters or so come from the northerly rivers of Canada and Siberia and Europe. It was thanks to the freshwater as much as to the low temperatures (1.7 degrees Celsius, last I checked) that right now, in the middle of July, through the closed curtains of the Louis’s main lounge, the creaky thunder of crumbling ice—six feet thick and stretching from shore to shore and riddled with seal holes and stalked by bears—could be heard.

  The northern ocean, Carmack emphasized, is connected to the “global ocean” by subtle currents and winds. In fact, the climate as we know it depends on those currents and winds, which transport excess heat away from the equator, to be released back into space at the poles. And the subpolar front, the boundary between “these two counterrotating gyres”—the boundary along which sixteen years ago twelve containers tumbled overboard, along which bath toys had traveled to Sitka—“acts as a bit of a wave guide for storm tracks.” The weather in Myanmar as in Manhattan is the consequence, in other words, of the Isthmus of Panama and of those currents circling and spiraling through time and space, currents that with alarming swiftness, as the Arctic warms, are changing in measurable if not always visible ways.

  “You look out now,” Carmack said in the main lounge, directing his gaze toward the closed curtains, his computer projecting a cartoon planet Earth onto his shirt. “Well, you know what kind of ice we’ve had in the last couple of days.” Since Resolute, far from ice-free, the Northwest Passage had seemed more like the Northwest Impasse. One might as soon attempt to transit the Gowanus Expressway in an icebreaker as the frozen thoroughfare in which, the previous evening, we’d found ourselves trapped.

  While I was chatting about winged copepods with Glenn Cooper over beers, a strange look had passed over the biologist’s face. He’d paused midsentence and was gazing, rapt, out the windows of the main lounge. I followed his gaze, expecting to see I’m not sure what—perhaps a polar bear feasting on a paleochemist. “We’re not moving,” Cooper had said. Yes, now that he mentioned it, I noticed it, too. I was experiencing the sensation of beer but not the sensation of drift—nary one of the six degrees of freedom. The Louis, weighing 11,345 tons, outfitted with three propellers each one of which can exert eighty tons of thrust, was frozen in, beset like the Jeannette, stuck. Out by the starboard rail a couple of graduate students were joking about having to get out and push. We were in Peel Sound, not quite halfway between Resolute and Cambridge Bay.

  Up on the bridge, Quartermaster Dale Hiltz was at the helm and Captain Rothwell was standing nervously by, dressed casually, in sneakers and a sweatshirt, looking out the windows and rubbing his mustache. He was supposed to be off-duty, asleep by seven, in his cabin one deck down. His second-in-command, Stephane Legault, also dressed casually, in sandals and shorts, was supposed to be in the main lounge enjoying a beer. Cathy Lacombe, in uniform, was supposed to be the commanding officer. Having encountered thick ice, Hiltz and Lacombe had performed the usual maneuver. They’d backed. They’d filled. They’d charged. The bow of the Louis had hauled out onto the ice. And the ice had refused to break, and the Louis to reverse, and now we were parked there, like a beached whale, propellers churning. The late evening sun, however, still shone brightly as a midday sun, making the ten thousand pools of melt that speckled and marbled and gilded and puddled the ice flash, as if some Nordic or Inuit god had dropped a handful of change. The watery puddles and the white hummocks formed a pleasing pattern—not a perfect pattern, but a discernible if erratic one, a kind of messy paisley. If you’ve ever noticed the rills waves make on packed sand, you can imagine those that the wind and puddles make on thawing land-fast ice.

  To Hiltz, in thirty years of icebreaking, this had happened only once before. “Come on, girl, patience!” he bellowed as the propellers churned. Robie Macdon
ald, his white hair resembling the nest of an eider duck, had never seen it happen. “It’s all one piece!” he said of the ice, meaning that there were no cracks and that Peel Sound was frozen fast from shore to shore. Captain Rothwell said, “It’s like an ice grip!” Then he said, “If it’s like this the rest of the way it won’t be good.” And Macdonald, thinking of the years he’d spent planning his scientific fieldwork, said, “No, it won’t be good.”

  When the captain of your ship begins speaking in perplexed exclamations and gloomy prognostications, it is hard, I’ve found, to keep the hysterical flights of fancy at bay. With a full tank the helicopter had enough gas, I knew, to travel 220 miles, which hardly seemed enough, considering how many of us there were aboard. Should we break out the survival suits? Would we spend weeks here in Peel Sound, eating our shoes and performing theatricals? Probably not. When we set out from Nova Scotia, the larder of the Louis had contained 683 pounds of bacon, 1,012 eggs, 900 pounds of coffee, and 1,900 rolls of toilet paper (this last fact makes one wonder what explorers of the past, lacking both paper and leaves, used; nothing, presumably; or perhaps lemmings, or snow). Back at the docks of Dartmouth, I personally witnessed stevedores load sixty-four crates of potatoes into a hatch in the Louis’s hull. Surely, we hadn’t eaten all of them. And so long as we had satellite reception there’d be no need for theatricals. We could instead watch nature documentaries about the Arctic.

  In the end Captain Rothwell and the engineers improvised an ingenious remedy, pumping ballast water back and forth from starboard to port, making the ship shimmy and shake, all the while running the props in reverse, until, to a round of cheers, the Louis slid free. It had taken forty-five minutes—nothing compared with the Jeannette’s twenty months, of course, but then it happened again, and then again. We kept stopping, sticking. No one aboard had experienced anything like it. I asked Erin Clark, the ice pick, if she could explain it. The problem, she said, was that the ice here had begun to thaw but hadn’t yet thawed enough. “It’s not hard, and it’s not soft,” she said. “It’s sticky.” Hard ice is brittle. Soft ice is slushy. This ice was rubbery. Beneath the weight of the ship, it didn’t break; it bent. Our average speed fell to just four knots, or less than five miles per hour. We might as well have snowshoed to Cambridge Bay.

  Even now, a day later, as Carmack was delivering his lecture in the main lounge, Captain Rothwell was considering giving up. If conditions didn’t improve soon, we’d have no choice but to turn around and follow the slushy channel of our wake irresolutely back to Resolute. So much for the record-breaking transit of the Northwest Passage.

  Now Carmack clicked the button on his remote control, and onto the screen and across his fleece vest there flashed an incongruous photograph of open water, taken the previous summer not far from the North Pole. “That’s a lot of open water that far north,” Carmack said. Then onto his screen there flashed a satellite image from 2005. “Everyone was shocked,” Carmack said, “when the ice cover collapsed to this position.” Then Carmack played the same animation he’d played for me back at the Institute of Ocean Sciences, the stop-motion one depicting the great melt of 2007. Said Carmack: “All the multiyear ice is streaming out, and as the Arctic refreezes, it just refreezes as first-year ice.” The meaning for the planet was ominous: the subtropical gyres were expanding, the subpolar fronts were moving north, along with invasive species. The meaning for me was ambiguous.

  Ebbesmeyer had based his prediction that the toys would reach New England in the summer of 2003 on a dozen-odd transarctic drifts, intentional and accidental, that he’d found in the historical data record—drifts including those of the Fram and the Jeannette, but also studies conducted by NOAA in the 1970s. From these precedents, he’d calculated that the icy currents flow at an average pace of around 0.6 miles per day, sometimes much faster, sometimes much slower. That’s about how fast—about 0.6 miles per day—that Carmack had expected his bottles to travel when he began his Drift Bottle Project; at most he’d expected them to travel at an average pace of a mile per day. Instead they appeared to be traveling “twice as fast,” he’d told me that afternoon in his office—not one mile per day, but two. In short, I was right to question Ebbesmeyer’s 2003 prediction. “Any predictions based on old data would no longer be as likely,” Carmack said.

  There was, however, one other miscalculation that in Carmack’s opinion Ebbesmeyer had made. He’d assumed that like the Fram and the Jeannette the toys, upon passing through Bering Strait, would have caught the current now known as the Transpolar Drift. Catching the Transpolar Drift is like catching the express. Between the coast of Siberia and the North Pole, it flows directly, or as directly as any Arctic current flows, from the Bering Strait to Fram Strait, the latter of which was named for Nansen’s famous ship. The data from Carmack’s Drift Bottle Project suggested a different route. Carmack’s drift bottles tended to hug the coastline, caught in coastal currents by the Coriolis force. The coastal currents that flow through the Bering Strait would have carried the toys around Alaska and into the Northwest Passage, which is why I’m here. Carmack now put up a slide titled “The Northern Drift Hypothesis,” an animated slide that showed animated bottles zipping around the northern coast of Canada.

  Did Carmack’s data prove Ebbesmeyer’s drift hypothesis wrong? Not necessarily. But it did prove it to be fallible. Ducks, frogs, beavers, and turtles could have made it to New England by 2003, Carmack said, depending on what unforeseen and unforeseeable events transpired during their transarctic voyage. But they also could have made it sooner, given the acceleration of the currents. Or perhaps they’d never made it at all. At the time Carmack and I traveled together aboard the Louis, he’d begun collaborating with Ebbesmeyer on a scientific paper analyzing data from the Drift Bottle Project. One conclusion they would eventually draw: “Our data . . . show the boundary between the subarctic and subtropical waters to be a near-impenetrable wall.” Out of 1,184 bottles launched in the eastern Arctic and recovered elsewhere, only one had headed south, to Puerto Rico. The rest the Gulf Stream and its branches had swept east, toward Europe. It was, in other words, statistically likely that the duck allegedly glimpsed in Maine was a counterfeit, an impostor, a figment, a will-o’-the-wisp, and that the advert created by that British cell phone company was as fantastical as any advert, as childlike as Ten Little Ducks, more childlike than Make Way for Ducklings, far more childlike than Paddle to the Sea, and that my errand, from the outset, was indeed that of a fool.

  MOONWALK

  In helicopter 363. Once again in the backseat. Once again in a jumpsuit. Once again a headset clapped onto my ears. Just because the ducks never made it to Maine doesn’t mean, as per Carmack’s Northern Drift hypothesis, that they never made it here, into the Northwest Passage. I’ve got four days left to search. And I mean to. In fact, I’ve printed up WANTED posters, illustrated with the blue, green, yellow, and red likenesses of the toys. They’re pretty snazzy, I think. I even put the word WANTED in an old-timey, Wild West font, and at the bottom I cut a little fringe of tear-away tags bearing my e-mail address. I’ve already posted some in Nuuk, on my way home from the Labrador Sea (so far, no replies), and some more in Resolute, and I’m ready to post more on every bulletin board I encounter before flying home for good. Granted, here, in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, there’s a hell of a lot of shoreline—87,000 miles of it—and a hell of a lot of sticky, rubbery ice, and a dearth of bulletin boards.

  With me and pilot Chris Swannell in helicopter 363 are a pair of men who, like me, seem to have been arrested by their childish imaginations, men who boarded the Louis in Resolute dressed as if for an expedition to the planet Hoth, in white snow pants and white parkas with furry hoods, parkas decorated with a cryptically Hellenistic logo of the sort one might encounter on the facade of a college fraternity. Even in the main mess, at breakfast, these strangers have been striding around in black knee-high jackboots of the sort favored by Napoleonic cavalrymen. This duo belongs to an outfit c
alled the Phaeton Group, named, curiously, for the doomed son of the Greek god, the one who steals his father’s solar chariot as if it were a Buick and takes it for a reckless spin, a whimsical crime for which Zeus, like some celestial traffic cop, executes Phaeton with a lightning bolt. The Phaeton Group, according to their literature, is “a science and consulting organization that carries out research and provides communications services to media and educational clients.” They offer “public outreach” and “media savvy” and both “enlightenment and excitement.” Publicists with the Canadian Coast Guard have hired them to produce educational posters about icebreakers. We’re flying out now so that they can collect footage of an icebreaker in action. I’m here because Chris Swannell refuses to be photographed or filmed and they need a human figure to stand in the foreground, on the ice, providing a sense of scale.

  In their getups, the duo from Phaeton look—to me, to the crew of the Louis, or at least to those members of the crew I overheard gossiping yesterday in the computer lounge—ridiculous, and they don’t seem to know it, but who, while looking or being ridiculous, ever does?

  Up we go. Helicopter 363 circles the Louis at two hundred feet, collecting footage to aft, astern, abeam. The back door is wide open and the Phaeton cameraman, buckled into a harness, the wind ruffling his hood’s furry ruff, is leaning out. I hope his glasses don’t fall off. I hope he doesn’t drop his fancy camera. At his direction, we ascend, Phaetonlike, to a thousand feet. At this height, except for the plume of yellowy exhaust rising from its stack, the Louis very much resembles a red toy boat in an icy bathtub. Now we fly miles ahead, over the ice, the hummocks and bummocks flickering below us.39 The Louis disappears, and Swannell looks for a solid floe on which to set us down. If I were Ishmael—Melville’s Ishmael, not the Bible’s—I’d probably at this point in my narration say something allegorical, about how we are all precariously aloft, about how the door of the helicopter is always thrown open and we are all always leaning out, dressed in ridiculous costumes, imagining ourselves to be something or someone that we aren’t: Phaeton, or John Muir or Rachel Carson or Doc from Cannery Row, or Ishmael, who, come to think of it, imagines himself to be the biblical Ishmael’s second coming; how, buffeted by winds actual and imaginary, held in place by harnesses that we can only hope will hold, we’re dangling above a planet too big for one mind to encompass, a planet that in large part thanks to our imaginings and desires and restlessness and ingenuity is changing more quickly than we can comprehend; how we’re all flying over hummocks and bummocks and milky-blue pools of slush that make patterns both beautiful and perilous, at once orderly and chaotic; how our cameras, fancy as they are, will never be fancy enough; how we’re all searching for colorful objects and meanings that we’ll never find and looking for solid ice that maybe just maybe we might.