by Donovan Hohn
We now reached the archaeological site where Brendan Griebel was helping to excavate a Thule house pit, the buried remains of a sevenhundred-year-old stone cottage. Griebel and his team had stretched strings into a grid across the site. With little shovels and brushes they’d begun sorting through the dirt, square by square, carefully labeling everything they found—charred bone, rock tools.
“Back then they were pretty strong, eh?” Puglik said. “My favorite animal to have would be a musk ox.”
“As a friend?” Freeland-Ballantyne asked.
“No, to eat. No, to hunt it down and then eat it. It’s starting to melt earlier and earlier, and it’s changing and changing. We used to go to Kugluktuk by Ski-Doo and sled.”
“Duck!” Freeland-Ballantyne shouted, pointing out at the shallow river across the soggy tundra.
“Where?” Puglik asked. “Might have eggs. Ducks are the last eggs of the year. Best thing about the North is being on the land. It’s nice and quiet up here. You can see all the animals. Pretty peaceful.”
It was too cold for any of us now, and we were all sleepy, at least we three grown-ups were. On the walk back in we discovered that the Annie we’d interviewed today was Puglik’s mom, from an earlier common-law marriage. He didn’t always sleep at her house. Sometimes he slept with his other family—wherever there was the most room. “Did they say anything about me?” Puglik asked Freeland-Ballantyne and me, and if he was sad to learn that they hadn’t, he didn’t show it. “The video game I want to get is Kung Fu Panda. Have you guys ever played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas?”
None of us had.
“Good rainbow,” Puglik said.
Cambridge Bay, when we reentered its outskirts, seemed deserted. No grown-ups. No police. No one. The place might as well have been a ghost town. Then, in an industrial area near the docks, we passed cones of piled gravel, and from behind them popped two urchin faces, a boy and a girl. Seeing Puglik, they leapt to their dirt bikes and followed us. Her handlebars had pink grips, and a pink plastic tassel on one side, but not on the other. “That’s Brenda,” Puglik said. “That’s Angus.” They pedaled around us, circling, ogling us, ogling Freeland-Ballantyne especially. Brenda wanted to know whether Puglik was staying with us in the big house, one of the nicest in town, and he said no, but now I thought I detected a hint of hopefulness in his voice.
When we reached the entrance of our borrowed house, Puglik lingered at the doorstep, waiting, expectantly, still warming his hands in his overlong sleeves. Was he hoping for an invitation to come in? Something more? Griebel offered him a slice of the pizza we’d made for dinner, and Puglik happily accepted it. While the archaeologist and the Rhodes scholar ascended to the kitchen, I stayed with Puglik in the damp warmth of the mudroom, among the many muddy boots.
Sitting on the carpeted steps, I began to unlace my boots. The boy kept his big white sneakers on, but as he was standing there, and I was sitting there, he untied his hood and revealed himself to be totally bald. I suspect he anticipated my surprise, which I tried hard not to show. He wasn’t merely bald; he possessed, I noticed now, no eyebrows. No wonder he’d seemed neither young nor old. Puglik wasn’t a leukemia patient or anything like that, Griebel later told me; his hairlessness was the symptom of a rare condition, alopecia universalis.
Freeland-Ballantyne appeared, descending the carpeted stairs behind me, bearing a slice of pizza on a plate, which she handed to me, which I handed to Puglik, then she ascended the stairs to help Griebel with the dishes, and once again, Puglik and I were alone. He ate hungrily, and happily. It was only then that I thought to ask him the question that had been bothering me: What were he and Brenda and Angus and the other children of Cambridge Bay all doing up so late, alone?
“In the summer, when there’s no school, parents sleep at night, kids stay up till seven”—A.M., he meant—“and sleep in the day so the parents can work. I like to look after the little kids. Kids need looking after, eh?” Then he handed me the now empty plate, sprinkled with crumbs, cinched his hood over his moony skull, and disappeared into the midnight sun. With misgivings, I bolted the door shut.
EPILOGUE
But then he thought that he would just look at the river instead, because it was a peaceful sort of day, so he lay down and looked at it, and it slipped slowly away beneath him . . . and suddenly, there was his fir-cone slipping away too.
—A. A. Milne, “In Which Pooh Invents a New Game and Eeyore Joins In”
“The great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago,” Melville famously writes at the catastrophic end of the voyage of the Pequod. It’s a beautiful, hauntingly apocalyptic sentence, its rhythms and sounds—all those long vowels, the repetition of “rolled”—enacting the eternal rolling of the sea. And five thousand years here is no arbitrary number, but one that harks back to the old Christian estimates of the age of Creation. Poetically satisfying as it is, I now know that the sentence is, scientifically speaking, illusory. The oceans have never been immutable, eternal.
In 1951, Rachel Carson wrote in The Sea Around Us that man “cannot control or change the ocean as, in his brief tenancy on earth, he has subdued and plundered the continents.” A mere ten years later, she’d revised her opinion. In a preface to the 1961 edition of that same book, Carson wrote, “Although man’s record as a steward of the natural resources of the earth has been a discouraging one, there has long been a certain comfort in the belief that the sea, at least, was inviolate, beyond man’s ability to change and to despoil. But this belief, unfortunately, has proved to be naïve.” What had happened in the interval between those two editions? Nuclear waste, placed in barrels lined with concrete and dumped offshore, was leaking radioactive elements. A year after writing that preface, with the publication of Silent Spring, Carson would bring to the attention of the world a much longer list of man-made marine pollutants, forcing her readers to imagine the ocean anew. I know now that it is upon Rachel Carson’s ocean, not Melville’s, that I’ve sailed.
No one ever replied to my WANTED posters and I doubt they ever will. Nevertheless, I suspect I know what happened to the toys. Stored for several months in my freezer, the photodegraded duck I’d salvaged on Gore Point, brittle to the touch, was crumbling into pieces. The legend of the ducks that drifted around the world, however, has proved more durable. In the summer of 2007, thousands of yellow ducks swam into the minds of newspaper readers in England. The Times of London notified readers that “an armada of rubber ducks” would soon appear over the horizon. “Drake’s Other Armada,” the Daily Mail’s punning headline read. By July 13, the anticipated invasion had begun—or so it seemed. Penny Harris, a retired schoolteacher in Devon, had found a convincingly weather-beaten specimen. “It’s covered in brown algae and has got barnacles on it,” she reportedly said. The Times was convinced. “First of the Plastic Duck Invasion Fleet Makes Landfall on the Devon Coast,” it announced on July 14. The tabloid Sun appeared to be a bit more cautious—“First of the Duck Armada?” its headline asked—but the accompanying graphic was unequivocal: a speech bubble superimposed onto a photo of Harris’s duck read, “I’ve been at sea for 15 yrs, swum 17,000 miles . . . Drake would be proud of me.” That same day, the local Devon paper, the Western Morning News, bothered to investigate, determining, correctly, that “it was not the right duck.” Neither the Times nor the Sun took note of the correction, and a day after the Western Morning News delivered its disappointing verdict, the Sunday Mail published yet another story about Harris’s discovery, under the alliterative headline “Found: The First ‘Friendly Floatee’ Rubber Duck in Britain”—getting the brand name of the Floatees wrong as well as the facts. Five days later the Toronto Globe and Mail published a time line of the rubber duck saga. It began in January 1992 with the spill and ended in July 2007 with Harris and her barnacle-encrusted counterfeit. Meanwhile, on the coast of Cornwall, beachcombers are still searching. Maybe it was enough that the ducks had in fact fallen overboard. Enough to kno
w that they had crossed the Pacific. That messages in bottles were traveling the Arctic currents.
Moby-Dick begins as Ishmael’s story. The opening chapters suggest a bildungsroman in which a green youth will, in the conventional Victorian manner, undergo an adventurous rite of passage into manhood. But in the middle of the novel, as many readers have noticed, Ishmael recedes into the background, less an actor in the action than an omniscient narrator, and interpreter, and at times even an author of the drama in which Ahab and the Whale now take center stage. Some readers suggest that the grandeur of Ahab’s tragic character almost usurps Ishmael’s role as protagonist. I’m not so sure.
Not long after becoming a father, I read in Andrew Delbanco’s biography that Melville’s firstborn son, Malcolm, was born midway through the novel’s composition. Rereading the novel with that fact in mind, I couldn’t help noticing the emergence of paternity as a major theme. It’s almost as if, over the course of the novel, we voyage not only from Manhattan to the South Pacific but from the mercenary and possibly bisexual freedoms of bachelorhood to the sorrows and fidelities—and toward but not quite to the heart-straining joys—of fatherhood.
The theme first appears early in the novel, in Nantucket. When Ishmael shares his misgivings about sailing under the command of a captain named Ahab (in the Bible, Ahab is a wicked king), Peleg, one of the Pequod’s owners, offers the young bachelor this reassurance: “my boy, he has a wife—not three voyages wedded—a sweet resigned girl. Think of that: by that sweet girl that old man has a child: hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless harm in Ahab?” Later, in one curious parenthetical aside, Ishmael uses the phrase “we fathers.” We? Has Ishmael become a family man since returning from his look at the watery part of the world? Is Melville speaking autobiographically? The farther the Pequod sails, the more numerous the allusions to parenthood become. When Queequeg rescues his fellow harpooneer Tashtego—who in a mishap, while harvesting spermaceti, has tumbled into the cavernous forehead of a dead sperm whale—Ishmael describes the deliverance in satirically obstetric terms: “[Queequeg] averred, that upon first thrusting in for him, a leg was presented.” Following the delivery, the mother, “the great head itself” (now sinking into the deep), Ishmael tells us, was “doing as well as could be expected.”
If this is not enough, look again. Here, at the heart of a “grand armada” of whales, the oarsman Ishmael is peering down—into what? The inscrutable deep? His own reflection? Not this time. No, he’s peering into an underwater, cetological nursery. An umbilical cord—antithesis of the harpoon line—still connects one cow to her newborn calf, a newborn calf whose fins and flukes “still freshly retai[n] the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby’s ears newly arrived from foreign parts.” Here, other calves, cordless, are nursing, slurping down milk that is, says Ishmael—speaking from experience—so “very sweet and rich... it might do well with strawberries”; milk that, though sweet and rich, in the whaling grounds nevertheless sometimes pours forth so gushingly that “milk and blood rivallingly discolor the sea.”
After many chapters spent in the murderous, manly battlefield of the whaling grounds, the glimpse into the nursery of whales is both enchanting and jarring, and is made all the more enchanting and jarring by Ishmael’s well-informed, fatherly eye. The nursing calves, he compares to “human infants” who “while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence.”
Fatherhood even helps us understand the apostasy that underlies Ahab’s monomaniacal quest. “Where is the foundling’s father hidden?” Ahab, feeling like a fatherless child, asks both the heavens and himself as he nears his doom. “Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.” Several chapters later, when St. Elmo’s fire lights up the Pequod, Ahab thinks he’s found the secret of his paternity. “Oh, thou clear spirit,” clutching the nautical lightning rod, he shouts at the blue pyrotechnics playing about the sheets, “of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire I breathe it back to thee.”
As Moby-Dick nears its end, the Pequod first encounters a ship called the Bachelor, on the quarterdeck of which “the mates and harpooneers” are “dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped with them from the Polynesian Isles.” The very next ship the Pequod encounters? The Rachel, named, allegorically, for the biblical Rachel, figurative mother of that generation of Israelites doomed to exile and wandering. Why does Melville give this ship that name? Because, thanks to the interventions of Moby Dick, the Rachel’s captain has lost a boatload of sailors. And among those sailors? “My boy, my own boy is among them,” the Rachel’s captain tells Ahab, begging him to join in the search.
Now keep in mind that between the appearance of the Bachelor and the Rachel another fatherly event has occurred: Ahab has adopted the castaway, tambourine-playing cabin boy Pip as a kind of spiritual son. “Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy,” Ahab tells his new ward; “thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings.” And Pip, in reply, wishes that his black hand and Ahab’s white one might be riveted together. You’d think, given the fatherly warp and woof of his heartstrings, that Ahab would be sympathetic to the appeals of the Rachel ’s bereft captain. But no. Ahab’s reply is terrible, terrible for the bereft father, but also—because of what it implies about his lonely, fatherless, unfatherly fate—terrible for Ahab: “God bless ye, man,” the doomed captain says to the bereft one, “and may I forgive myself, but I must go.”
One last time. In Moby-Dick, Starbuck, first mate, is the consummate father, and as the novel ends his fatherly voice grows loud. On the eve of destruction, Starbuck reminds his captain of his captain’s wife and child: “Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are Starbuck’s—wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow youth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, longing, paternal old age! Away! let us away!”
For a moment Ahab seems to be persuaded: “By the green land; by the bright hearth stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye.” For a moment, but only for a moment. Of course, Ahab, the foundling son of a fatherless universe, possessed by his chase, making of his own son a foundling, renounces that homecoming, though he does tell Starbuck not to renounce it—to stay on the Pequod rather than chase the white whale, choosing for his second-in-command a happier fate than the one he chooses for himself. Cruelly, Melville drowns Starbuck, too. And Ishmael? Abob on the life buoy of Queequeg’s coffin, he’s rescued by the Rachel, “the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.”
Two days after my walk on the tundra, after a long series of connecting flights and a ride from JFK on the A train, I turned the key in the lock of my front door and lugged my ergonomic suitcase up three flights of stairs. On this my final return, at least my final one for a good long while, Beth and Bruno had made, with crayons and butcher paper, a big sign that read WELCOME HOME, PAPA. Now almost three, my son had entered an A. A. Milne phase. In the following days I read to him such classics as “In Which Piglet Is Entirely Surrounded by Water” and “In Which Christopher Robin Leads an Expotition to the North Pole.”
Of a Sabbath afternoon, not long after my return, I take Bruno down to the park along the Hudson River. We gather pinecones from beneath the pine trees there, Bruno foraging, me watching for dog turds and syringes and fragments of broken glass, of which there are surprisingly few. Parents, like their children, are at the mercy of their nightmares and dreams. Unlike children, they’re also at the mercy of memories—and I remember well the pleasure of exploring those secret, shadowy grottoes beneath branches and behind bushes. When Bruno’s arms and my hands are full of pinecones, we carry them—dropping a few, among the sunbathers, alon
g the way—to the river’s edge. There we divide them into equal piles and take turns throwing them, as if launching a pinecone assault on the condominiums of New Jersey, or on the ferryboats, behind which the sun has begun to set. To throw his, Bruno has to reach through the railings of the balustrade, a significant handicap. His barely make it into the water. I hurl mine as far as I can, trying to impress him.
Bruno can play this game for hours on end, never tiring of it. So can I. When all the pinecones are adrift, we follow them, hurrying among the joggers and strollers, stopping to peer down. Finally, we let them go, and I tell Bruno where the currents will take them—out of the harbor, onto the Atlantic, into the Gulf Stream, which will sweep them toward northern Europe, odds are, and then, if they chance to remain adrift, perhaps to the Arctic or else into the Sargasso Sea. Perhaps they will end up on some European or Brazilian or African or Asian coast and take sprout—these seeds of Manhattan pines.
This was pure fancy, of course. Pinecones aren’t sea beans, after all. They evolved to germinate on a forest floor, not ride the currents. Still, it was fun to imagine.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’ve been lucky, before setting out to write this book and since, to have worked with and learned from a number of superlative editors: at Agni, Askold Melnyczuk; at Harper’s, Lewis Lapham, Ben Metcalf, Colin Harrison, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Ellen Rosenbush, Jen Szalai, and Bill Wasik, among others; at The New York Times Magazine, Alex Star; at Outside, Will Palmer; and at Viking, Joshua Kendall, who faithfully and skillfully piloted this book through calms and storms, even when—especially when—it seemed to have sprung a leak.