by Philip Roy
But my arm was too sore to dive or even jump, so I slipped off the hull a bit clumsily and had an easy swim a few times around the sub, using just my legs and one arm. The water was so warm—it was wonderful. I closed my eyes. Suddenly, my foot struck something and it scared the heck out of me. I immediately thought of sharks and scrambled up the side of the sub. I turned around and looked into the water but didn’t see anything. That was weird.
I went inside and peeked at the sonar screen. There was nothing. Nothing on radar either. Was it a shark? I didn’t see any fins. There would have been fins.
I had to know what it was so I turned on battery power and slowly motored around in circles. I didn’t see anything from the portal. Then, I got an idea. I went inside and looked down through the observation window. Sure enough, there was some kind of dull grey shape there, just hanging in the water, not really floating and not sinking. I couldn’t tell how big it was or what it was made of. It looked like plastic, but wouldn’t plastic float on the surface?
I kneeled down at the window and stared at the grey blob. Should I move on or should I investigate? I looked at Hollie. He was curious because I was curious. “Okay. I’ll investigate.”
I took a twenty-foot length of rope, tied it to the gaff and threw the gaff over the side. After a few tries I hooked on to something. I pulled up slowly by leaning back with the rope over my shoulder, then wrapping the rope around the portal so it wouldn’t sink. But whatever it was didn’t want to sink anyway. What on earth was it?
It broke the surface like a chunk of dead, rotted flesh. But I was right, it was plastic. It was about eight feet long, three feet wide and maybe four feet deep. It had no markings on it, nothing to identify it at all. It must have been in the ocean so long everything had faded. Now it was nothing but a grey blob. I unhooked it and let it go. But it didn’t go anywhere. I went back inside, shut off the lights and went to bed. I made a feeble attempt at meditating in bed but fell asleep.
In the early twilight when I woke, we were surrounded by a sea of plastic.
It must have been garbage dumped out of a ship. There should have been a law against that—dumping at sea—but I didn’t think there was, although I would sometimes see a sign posted in harbours prohibiting dumping in the water. Everywhere around us were plastic bottles, plastic bags, round plastic, straight plastic, crooked plastic, plastic rope, plastic netting and on and on. There were also broken pieces of industrial-looking plastic. Some of it was in large globs like the piece we found before going to bed, but most of it was in smaller chunks. Why would a ship dump plastic garbage into the sea? Oh! Maybe the ship had been caught in that typhoon and sank. Hmmm. Except that this garbage was really old and deformed. It looked like it had been in the water for many, many years.
We motored slowly through the garbage as the twilight turned darker. I didn’t want to run into anything bigger. But none of the garbage seemed an obstacle to the sub. I couldn’t believe how long the trail lasted. We were still seeing it when it grew dark. It was so depressing! It reminded me of what Nanuq, the old Inuit man, had said about the sea dying. I was glad he couldn’t see this. Garbage made the ocean look like a dump, or like a dead swamp or an industrial lake. I was glad when the darkness hid it from us. In the morning, when the sun came up, the sea would be fresh and clean.
It wasn’t! I couldn’t believe it. The garbage continued forever in all directions. This was scary. What was going on?
I went inside and looked down through the observation window. The garbage was at least twenty to thirty feet deep. There were chunks here and there, but there was also a kind of sludge in the water, like melted ice, except it was plastic.
A little while later there was a really bad smell on the port side. It was so foul I had to cover my nose. Hollie smelled it and looked worried. I saw netting in the water. Then, I saw carcasses. There were turtles, dolphins, sharks and fish all rotting in the sun. It was a net just like the one I had broken, but nobody had rescued these creatures. Hugh wasn’t here. There were no transmitters on any of the turtles.
I couldn’t get away from the smell. It was so bad I threw up over the side. Then we passed the area and the air was fresh again. But the garbage continued. It continued all day. In the late afternoon we came across another carcass tied up in part of a net. It was the headless torso and part of the legs of a man. I stopped the sub, backed up and stared at the body. If we were back in Canada I would have reported it. But who would I call here? Who would come all the way out here for part of a dead body? Nobody. Nobody would care. As I stared at the corpse I felt that something had changed inside of me. I didn’t know what it was exactly and couldn’t have put it in words, but I didn’t feel there was much difference between the plastic garbage and the dead body. I wasn’t sure that was the right way to feel about it but I couldn’t help it. Everything here was dead. Everything was rotting. What was the difference?
Well, it was a body. It had been somebody. I should have felt sad for the person. It was sad. And yet, it looked like just another piece of garbage. The garbage really scared me. I was afraid that Nanuq was right; the sea was dying. The sea was certainly dying here. We were killing its creatures and we were dumping our garbage into it. We were killing it.
Chapter 18
ON THE SECOND day of garbage I was sick to my stomach with worry. I had sailed past dozens of carcasses of dolphins, turtles, sharks, even a small whale. Some had been caught in nets and drowned. Pieces of netting floated with them, wrapped around them. With some I couldn’t tell what had killed them. They were all drifting with the garbage and rotting under the sun. There weren’t any smaller fish eating them as there would have been in cleaner, healthier water. I was worried to death. And then, for the first time since we left the circus ship, I heard a beep on the radar. Thank heavens, I thought! I would go out of my mind all alone out here.
The vessel was ten miles away when it hopped onto the radar screen. I sailed straight towards it. I wanted to know what it was. I didn’t care about submerging. I was too upset.
She was a small ship, about the size of a coastguard ship. I could tell from five miles away through binoculars. But I couldn’t see any markings. It was twilight by the time we were close enough for her to spot us. She would have seen us on radar at the same time we had seen her. I didn’t know what she was doing here but I knew it wasn’t fishing. The only thing you could fish for here was garbage.
As it turned out, that’s what she was doing. When I drew the binoculars across her bow I read, “Environmental Protection Ship – Phoenix.”
I felt a burst of hope. She was here to clean up the garbage! Then I thought for a moment: how could she do that? The garbage stretched forever. She was just one small ship. Still, the fact that she was here filled me with hope. It meant that somebody knew about it; somebody cared. I pulled up under the shadow of her bow, cut the engine, climbed the portal and stood up. There were half a dozen people on deck leaning over, staring, smiling and waving. They had watched us come in.
“Ahoy! Submariner! Ahoy! Where are you from?”
“Canada.”
“What brings you out here?”
“I’m exploring.”
The sound of voices brought Seaweed up the portal. He took a quick peek and jumped into the air. Then Hollie wanted up. I climbed down and carried him up.
“Will you come aboard?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
They dropped a rope ladder. I tied up to it, put Hollie in the tool bag and swung it over my shoulder. I couldn’t wait to get on deck and ask them about the garbage. But climbing the ladder was difficult. I could only hold on with one arm.
There were seven people on deck: four men and three women. They told me their names and I told them mine but I couldn’t remember any of theirs, except for one, Carl, who was older than the others and probably from Sweden. He was one of those sailors who spent so much time in the sun his face looked like an old leather boot. He was waiting at the top of the la
dder to help me up. “You’re just a lad! What happened to your arm?”
“I uhh . . . was shot.”
I had to bite my lip, not because I had been shot but because I had been sailing through garbage for a day and a half and it felt like it was the end of the world. I hadn’t realized how upset I really was.
“Ho! How did it happen?”
“I was freeing turtles and dolphins from a trawler net.”
“Oh! Good for you! And they shot you?”
“Yes.”
He looked angry enough to kill somebody himself. “Shrimp trawlers! They’re the scum of the earth! Let me see it.”
I raised my arm. He lifted the bandage and looked at the wound. It was covered with a scab. I would carry a deep scar for the rest of my life. I didn’t care.
“You realize they were trying to kill you, right?”
“Yes.”
“They’ll kill anything that gets in their way, anything between them and their pursuit of money.”
“But why do they kill turtles and dolphins? If they’re after shrimp, why don’t they let everything else go?”
“They’re supposed to! They’re supposed to have holes in their nets that let the turtles, dolphins and sharks escape. But they don’t work very well and they get impatient. The turtles get tangled in the nets. The dolphins and sharks too. Rather than look for a humane solution, they just slaughter them and discard them. It’s madness. They’re murderers! They don’t care. But it’s only short-term gain. In the long run they’re killing the very food chain that’s feeding them. We’re in a fight to save the oceans, my friend. It’s a fight between those who want to make a fast dollar and those who want to save the planet.”
I looked around at their staring faces. These were the people who wanted to save the planet.
“But what about this garbage? Do you know where it has come from? Do you know why there is so much here?”
Carl nodded up and down and frowned. “This, my friend, is an island of plastic the size of Texas. Some say it’s twice as big as that. We’re not really sure. We call it an island but it’s more like a carpet, as you can see. You can’t stick your hand into the water without touching something. It’s here because plastic floats. It breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces but it never biodegrades. So, it’s always here. The island has been growing since the 1950s at least. Every day it pulls more plastic into it like a black hole, except that it doesn’t disappear, it grows.”
He picked up a jar of sea water. “See how murky it is? It looks like silt, right? Well, those are particles of plastic. The fish eat that and they die. Dolphins eat it, sharks eat it, turtles eat it, whales eat it, seabirds eat it. They all die.”
He slammed the jar down with a bang.
“But . . . where does the plastic come from? And why is it here?”
Carl raised his hands in front of his face and spun them in circles in opposite directions. “We are in a vortex. The currents of the Pacific spin like wheels, this way and that, around and around, but here, they don’t spin. This is the centre. Not the geographic centre, just the centre of the currents. The garbage gets swept here by the currents, becomes trapped and just stays. You can find pieces of plastic here that were thrown into the sea fifty years ago.”
“Wow.”
“Yet most of the world doesn’t even know it’s here.”
“Can’t we tell everyone?”
“We’re trying. You’d be amazed how difficult it is to get people to hear something they don’t want to hear. The average person contributes about two hundred pounds of plastic to the garbage of the world every year. That’s a lot of plastic. Since it doesn’t biodegrade, it has to end up somewhere. A lot of it ends up here. But since people don’t see it, they don’t care about it.”
“If it kills the oceans they will care.”
“Yes, but by then it will be too late.”
The Phoenix was part of an international environmental protection organization. Each of the crew was a researcher from a North American or European university. One of the women was from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She was studying the effects of ocean garbage on sea turtles. I told her about Hugh and asked her if she put transmitters on turtles. She said no, but other people did. Then she asked me about my sub. “Are you a . . . I mean, you’re so young and everything, but . . . are you a vigilante environmentalist or something?”
“No. I’m an explorer.”
“But you’re fighting with fishing trawlers. And you just got shot. And you’re way out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean all by yourself, except for a dog. Or did we see a seagull climb out of your submarine too?”
“Yes. That’s Seaweed. He’s my first mate. Hollie is my second mate.”
I opened the tool bag and lifted Hollie out. His tail was wagging like a ribbon flapping in the wind. She patted him while he tried to give her a bath with his tongue. “What a cutie! Please, come inside and let me take a closer look at your arm.”
I followed her inside the cabin, sat down at a table and let her unwrap the bandage and examine my arm. She took my temperature, felt my pulse and measured my blood pressure.
“Are you a doctor?”
“No, but I studied to be a paramedic before I studied oceanography. When did it happen?”
“About ten days ago.”
“Can you use your hand?”
“A little bit. It’s getting better slowly. I had acupuncture a few times on another ship.”
“You had acupuncture out here? That’s funny. One moment you get shot, the next you get acupuncture. That’s the Pacific for you. I can give you some tablets for pain if it starts to hurt again. And I can give you an antiseptic cream to rub over it. That will help protect it from infection. You’re doing a good job keeping it clean. How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“Pretty young to be so far from home all by yourself. Where are your parents?”
“My father lives in Montreal. I was raised by my grandparents in Newfoundland. I left home at fourteen.”
“Have you been at sea ever since then?”
“Pretty much. I visit with friends a lot.”
“Where did you get the submarine?”
“I made it with somebody. I had a lot of help.”
She paused while she watched the blood pressure gauge. “Your story is amazing. I have a nephew who’s sixteen—I wish he could see what you are doing with your life. Someone like you could really make a difference in the world, Alfred, if you don’t get killed first. It’s dangerous out here.”
“I know.”
“Yes, I guess you do. Do you ever think of what you might do when you finish exploring?”
“No.”
“Perhaps you should consider environmental protection. You obviously care a lot about animals and the environment. And we sure could use you on our side.”
I nodded my head but didn’t say anything. I wanted to think about it.
“I hope you will think about it. Where are you going next?”
“Bikini Atoll. Then Saipan.”
“Boy! You’re not exactly looking for the pleasure spots, are you?”
“I guess not.”
I stayed just a few hours on the ship. When the crew started to get sleepy I thanked them for their help, climbed down the rope ladder and sailed away. They were going to bed but it was our morning. Besides, I had even more things to think about now.
By sunrise we had sailed free of the island of plastic. According to the crew of the Phoenix, we had passed through just one corner of it. I was so happy to see clean water again my heart lifted and my hopes did too. I couldn’t stop thinking about what the woman from Vancouver had said: that I should consider a career in environmental protection. I loved the sea with all my heart. I planned to spend my whole life on it. I wanted to protect it and all the creatures that lived in it: the turtles, whales, polar bears, seabirds, dolphins, sharks. I wanted to stop the trawlers from killing everything
in their way. I wanted to stop people from polluting the sea. Maybe Ziegfried could invent something to help clean it up. Perhaps he could design a ship that would suck up plastic, recycle it and filter the water until it was clean again. World War Two minesweepers searched for and gathered up explosive mines that had been dumped into the sea during the war. And they found most of them. Couldn’t a ship do the same thing with plastic?
Maybe I could be both an explorer and an environmentalist. Why not? I would ask Ziegfried and Sheba their opinion, although I could guess what they would say. Both lived in houses full of animals and birds they had rescued. Both were dedicated to living in ways that didn’t harm the environment. They would like it.
Chapter 19
AS WE SAILED SOUTH to Bikini Atoll the sun grew hotter every day. The hull heated up so much I had to carry a t-shirt up and lay it on the metal when I wanted to lean against the hatch. How hot could it get?
Bikini Atoll is the top of a seamount that broke the surface in several places, each one creating a tiny island. Bikini Island is the biggest of them, although it is still pretty small. The islands form an oval, with a lagoon in the middle twenty miles long and ten miles wide. We were in the Marshall Islands now, where Amelia Earhart probably crashed into the sea before she was picked up by Japanese sailors and taken to Saipan. That was one theory. Perhaps she actually drowned. Nobody knew for sure. Saipan is also in Micronesia but a thousand miles away, on the other side of the Marianas Trench, the deepest seafloor in the world. Nothing about the Pacific is small.
Earhart left New Guinea in her small twin-engine plane and planned to land and refuel on Howland Island, a tiny island halfway to Hawaii. But she couldn’t find it. She sent a few broken radio transmissions from her plane saying she couldn’t find the island in the dark so she was flying north. But she was running out of gas. She probably tried to make it to the Marshall Islands, which are in a straight line between New Guinea and Hawaii, but were occupied by Japan at the time. Since the Japanese were preparing for war against the Americans they probably thought she was a spy.
