Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

by Andrew Blackwell

  Watch was also a time for gossip. Ships run on gossip, and it is the most reliable way to spread information among the crew. Boredom creates such a powerful suction in the mind for anything interesting, anything new, or anything related to your situation—the situation, that is, of being marooned on a small, steel island. Night watches, when the rest of the crew were sleeping, were especially productive. Entire shifts were spent reenacting the captain’s social gaffes and speculating about whether Mary’s goals for the voyage were achievable. We wondered how long the voyage would be, and mused about what, exactly, we were supposed to be doing.

  The space between conversations, normally reserved at sea for quiet reverie and communion with the mysteries of the deep, was instead filled by Gabe, who for the duration of the voyage maintained a running series of food fantasies. Night and day, becalmed or in high seas, Gabe would welcome us into his inner restaurant, a sensual wonderland of Thai green curries and simmering stews and more green curries—always with the green curry—and hot liquored drinks to ward off the cold air that chased us almost all the way to the Gyre.

  At times it seemed Gabe had no other way to approach the world. Once, during a discussion of the myth of the Garbage Patch as a “plastic island,” I caught him staring into space, licking his lips.

  “It’s more like…like a thin minestrone,” he said.

  Oh, and then you also have to steer the boat, taking turns at the Kaisei’s tall, spoked wheel. You can pull off such feats of steering as you’ve never imagined: driving without being able to see in front of you (thanks to the masts, and the structure of the upper lounge, and whatnot), driving in the dark without headlights, driving in the dark without headlights while looking backward, with your hands off the wheel, drinking coffee, and telling bad jokes. These maneuvers and more, I personally executed.

  All this is made possible by the absence, on the high seas, of anything else but the high seas. There is nothing to steer around, nothing to crash into, indeed no things whatsoever, except for you and your ship. If, within a ten-mile radius, so much as a rain squall or a tall wave threatened to violate our monopoly on thingness, the radar would sound an alarm.

  All that mattered when you were steering, then, was the heading, which would be provided by the watch captain, in our case the Pirate King.

  “One-eight-five,” he would say.

  “One-eight-five, aye,” we would respond, duty-bound to get over the silliness of saying “aye” all the time.

  You would then peer at the points of the compass as they wavered in the gimbaled steel housing of the binnacle, just beyond the wheel, and ponder how to make a five-degree course correction to a heading that wandered a good ten degrees back and forth, according to the swell and the wind and the whimsy of Poseidon.

  16 AUGUST—36°55′ N.129°27′ W

  In the afternoon, we saw our first piece of debris. The honor went to Charlie Watch. Art, a retired science teacher both crusty and jovial, said he thought it was a net, although it was too far away to be sure.

  Around eight thirty the following morning, I spotted Debris Item No. 2: a large bundle of synthetic yellow rope, to starboard.

  After only three days at sea, the mind was already so tuned to the featurelessness of the ocean surface that a bundle of rope was cause for major excitement. Even a fragment of kelp would have been a thrill, and this was actual rope. We went thronging to the rail. I wanted to cry “WHERE AWAY?” but restrained myself, as it would have made no sense. It had been me that spotted the rope, so someone else should have been crying “Where away?” so I could then call, “TWO POINTS ON THE STARBOARD BEAM!”

  It was Patrick O’Brian syndrome. I had read too many of his rousing tales of early-nineteenth-century naval adventure. Now, on a large sailing vessel for the first time, I was afflicted by the urge, barely stifled, to scream “WHERE AWAY?!” whenever I had the chance, in rude imitation of the indefatigable Captain Aubrey. (The strange counterpoint to this urge was that I never got used to shouting “LAYING ALOFT!” before climbing into the rigging, as instructed by the Pirate King.)

  The bundle of rope slid out of sight. “Where away?” I whispered.

  There was more trash that day, small pieces here and there. We had no illusions that we were anywhere near the Gyre, though. We hadn’t traveled far enough, and the weather was still cool and windy, not the warm doldrums we could expect once we reached the Gyre. But it whetted our appetite. It sharpened our eyes. People began scanning the ocean surface for debris whenever they were on deck. Several people went up into the crosstrees to look out from above. The call came down of another rope sighting. (Where away?) Gabe and I went thronging to the rail. You must always throng to the rail, I felt, even if there are only two of you.

  There it was: a tattered section of rope, maybe eighteen inches long.

  “Oh, shit,” said Gabe. “That is going to fuck up some ecosystem.”

  The sightings soon died down and by the following day the water was trash-free. We readied ourselves for its return. A logbook for debris was established—it lived in the wheelhouse, on the desk underneath the GPS/radar display—and a new task was added to our watch duties: debris lookout. Two members of the active watch would sit in the bow, one looking to port, one to starboard, using a walkie-talkie to report anything they saw to a third member of the watch, who would note its latitude and longitude and the time of sighting in the logbook. The fourth watchmate would man the helm, and several times during the three-hour shift, at the word of the Pirate King, we would rotate.

  I was underwhelmed by this debris-watch system. Mary had already said that this voyage wouldn’t have the scientific focus of the previous year’s, but if we were doing the work of debris watch anyway, it seemed a waste not to do it in a methodical or standardized way.

  But no. There would be no real data collection, no pulling of nets through the water to quantify debris density at different coordinates. There wasn’t even any consistent method for eyeballing it. Should we be looking everywhere and anywhere? Or should we be looking at a defined area, so that the debris count from one watch might be meaningfully compared with that of the next?

  And how should different objects count? We would of course radio in large items to the wheelhouse. (I’ve got half of a green plastic bucket. I’ve got a two-foot square of yellow tarp.) But what about a two-inch fragment? A half-inch one? Only through the gradual buildup of a debris-lookout culture, transmitted orally from one watch to the next, did even vaguely standardized practices emerge. Our observations, it seemed, would be of little use to anyone else once we were done.

  Soon, a pair of work lights were strapped to the netting underneath the bowsprit, and debris watch extended around the clock. Now we stood at the rails even at night, staring into the pools of light that trickled forward onto the rising, falling, onrushing ocean. In active seas, the prow of the ship became a mesmerizing twilight zone, where I stood watching bow waves crash aside and looked up at the Kaisei’s great square sails, taut against the night.

  But when we couldn’t find this reverie, some of us grumbled. What, exactly, was the point?

  The point was that our goal was not to measure debris or to record it in any useful way, but simply to find it. We were looking for what Mary referred to as “current lines” of trash, narrow bands of high density. Mary spoke again and again of the current lines, and I saw that if we could bring the Kaisei back to port heavy with trash, it would validate the dream of cleanup. But for that, we would have to find the mother lode.

  The impossibility of steering in a straight line is just one expression of the truth that at sea there are no straight lines. Nothing is level, nothing constant. Least of all gravity. You were once so naive as to assume that gravity was a force of uniform strength and direction. Welcome, then, to the Kaisei, where gravity is contingent, erratic, ever-changing. Just try putting down a mug of tea. All the flat surfaces of the world, formerly so useful, are now mere runways for your beverage, which will l
eap unbidden into the air and onto the floor, scuttling away in search of lower ground. For a mug—a book, a computer—to be left on a table or a shelf, it must first be restrained, like a lunatic strapped to a bed.

  All the structures of daily life now find themselves built on quicksand. I go to the bathroom: I pee. The urine describes a sideways arc away from me (strictly speaking, I arc away from it), first left, then right, then left. Compound upon this the natural downward curve of the stream, and a newfound inability to stand upright, and now several integrals of calculus are necessary to ensure that a majority of one’s piss doesn’t end up on the floor.

  The bathroom anointed, you make for the lower lounge. The world rotates. You plow against the left wall of the corridor, the right, the left…Soon you will realize that in fact you are walking a straight line, and it is the corridor itself that is driving the lane here, sometimes quite violently. It’s up to you to shoulder off its aggressions.

  Finally, you make it to the lower lounge for a quiet sit on the padded benches built against the hull. The lower lounge, like most places belowdecks, throbs with the vibration of the engines and the motion of the ship, with the parting of the ocean water as the Kaisei toils ever forward. Here, merely sitting, watching a movie on someone’s laptop—There Will Be Blood stirring memories of Spindletop—you feel, more purely than anywhere else, precisely because you are trying to sit still, how the Earth’s lines of force, once so parallel, so uniform, now swing and warp, bending the room into a haphazard, freaky place. One moment you are pressed against the cushions of the sofa. Then the pendulum of the world swings and you float half an inch into the air. An hour later, your face has melted and your stomach, having received so much from you over the years, now wants to give something back.

  Will it never end? For three weeks, the very welds in the hull yearning upward and sideways?

  You need your bunk. You stagger to the end of the glowering, thuggish corridor and back into your cabin, mumble something to the sleeping forms of your cabinmates, and then you are home, hidden away in the wooden womb of your bed, surrounded by clothes and blankets and bags of almonds.

  I curled up, oriented so I wouldn’t roll and crash against the walls as I napped, free for a moment from the need always to be bracing and balancing and holding on.

  But even in my bunk I could feel the tireless ocean gravity, changeable as the wind. Under its sway, my organs and skin, my face, my mouth, they pulled against my skeleton: left, then right, then left…The thought surfaced that this was not, in fact, a special marine case. The boat and the ocean had not cast some churning and unnatural spell. They had merely revealed how the world really was. Gravity and orientation weren’t reliable, except in the narrow instance of life on land. The worlds that sprang from the laws of nature were wavering and irregular. And so were our bodies—provisional, inconstant, flesh on a frame. And our lives and plans, too, oscillations in a medium, ripples passing up the swell.

  18 AUGUST—35°46′ N, 135°28′ W

  That afternoon, while I was at the helm, Mary came and stood on the bridge for a while. We hadn’t spoken much since the beginning of the voyage. It was another odd effect of life on the Kaisei: thanks to the rigorous rotating schedule, you could see surprisingly little of someone who wasn’t on your watch. Aside from meals—and even those were sometimes worth skipping for sleep—I might see the members of Alpha Watch only if I happened to be on deck taking pictures during their shift, or if there was a call for all hands to make sail. But Mary wasn’t assigned to a watch and tended to be in her cabin when she wasn’t visiting the on-duty watch or observing some debris being brought on board. So a certain distance built up.

  Maybe I just felt awkward around her.

  I shifted the wheel a few spokes to port, keeping course. Mary took a deep breath of ocean air.

  “Been doing so much reading,” she said. “Trying to synthesize everything and come up with the right approach.” She told me she had a tall stack of books about ocean debris in her cabin.

  How late, I thought. How late to be looking for the right approach.

  She sat down on the edge of the bridge, leaning against the railing.

  “So what do you think, Andrew?”

  “Of what?” I said.

  “Of life out here.”

  I considered the question. The sailing life is supposed to be the apotheosis of freedom and adventure, but it seemed notable to me mainly for its indignities, and for the endless tasks, both awkward and arcane, on which our safety depended. It was like owning a house, but more likely to get you killed. The idea that sailing was an expression of freedom, I suspected, was merely a tool for self-soothing on the part of all the sailors and yachtsmen of the world. They had to justify why they bothered.

  Mary was waiting for my answer, her eyes bright. I laughed. “Well, it’s certainly different, Mary,” I said.

  She smiled and handed me a piece of chocolate. I thought of something she had told me back in California, advice for someone who had never been to sea. The trick, she’d said, is not to think of yourself as limited by the confines of your boat. You have to believe that you are limited only by the edges of what you can see from the boat. And the indignities of being at sea had let me realize the truth of this. The solution to every misery was to open your mind toward the horizon. To know that you were not on the ocean, but of it.

  19 AUGUST—35°05′ N. 138°42′ W

  On our fifth day—sixth? twelfth?—we got our first real taste. The air warmed, the clouds disappeared, the ocean became settled and smooth—and we caught the propeller on a ghost net.

  Ghost nets are fishing nets and tackle that have been cast off or lost by commercial fishermen. As nets and their attached gear wander and float, they find each other, tangling into ungainly masses of net and rope riddled with fishing floats and other debris. They have the largest bodies of any species of nonlife in the Garbage Patch. Synthetic men-of-war, they continue to fish, entangling and killing animals as they roam the ocean for years, perhaps decades. And they’re hell on propellers.

  I awoke in my bunk to the sound of—what was that sound? Robin, another retired science teacher and a friend of Art’s, was crouched next to me, nudging my shoulder.

  You might want to get on deck, he said. The propeller got fouled on a net.

  I realized what the sound was. After five days of constant motoring, the propeller was no longer spinning. “Where away?” I gurgled, tumbling out of bed.

  We came on deck to find the Pirate King fresh from the ocean, stripped to the waist, droplets of saltwater glinting in his beard. I want to say he had a knife in his mouth. He had gone over the side to free the propeller. His quarry lay at his feet: a young ghost net, long and narrow, uncomplicated by other nets and ropes, not yet tangled into itself beyond recognition. The excited crew clustered around. We had only just reached the Gyre, and already the Garbage Patch had reached out, striking us a glancing blow!

  I had my video camera with me and began recording Robin and his collaborators as they untangled the net. Mary was there, watching it unfold, oddly separate from the crew, as she always seemed to be. She picked up a corner of the net and turned it over in her hand.

  “It’s so hard to believe people throw stuff like this in the ocean,” she said. I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or to my camera.

  There was debris in the water again. Someone brought out a long pole with a basket of netting at its end, and we started hunting. There was a trick to it. If you left the net in the water, it became difficult to maneuver; instead, you had to stab the water just aft of an object as it passed. In this way, like Vikings spearfishing from the deck of a warship, we brought several scraps of trash aboard.

  Meanwhile, Kaniela and Nick took the dinghy out, buzzing around to pick up bits of debris spotted by people aloft. Nick was on board as a representative of the Ocean Conservancy and was the closest thing we had to a professional marine biologist or ocean debris specialist. Every year,
the Ocean Conservancy leads a gigantic volunteer effort called the International Coastal Cleanup, and this year Nick’s efforts on the Kaisei would be the cleanup’s symbolic beginning.

  Bravo Watch began. I grabbed a walkie-talkie and took bow watch, calling sightings in to Gabe, in the wheelhouse, who would note them in the log. Nick and Kaniela also had a radio in the dinghy. If any of us saw something particularly interesting—a bucket, a large piece of tarp—Kaniela would gun the motor and the dinghy would skip across the ocean in hot pursuit.

  I climbed out onto the bowsprit, watching the water stretch past, eyes peeled for plastic crates and buckets. The dinghy zipped forward with Nick in the bow, a figurehead in sunglasses.

  Something was bugging me. I keyed my radio.

  “Gamma whiskey breaker, this is bow watch alpha bravo comeback, over.”

  Bravo Watch liked its radios, and its nonsense.

  “Loud and clear, bow watch,” came Gabe’s crackling reply. “This is the bridge. Can I get a two-five on your niner, over.”

  “Roger, bridge,” I said. “Bridge, we are cleaning up the Pacific Ocean…by hand. Over.”

  Robin came forward to the bow to say hello. People liked to say hello when you were in the bow, not only because it was scenic and quiet but also because it was one of the few places where you could talk without being overheard.

  I told him I didn’t think our work was very useful.

  “It’s a joke!” he said, making a face. “The one thing is testing the ocean-current models. That’s the one thing that could be real.”