by Donovan Hohn
The author of the ad was Eben Punderson, then a high school English teacher who moonlighted as a journalist, now a lawyer in rural Vermont. On Thanksgiving Day 1992, a party of beachcombers strolling along Chichagof Island had discovered several dozen hollow plastic animals amid the usual wrack of bottle caps, fishing tackle, and driftwood deposited at the tide line by a recent storm. After ten months at sea, the ducks had whitened, and the beavers had yellowed, but the frogs were still green as ever, and the turtles, still blue.
Now that summer had returned, the beachcombers were out in force, and on the windward side of Chichagof, as on other islands in the vicinity of Sitka, they found toys, hundreds of them—frogs half-buried under pebbles, beavers poised atop driftwood, turtles tangled in derelict fishing nets, ducks blown past the tide line into the purple fireweed. Beachcombing in the Alaskan wilderness had suddenly come to resemble an Easter egg hunt. A party game for children. Four animals, each one a different color, delivered as if supernaturally by the waves: collect them all!
Laurie Lee of South Baranof Island filled an unused skiff with the hoard of toys she scavenged. Signe Wilson filled a hot tub. Betsy Knudson had so many to spare she started giving them to her dog. It appeared that even the wild animals of Sitka Sound were collecting them: one toy had been plucked from a river otter’s nest. On a single beachcombing excursion with friends, Mary Stensvold, a botanist with the Tongass National Forest who normally spent her days hunting rare specimens of liverwort, gathered forty of the animals. Word of the invasion spread. Dozens of correspondents answered the Sentinel’s ad. Toys had been found as far north as Kayak Island, as far south as Coronation Island, a range extending hundreds of miles. Where had they come from?
Eben Punderson was pretty sure he knew. Three years earlier, in May of 1990, an eastbound freighter, the Hansa Carrier, had collided with a storm five hundred miles south of the Alaskan Peninsula. Several containers had gone overboard, including a shipment of eighty thousand Nikes. Five months later, sneakers began washing up along Vancouver Island. The story had received national attention after a pair of oceanographers in Seattle—James Ingraham of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a scientist with a private consulting firm that assessed the environmental risks and impacts of engineering projects (sewage outflows, oil rigs)—turned the sneaker spill into an accidental oceanographic experiment. By feeding coordinates collected from beachcombers into NOAA’s Ocean Surface Current Simulator, or OSCURS, a computer modeling system built from a century’s worth of U.S. Navy weather data, Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham had reconstructed the drift routes of some two hundred shoes. In the process, the basement of Ebbesmeyer’s bungalow had become the central intelligence agency of what would eventually grow into a global network of coastal informants. If anyone knew anything about the plague of plastic animals, it would be Ebbesmeyer, but when the Sentinel’s moonlighting reporter contacted him in the summer of 1993, it was the first the oceanographer had heard of the toys.
Punderson still had another lead. The ducks—and for some reason only the ducks—had been embossed with the logo of their manufacturer, The First Years. A local toy store was unable to find the logo in its merchandise catalogs, but the director of the Sheldon Jackson College library traced the brand back to its parent company, Kiddie Products, based in Avon, Massachusetts. Punderson spoke to the company’s marketing manager, who somewhat reluctantly confirmed the reporter’s speculations. Yes, indeed, a shipment of Floatees had been lost at sea. “Solved: Mystery of the Wandering Bathtub Toys,” ran the lead headline in the Sentinel’s Weekend section a month after Punderson’s ad first appeared. And that is where the story should have ended—as an entertaining anecdote in the back pages of a provincial newspaper. Mystery solved. Case closed. But then something else unexpected happened. The story kept going.
The story kept going in part because Ebbesmeyer and his beachcombers joined the hunt, in part because the toys themselves kept going. Years later, new specimens and new mysteries were still turning up. In the autumn of 1993, Floatees suddenly began sprinkling the shores of Shemya, a tiny Aleutian island that lies about 1,500 miles closer to Siberia than to Sitka, not far from the site of the spill. In 1995, beachcombers in Washington State found a blue turtle and a sun-bleached duck. Dean and Tyler Orbison, a father-son beachcombing team who annually scour uninhabited islands along the Alaskan coast, added more toys to their growing collection every summer—dozens in 1992, three in 1993, twenty-five in 1994, until, in 1995, they found none. The slump continued in 1996, and the Orbisons assumed they’d seen the last of the plastic animals. Then, in 1997, the toys suddenly returned in large numbers.
Thousands more were yet to be accounted for. Where had they gone? Into the Arctic? Around the globe? Were they still out there, traveling the currents of the North Pacific? Or did they lie buried under wrack and sand along Alaska’s wild, sparsely populated shores? Or, succumbing to the elements—freezing temperatures, the endless battering of the waves, prolonged exposure to the sun—had they cracked, filled with water, gone under? All 28,800 toys had emerged from that sinking container into the same acre of water. Each member of the four species was all but identical to the others—each duck was just as light as the other ducks, each frog as thick as the other frogs, each beaver as aerodynamic as the next. And yet one turtle had ended up in Signe Wilson’s hot tub, another in the jaws of Betsy Knudson’s Labrador, another in an otter’s nest, while a fourth had floated almost all the way to Russia, and a fifth traveled south of Puget Sound. Why? What tangled calculus of causes and effects could explain—or predict—such disparate fates?
There were still other reasons why the story of the toys kept going, reasons that had nothing to do with oceanography and everything to do with the human imagination, which can be as powerful and as inscrutable as the sea. In making sense of chaotic data, in following a slightly tangled thread of narrative to its source, Eben Punderson had set the plastic animals adrift all over again—not upon the waters of the North Pacific, but upon currents of information. The Associated Press picked up the Daily Sitka Sentinel’s story and far more swiftly than the ocean currents carried the castaway toys around the globe.
The Floatees made brief appearances in the Guardian and the New York Times Magazine, and a considerably longer appearance in the Smithsonian. Like migrating salmon, they returned almost seasonally to the pages of Scholastic News, the magazine for kids, which has reported on the story seven times. They were spotted in the shallows of People and MSNBC, and in the tide pools of All Things Considered. They swirled through the sewers of the Internet and bobbed up in such exotic lagoons as a newsletter for the collectors of duck-themed stamps, an oceanography textbook for undergraduates, and a trade magazine for the builders of swimming pools.
These travels wrought strange changes. Dishwasher safe the toys may have been, but news-media safe they were not. By the time they drifted into my own imagination late one winter night several years ago, the plastic animals that had fallen into the Pacific in 1992 were scarcely recognizable. For one thing, the plastic had turned into rubber. For another thing, the beavers, frogs, and turtles had all turned into ducks. The day Eben Punderson published an unusual ad in the pages of the Sitka Sentinel a metamorphosis had begun, the metamorphosis of happenstance into narrative and narrative into fable—the Fable of the Rubber Ducks Lost at Sea.
Far across the ocean, in a toy factory made of red brick, a pinkly Caucasian woman in a brick-red dress and a racially ambiguous brown man in a sky-blue shirt work side by side at an assembly line. From a gray machine, yellow-billed and lacking irises in the whites of their eyes, rubber ducks emerge, one by one, onto a conveyor belt. Chuckedy-chuckedy-chuck goes the rubber duck machine. As the ducks roll past, the woman in the brick-red dress paints their bills brick red with a little brush. The man in the sky-blue shirt paints their irises sky blue. It is beautiful, this unnamed country across the sea. Green grass grows around the factory. A
grass-green truck carries the ducks to a waiting ship named the Bobbie. Away the Bobbie chugs, carrying five cardboard boxes across a blue-green sea, a white streamer of smoke trailing behind it. Smiling overhead is an enormous sun the color of a rubber duck. Then a storm blows up. Waves leap. The Bobbie tosses about. The white-bearded captain cries and throws his hands out a porthole. Down goes a cardboard box. Ducks spill like candy from a piñata. Slowly, they drift apart. One frolics with a spotted dolphin. A second receives a come-hither look from a blueberry seal in a lime-green sea. A polar bear standing on an ice floe ogles a third. And so their journeys go, each duck encountering a different picturesque animal—a flamingo, a pelican, a sea turtle, an octopus, a gull, a whale. Finally, who should the tenth rubber duck meet but a brood of real ducks. “Quack!” says the mother duck. “Quack! Quack! Quack!” say the ducklings. “Squeak,” says the rubber duck. So ends Eric Carle’s Ten Little Rubber Ducks.
Carle’s picture book was, perhaps inevitably, inspired by one of the many newspaper articles that appeared after Ebbesmeyer put the beachcombers of New England on alert. Having crossed the Arctic, having drifted south on the Labrador Current, along the wild coast of Newfoundland, past Nova Scotia and the Grand Banks, some of the Floatees would reach the Eastern Seaboard of the United States in the summer of 2003, the clairvoyant oceanographer predicted. A savvy publicist at The First Years, smelling a marketing opportunity, sent out a press release advertising a bounty: Kiddie Products would give a U.S. savings bond worth $100 to any beachcomber who found one of the castaway toys on an East Coast beach. All along the coasts of Massachusetts and Maine, people began to hunt. There was, as there usually is, a catch—two catches, actually: (1) to claim the reward, the lucky beachcombers would have to surrender the evidence, and (2) Ebbesmeyer would have to confirm a positive match. As intended, the press release provoked a flurry of coverage. Once again, news organizations large and small recounted the “rubber duck saga,” as the Montreal Gazette dubbed it that summer.
A scrap of the article that Carle happened on, torn from an uncredited source, accompanies his author’s note:RUBBER DUCKS LOST AT SEA
In 1992, a shipment of 29,000 rubber bathtub toys including ducks, beavers, turtles and frogs, fell overboard from a container ship.
Some of these rubber toys have washed up on the shores of Alaska, while others have made their way through the Bering Strait, past icebergs, around the northern coast of Greenland and into the Atlantic Ocean.
“I could not resist making a story out of this newspaper report,” Carle’s note explains. “I hope you like my story.” Beautifully illustrated with Carle’s signature mix of paint and paper tearings, Ten Little Rubber Ducks is hard not to like. Studies have shown that the primary colors, smiling faces, and cute animals in which Carle’s book abounds—and of which the rubber duck may well be the consummate embodiment—have the almost narcotic power to induce feelings of happiness in the human brain. The metamorphosis that had begun in the pages of the Daily Sitka Sentinel was complete: in Carle, the fable had finally found its Aesop.
It’s easy to see why Carle found the story irresistible. It was an incredible story, a fabulous story; the sort of head-shaking, who’d-a-thunk anecdote suited to an entry in Ripley’s Believe It or Not, perhaps, or to cocktail party banter, or to a lighthearted closing segment on the evening news, or most of all to a picture book for children.
Visit the kids section of your local public library and you’ll find dozens or possibly even hundreds of stories about inanimate objects that come magically to life or go on incredible journeys. Such stories are so common, in fact, that they constitute a genre—the “it-narrative,” literary scholars have called it. Think of Pinocchio. Or The Velveteen Rabbit. Or Winnie-the-Pooh. Or the improbable eighteenth-century bestseller The Adventures of a Pincushion. The it-narrative that the legend of the castaway ducks most resembles surely must be Holling Clancy Holling’s Paddle-to-the-Sea, the 1941 Caldecott winner in which a boy in the Canadian wilderness carves a wooden Indian man in a wooden canoe, carries his creation up a nearby mountain, and sets it atop a bank of snow. “The Sun Spirit will look down at the snow,” the boy says. “The snow will melt and the water will run downhill to the river, on down to the Great Lakes, down again and on at last to the sea. You will go with the water and you will have adventures that I would like to have.”
What distinguishes Paddle-to-the-Sea from most other it-narratives is its painstaking realism—realism so painstaking that the book feels like nonfiction. Carle, by contrast, has always preferred allegory to realism. Think of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, his best-known book, the protagonist of which, a glutinous larva with eyes like lemon-lime lollipops, is an entomological embodiment of childish appetites. He’s born on a Sunday, binges for a week, and then the following Sunday nibbles contritely on a leaf, in reward for which penance, he pupates, abracadabra, into a butterfly, an angelic butterfly. It’s a Christian allegory with which any American child can identify, an allegory about conspicuous consumption: The Prodigal Caterpillar, Carle might have called that book, or The Caterpillar’s Progress.
In Ten Little Rubber Ducks, on the other hand, there are no choices, no consequences. There is only chance. The human imagination is by nature animistic. It can even bring a pincushion to life. But Carle’s ten identical rubber ducks remain inanimate—psychologically empty, devoid of distinguishing characteristics, appetite, emotion, or charm. Carried along by ocean currents rather than by the lineaments of desire, they drift passively about, facial expressions never changing.
BIG POPPA
A few months before Carle’s book hit bookstore shelves, I likewise happened on the legend of the rubber ducks lost at sea, not in a newspaper report but in an essay by one of my students. Late one night, after my wife, Beth, had gone to sleep, when few windows remained lit in the building across the street, I stayed up as usual to grade papers. Mostly I taught the sorts of poems and novels and plays typically prescribed to American teenagers as remedies for short attention spans and atrophied vocabularies—Hamlet, for instance, or Their Eyes Were Watching God, or Leaves of Grass. And mostly the papers I graded were the sorts of essays English teachers typically ask American teenagers to write—five or six paragraphs on the role of prophecy in Macbeth or the motif of walls in “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” that sort of thing. But every spring I also taught a journalism course.
One of my favorite assignments I’d devised asked students to practice what James Agee called the archaeology of the ordinary. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, of the overalls that Depression-era sharecroppers wore, Agee writes, “I saw no two which did not hold some world of exquisiteness of its own.” Everywhere Agee went during his Alabaman travels, he found exquisite worlds, doing for the material lives of sharecroppers what Thoreau did for Walden Pond, or Melville for whaling. If like Agee my students could learn to study a thing—any particular thing—“almost illimitably long,” as Agee recommended, they too might begin to perceive “the cruel radiance of what is” rather than the narcotic shimmer of what isn’t. Or so my hopeful thinking went.
One year one student chose to write about a venerable brand of shoe polish, discovering therein the lost world of the New York City shoe-shine boy, who in most instances wasn’t a boy at all. Another chose a taxidermy crocodile. Another a charm bracelet her mother had given her. Another a baseball he’d caught in the stands of Yankee Stadium. This last student had studied his subject matter so illimitably he’d sawed the damn thing in half. And one student, a pudgy, myopic kid who’d given himself the nickname “Big Poppa,” chose to write about the rubber duckie he carried around in his pocket for good luck. Luck Duck, he called it. It was his mojo, his talisman, his totem, his charm.
I myself was a struggling, part-time archaeologist of the ordinary. Like Professor Indiana Jones—or so I sometimes fancied—I lived a double life. Summers, after classes had ended, on a magazine assignment, I would hang up my olive-green corduroy blazer with the torn lini
ng and the baggy pockets full of chalk nubbins, pull on my hiking boots, pick up my notebook and voice recorder, and head off in search of exquisite worlds. The worlds I tended to seek and find were those on the borderlands between the natural and the man-made, the civilized and the wild. I liked such borderlands because within them interesting questions and contradictions tended to flourish, like wildflowers on a vacant city lot. I also liked them because I have since childhood found natural history more enchanting than nature, whatever that was. I’ve never heard the howl of a wolf or felt a strong desire to answer its wild call, but I have often found myself entranced before the diorama at the American Museum of Natural History in which taxidermy wolves, though suspended from wires, appear to be racing over the Alaskan tundra under a black-light moon, leaving footprints in the plaster-of-paris snow.
More than most of the students at the private Quaker school in Manhattan where I taught, Big Poppa could have used a little luck. The only child of divorced parents, he was forever shuttling back and forth between his mom’s apartment and his father’s studio, leaving behind a trail of unfinished homework and misplaced books. His backpack was an experiment in chaos. When he was supposed to be studying, he instead stayed up all night playing fantasy sports games on the Internet. He loved playing real sports too, baseball especially, and he was by reputation a good infielder, and the team’s best batter, but he was chronically late to class, and his attendance record was so poor that midway through the baseball season during the spring of his senior year, he had to be temporarily benched, per school policy. Most of his classmates were Yankee fans, whereas Big Poppa rooted avidly, hopelessly, for the underdog Mets, whose paraphernalia constituted a large portion of his wardrobe.
