Moby-Duck

by Donovan Hohn

  A class clown of the masochistic rather than the sadistic variety, he liked to amuse his peers at his own expense—for instance, by announcing one day that he wished henceforth to be known by the nickname Big Poppa (a self-deprecating reference to the babyish pudge that was for him a source of shame, but also to the rapper Notorious B.I.G., a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, a.k.a. Big Poppa); or, for instance, by rooting too avidly for the Mets; or by arriving late to class prematurely suited up in his baseball uniform (the cleats, the red stirrups, the white tights), fielding imaginary grounders and swinging at imaginary pitches as he crossed the room, before dropping himself into a chair, looking about at his smirking classmates, and inquiring, with an interrogative shrug, “What?” He’d once asked a French teacher for permission to go home sick because he’d eaten “a bad knish.” It had become an inside joke. “What’sa matter?” his friends liked to ask him. “Bad knish?”

  He could also be poignantly emotional. He felt strongly about bicycle helmets and upbraided teachers who biked to school without them. The degradation of the environment upset him, sometimes almost to tears. Once, when another of my students discarded her water bottle in the trash can, Big Poppa made a great fuss, rescuing it and depositing it in a recycling bin intended—the bottle’s owner wryly observed—for paper products only.

  He dreamed of becoming a sportswriter someday, and I, faculty adviser to the student newspaper, had encouraged him in this dream. I encouraged him because he could turn a phrase and because when it came to baseball, he knew his stuff, and because I sympathized with him (I, too, had been a pudgy, myopic, late-to-pubesce child of divorce), but also because Big Poppa was charming, and bright, and kind—just a little rudderless, a little juvenile, a little lost. Old enough to carry a rifle in Afghanistan or Iraq, he instead carried a rubber duckie for good luck. Earlier that winter, during a snowball fight in a classmate’s backyard, his glasses had disappeared into a snowdrift. This wasn’t the first time they’d gone missing. Afraid to ask his parents to buy a new pair, he’d decided to wait for the snow to melt and his glasses to resurface, which they eventually did. In the meantime, he’d spent three weeks stumbling through the halls, his face contorted into a squint. He lost Luck Duck for a while too, and the loss inspired what appeared to be genuine distress.

  While researching his essay, Big Poppa had happened on a newspaper report, perhaps the very same one that Eric Carle had happened on. In a paragraph cataloging rubber duck trivia, he’d included a four-sentence synopsis—the container spill, the oceanographers in Seattle, the journey through the Arctic. The toys were supposed to have reached the coast of New England by the summer of 2003. It was now March 2005. Had they made it? Big Poppa didn’t say. Neither did he mention anything about beavers, turtles, or frogs.

  It was well after midnight by the time I finished marking his essay, and because I am prone to nocturnal flights of fancy, I sat there for a while at my desk thinking about those ducks. I tried to imagine their journey from beginning to end. I pictured the container falling—splash!—into the sea. I pictured the ducks afloat like yellow pixels on the vast, gray acreage of the waves, or skiing down the glassy slopes of fifty-foot swells, or coasting through the Arctic on floes of ice. I imagined standing on a beach somewhere in Newfoundland or Maine—places I had never visited or given much thought. I imagined looking out and seeing a thousand tiny nodding yellow faces, white triangles glinting in their cartoon eyes, insipid smiles molded into the orange rubber of their clownish bills. I imagined a bobbing armada so huge it stretched to the horizon, and possibly beyond. I imagined them washing ashore, littering the sand, a yellow tide of ducks.

  Getting ready for bed that night, I noticed anew the rubber ducks roosting on our bathroom shelf. For years they’d perched there, between a jar of cotton balls and a bottle of facial cleanser, two yellow ducks of the classic variety and one red duck with horns. I couldn’t remember when or why we’d acquired them. I picked one of the yellow ones up and gave it a squeeze. Air hissed from an abdominal hole. “Quack,” I said, and returned it to its shelf.

  At work the next day, I noticed as if for the first time the several yellow ducks of diminishing sizes processing single file across a colleague’s desk—gifts from students, she explained when I asked. I began seeing them everywhere. In the course of a single afternoon, I came upon a great, neon rubber duck aglow in the window of an Old Navy store and a mother-duckling pair afloat in the margins of a brochure on vaccinations that our health insurance provider sent. My wife and I that spring were, as the euphemism has it, “expecting,” and the baby outfitter where we’d registered for shower gifts—across the blue awning of which yet another duck swam, a pacifier abob like a fishing float beside it—appeared to be the epicenter of this avian plague. In addition to rubber ducks themselves, the store sold yellow towels and sweatshirts with orange bills for hoods, yellow rubber rain boots with beaks for toes, yellow pajamas with orange, webbed feet. There was the Diaper Duck, a duck-shaped dispenser of odor-proof trash bags, as well as numerous other implements—brushes, soap dishes, etc.—that incorporated the likeness and the yellowness of the duck.

  Elsewhere, in drugstores and catalogs and the bathrooms of friends, I spotted exotic varieties in which strange, often ironical mutations had occurred—momma ducks with ducklings nested on their backs; black ducks, sparkly ducks, ducks with the face of Moses or Allen Iverson or Betty Boop; ducks sporting sunglasses or eyelashes or lipstick or black leather; ducks playing golf. Every powerful icon invites both idolatry and iconoclasm, and in the bestiary of American childhood, there is now no creature more iconic than the rubber duck. The more I thought about its golden, graven image, the more it seemed to me a kind of animistic god—but of what? Of happiness? Of nostalgia? Of innocence never lost?

  THE MAP

  “So,” I asked the retired oceanographer when I reached him at his Seattle home, “did any of the toys make it through the Arctic?” I had by then read every article about the incredible journey I could find. As of October 2003, according to the news archives, not one of the 28,800 castaway toys had been discovered on the Atlantic Seaboard, not one savings bond had been handed out. Bounty-hunting beachcombers had found plenty of toy ducks, just not of the right species. After October 2003 the news archives fell silent.

  Oh, yes, Curtis Ebbesmeyer assured me, yes, they’d made it. Right on schedule, in the summer of 2003, he’d received a highly credible eyewitness report from an anthropologist in Maine, which he’d published in his quarterly newsletter, Beachcombers’ Alert! He promised to send me a copy. But before we hung up he dangled before my ears a tantalizing lure: if I really wanted to learn about things that float, then I should join him in Sitka that July. “You can’t go beachcombing by phone,” he said. “You have to get out there and look.”

  Since the summer of 2001, Sitka had played host to an annual Beachcombers’ Fair, over which Ebbesmeyer—part guru, part impresario—presided. Beachcombers would bring him things they’d scavenged from the sand, and Ebbesmeyer, like some scientific psychic, would illuminate these discoveries as best he could. “Everything has a story,” he likes to say. When a beachcomber presented Ebbesmeyer with flotsam of mysterious provenance, he’d investigate. At that year’s fair in Sitka, a local fisherman named Larry Calvin would be ferrying a select group of beachcombers to the wild shores of Kruzof Island, where some of the toys had washed up. Ebbesmeyer, who would be leading the expedition, offered me a spot aboard Calvin’s boat, the Morning Mist.

  Alaska—snowcapped mountains, icebergs, breaching whales, wild beaches strewn with yellow ducks. How could I say no? There was only one problem. The Beachcombers’ Fair ended July 24, and Beth’s due date was August 1, which was cutting it pretty close. I told Ebbesmeyer I’d get back to him.

  Soon thereafter an envelope with a Seattle postmark arrived. Inside, printed on blue paper, were a half-dozen issues of Ebbesmeyer’s newsletter, Beachcombers’ Alert! Thumbing through this digest of the miscellaneous and arc
ane was a bit like beachcombing amid the wreckage of a storm. Alongside stories about derelict vessels and messages in bottles, the oceanographer had arrayed a photographic scrapbook of strange, sea-battered oddities, natural and man-made—Japanese birch-bark fishing floats, the heart-shaped seed of a baobab tree, land mines, televisions, a torn wet suit, a 350-pound safe. Many of these artifacts had accumulated colonies of gooseneck barnacles. Some were so encrusted they seemed to be made of the creatures: a derelict skiff of barnacles, a hockey glove of barnacles.

  At the end of an article titled “Where the Toys Are,” Ebbesmeyer had published the letter from that anthropologist in Maine. Bethe Hagens was her name. “You won’t believe this,” she’d written after hearing about the castaway toys on NPR, “but two weeks ago, I found one of your ducks.” In fact, Ebbesmeyer had believed her, or wanted to. She hadn’t kept the evidence, so there was, she’d written, “no science, no proof. But they’re here!” Was there proof or wasn’t there? Were they here or weren’t they? Accompanying the article was a world map indicating where and when the toys had been recovered by beachcombers. Off the coast of Kennebunkport, Ebbesmeyer had printed a pair of question marks the size of barrier reefs.

  From a dusty bookshelf I fetched down our Atlas of the World, a neglected wedding gift, opened it to the Atlantic, and found Kennebunkport. Then I traced my finger out across the Gulf of Maine, around Newfoundland and Labrador and—flipping to the map of the Arctic—across Baffin Bay, westward past the pole, all the while pronouncing the unfamiliar syllables (Point Hope, Spitsbergen Bank) as if the names of these places could conjure up visions of their shores. What does the air smell like in the Arctic? I wondered. Can you hear the creeping progress of the ice?

  “The loss of fantasy is the price we have paid for precision,” I’d read late one night in an outdated Ocean Almanac, “and today we have navigation maps based on an accurate 1:1,000,000 scale of the entire world.” Surveying the colorful, oversize landscape of my atlas, a cartographic wonder made—its dust jacket boasted—from high-resolution satellite photographs and “sophisticated computer algorithms,” I was unconvinced; fantasy did not strike me as extinct, or remotely endangered. The ocean was far less fathomable to my generation of Americans than it was when Melville explored that “watery wilderness” a century and a half ago. Most of us were better acquainted with cloud tops than with waves. What our migrant ancestors thought of as the winds, we thought of as turbulence, and fastened our seat belts when the orange light came on. Gale force, hurricane force—encountering such terms we comprehended only that the weather was really, really bad, and in our minds replayed the special-effects sequences of disaster films or news footage of palm trees blown inside out like cheap umbrellas. In growing more precise, humanity’s knowledge had also grown more specialized, and more imaginary: unlike that of my unborn child, the seas of my consciousness teemed with images and symbols and half-remembered trivia as fabulous as those chimerical beasts cavorting at the edges of ancient charts. Not even satellite photographs and computer algorithms could burn away the mystifying fogs of ambient information and fantasy through which from birth I had sailed.

  Not long ago on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, the novelist Julia Glass worried that her fellow Americans, “impatient with flights of fancy,” had lost the ability to be carried away by the “illusory adventure” of fiction, preferring the tabloid titillation of the “so-called truth.” Perhaps, concluded Glass, “there is a growing consensus, however sad, that the wayward realm of make-believe belongs only to our children.” I’d reached different conclusions. Hadn’t we adults, like the imaginative preschoolers Glass admires, also been “encouraged ”—by our government, by advertisers, by the fabulists of the cable news—“to mingle fact with fiction”?

  “If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it to such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale.” So wrote Thoreau, and for a number of years I’d been inclined to agree with him. I’d been inclined to agree, but despite my experiments in the archaeology of the ordinary, I’d also been more inclined to be deluded than to steadily observe realities only. Ask me where plastic came from and I’d have pictured Day-Glo fluids bubbling in vats, or doing loop-the-loops through glass tubes curly as Krazy Straws. If you’d asked me how rubber ducks were made, I might well have pictured them emerging onto a conveyor belt—chuckedy-chuckedy-chuck —out of a gray machine.

  Looking at the face of my unborn daughter or son adrift on a sonogram screen, I hadn’t felt the sorts of emotions expecting parents are supposed to feel—joy, giddiness, pride, all that. Instead I’d felt a fatalistic conviction that either I or the world and probably both would let down that little big-headed alien wriggling around in those uterine grottoes. How safe and snug he or she looked in there. How peacefully oblivious, no doubts and vanities bubbling through his or her gray matter, no advertising jingles or licensed characters or boogeymen, no fantasies, not even dreams—at least none of the sort that would animate his or her postpartum inner life. It seemed cruel somehow, this conjuring act of incarnation, this impulse to summon out of one’s DNA a person who’d had no choice in the matter. I’d had a choice, and I’d enthusiastically chosen to become a father. Now that the deed was done, I found my own paternity difficult to believe in. I could no more imagine being somebody’s father than I could imagine performing the Eucharist or surgery.

  Truth be told, it wasn’t only my unborn child whom I was worried for. For months, a quote from one of Hawthorne’s letters had been bothering me. It came to mind at unexpected moments—during faculty meetings, or as I trudged home beneath the fruitless pear trees and proprietary brownstones of Greenwich Village, or browsed among aisles of Bugaboos and Gymborees at BuyBuy Baby. It had drifted there, upon my inward seas, like a message in a bottle, a warning cast overboard by a shipwrecked seafarer years ago: “When a man has taken upon himself to beget children,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to Sophia Peabody, his fiancée, in 1841, “he has no longer any right to a life of his own.”

  At the hospital, Beth hadn’t seemed to share my gloomy presentiments. Supine on the examination table beside me, gazing beatifically at the sonogram screen while a sullen West Indian nurse prodded her ballooning abdomen with a wand, Beth kept giving my hand little squeezes of motherly delight, squeezes that had the peculiar effect of making me gloomier still. Why? Guilt had something to do with it, no doubt. Self-loathing, perhaps. I think also that there exists a kind of chiaroscuro of the human heart whereby the light that another’s joy gives off, instead of shining brightly upon us, casts us more deeply into shadow.

  Riffling the pages of my atlas, I turned to the North Pacific, found the coordinates—44.7°N, 178.1°E—at which, on that January day or night in 1992, the toys became castaways, and marked the spot with a yellow shred of Post-it. How placid—how truly pacific—that vaguely triangular ocean seemed in the cartographer’s abstract rendering. Its waters were so transparent, as though the basin had been drained and its mountainous floor painted various shades of swimming-pool blue. Way over there, to the east, afloat on its green speck of land like a bug on a leaf, was Sitka. And way over there, huge as a continent, was China, where, odds were, someone in some factory was at that very moment bringing new rubber ducks into the world. It was then, as I studied my map, trying in vain to imagine the journey of the toys, that there swam into my mind the most bewitching question I know of—What if?

  What if I followed the trail of the toys wherever it led, from that factory in China, across the Pacific, into the Arctic? I wouldn’t be able to do it in a single summer. It would require many months, maybe an entire year. I might have to take a leave of absence, or quit teaching altogether. I wasn’t sure how or if I’d manage to get to all the places on my map, but perhaps that would be the point. The toys had gone adrift. I’d go adrift, too. The winds and currents would chart my course. Happenstance would be my travel agent. If nothing else, it would be a
n adventure, and adventures are hard to come by these days. And if I were lucky it might be a genuine voyage of discovery. Medieval Europeans divided the human lifetime into five ages, the first of which was known as the Age of Toys. It seemed to me that in twenty-first-century America, the Age of Toys never ends. Yes, stories fictional and otherwise can take us on illusory odysseys, but they can also take us on disillusory ones, and it was the latter sort of journey that I craved. It wasn’t that I wanted, like Cook and Amundsen and Vancouver and Bering and all those other dead explorers, to turn terra incognita into terra cognita, the world into a map. Quite the opposite. I wanted to turn a map into a world.

  THE FIRST CHASE

  One day Mr. Mallard decided he’d like to take a trip to see what the rest of the river was like, further on. So off he set.

  —Robert McCloskey, Make Way for Ducklings

  THE HEAVYSET DR. E.

  There are two ways to get to the insular city of Sitka—by air and by sea. In my dreams, I would have picked up the frayed end of that imaginary, ten-thousand-mile-long trail that led from Sitka to Kennebunkport and followed it backward, Theseus style, to its source—backward across the Gulf of Maine, backward through the Northwest Passage, that legendary waterway which the historian Pierre Berton has described as a “maze of drifting, misshapen bergs,” a “crystalline world of azure and emerald, indigo and alabaster—dazzling to the eye, disturbing to the soul,” a “glittering metropolis of moving ice.” To Lieutenant William Edward Parry of the Royal Navy, who captained the Alexander into the maze in 1818, the slabs of ice looked like the pillars of Stonehenge.

  By that summer, the summer of 2005, global warming had gone a long way toward turning Berton’s maze of bergs into the open shipping channel of which Victorian imperialists dreamed. The following September, climatologists would announce that the annual summer melt had reduced the floating ice cap to its smallest size in a century of record keeping. Nevertheless, a transarctic journey, even aboard an icebreaker, was out of the question if I wanted to make it to and from Sitka by the first of August.