by Donovan Hohn
The toys, Ebbesmeyer concluded, could survive a voyage through the ice. Once beset, they would creep along at a rate of a mile or so per day. How long would it take them to reach the Atlantic? That was hard to say, impossible to say, perhaps. It depends which route they took. Data from other drift experiments, both intentional and disastrous, suggest that flotsam can cross the Arctic in three years, or in six years, or eight, or ten, or more.
Gazing into the indeterminate mists of his climatological crystal ball, Ebbesmeyer nevertheless hazarded an augury, one in which he’d had enough confidence, back in 2003, to put the beachcombers of New England on alert: seven or eight years after the day or night they fell overboard, five or six years after entering the ice pack, some of the toys would escape through Fram Strait and find themselves abob again, this time among icebergs and melting floes. In the North Atlantic some would catch an offshoot of the Gulf Stream and ride it to Northern Europe. Those that strayed west into the Labrador Current would begin the long, two-thousand-mile journey south toward Kennebunkport.
Before flying to Seattle, I’d made a day trip to Maine to visit that beachcombing couple who thought they’d seen a Floatee. Bethe Hagens and her boyfriend Waynn Welton—drawn to each other, perhaps, by the unusual spellings of their first names—had taken me to the southeast end of Gooch’s Beach, the scene of their discovery. On that afternoon in 2003, the sun had been shining and the tide had been out. There had been sailboats on the blue water. The day I visited, by contrast, was damp and drizzly. The tide was at full flood. All that remained between the stone seawall and the surf was a narrow runner of sand. A lit Marlboro in one hand and his sandals in the other, rain beading on the lenses of his glasses and in his beard, Waynn Welton strode knee-deep into the sea and sloshed around until, phantasmal in the drizzle, he found what he’d gone wading for. “It was right there!” he hollered, a wave darkening the hem of his shorts. “Right around where that sippy cup is!” I followed his pointed finger. Where at low tide one sunny afternoon a duck—maybe yellow, maybe white—had perched atop the seaweed, a blue sippy cup with a pink lid now floated alone inside a corral of rocks. A wave came in and the cup rolled and bumped around.
I’d assumed that Ebbesmeyer shared my doubts about Hagens and Welton’s alleged discovery. The question marks he’d printed on his map suggested as much. Now, however, he told me that there was “no question” in his mind that the couple had indeed seen one of the 7,200 ducks lost at sea. Hagens was a trained anthropologist, after all, with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He drew a courtroom analogy: “It’s sort of like, you have an accident at a stoplight. What did you see? Well, there are some good observers and there are some bad observers. Somebody who details what they saw precisely, the jury will listen to that.” Besides, Hagens wasn’t his only eyewitness. He’d received one other credible report, from “a lady in Scotland” who’d happened on a frog: “Again she didn’t pick it up. I said, ‘What did it look like?’ She said, ‘Well, it was kind of buried in the sand.’ I sent her a picture, and she said, ‘That’s it.’ ”
Hagens had described her duck after hearing Ebbesmeyer describe one on the radio; instead of asking his witness in Scotland to pick her partially buried frog from a lineup of frogs, Ebbesmeyer had sent her a mug shot of the suspect. Objection! I thought, but didn’t say. Who was I to accuse the learned oceanographer of leading a witness? Of confabulating facts? Of making believe? Besides, like him, like the subscribers to Beachcomber’s Alert! and to newspapers and magazines the world over, like Eric Carle and his juvenile readers, like Bethe Hagens and Waynn Welton and Big Poppa, I wanted to believe.
Although his library of shoes may suggest otherwise, Ebbesmeyer has not amassed a museum of flotsam in his basement. He collects stories and data, not things. Fat three-ring binders occupy most of the shelf space. They contain “a small portion” of the studies he has conducted over the years. Reading the handwritten labels masking-taped to their spines, I wondered how many of these studies had scientific value and how many were merely the glorified puzzles with which the heavyset Dr. E. had desperately occupied his mind.
I saw binders labeled “Fishing Floats” and “Vikings,” “Phytoplankton” and “Drifting Coffins,” “Eddies” and “Icebergs.” Beside a paperback copy of The Egyptian Book of the Dead was an entire binder devoted to Isis and Osiris, the star-crossed Egyptian gods. Ebbesmeyer told me the tragic ending of their tale: “Osiris’s brother killed him, put his body in a coffin, put the coffin in the Nile River, and it washed up three hundred miles to the north of Lebanon. His wife, Isis, went to find it, and she did. That’s the first documented drift of an object between point A and point B that I know of.” It was self-evident to me why oil companies had commissioned Ebbesmeyer to study the eddies swirling unpredictably through the Gulf of Mexico, knocking oil rigs from their moorings, and I knew that peer-reviewed oceanographic journals had published his studies of flotsam. But Isis and Osiris seemed more like armchair archaeology than hard science.
Ebbesmeyer must have sensed my doubts, or else he’d heard them from other skeptics before. In the backyard, seated on the patio, where a string of rubber duckie Christmas lights festooned a grape arbor and wind chimes made mournful noises on the breeze, he waxed ecclesiastical. “There’s nothing new around,” he said. Take Osiris. Even today, when the Nile floods, flotsam follows that same route. Not even pollution is new. He told me to think of volcanic eruptions, of the tons of pumice and toxic ash an eruption throws into the sea. No, when you studied the history of flotsam long enough you realized that only one thing was fundamentally different about the ocean now, only one thing since the time of the ancient Egyptians had changed. He took a sip of coffee from his mug, which was decorated with a painting of a cat. “See, pumice will absorb water and sink,” he said. “But 60 percent of plastic will float, and the 60 percent that does float will never sink because it doesn’t absorb water; it fractures into ever smaller pieces. That’s the difference. There are things afloat now that will never sink.”
Ebbesmeyer went inside and returned a moment later carrying what at first glance appeared to be exotic produce—a new, flatter variety of plantain or summer squash, perhaps. He spread these yellowy lozenges out on the patio table. “Remnants of high-seas drift-net floats,” he said. There were four of them, in varying stages of decay. The best-preserved specimens had the hard sheen of polished bone. The worst was pocked and textured like a desiccated sponge that had been attacked with a chisel. Ebbesmeyer picked the latter float up. “This is a pretty cool old one,” he said. By “cool,” he meant that it told the story of drift-net floats particularly well.
“High-seas drift nets were banned by the United Nations in 1992,” his version of this story began. “They were nets with a mesh size of about four inches, but they were, like, fifty miles long. The Japanese would sit there and interweave these for fifty miles. There were something like a thousand drift nets being used every night in the 1980s, and if you do the math they were filtering all the water in the upper fifty feet every year. Well, they were catching all the large animals, and it clearly could not go on.”
(I’d heard this part before. As a kid, I’d made my parents buy certified catch-free tuna after reading about how dolphins would get tangled in the nets and drown. The idea of dolphins drowning—dolphins, which spent most of their time swimming around with curvy little smiles on their faces—had made a big impression on me. But then lots of things made big impressions on me as a kid: bloody harp seal pups; the scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where something you can’t see tugs the little boy out the doggy door; a picture in a book of a saber-toothed tiger thrashing in vain as it sank into the La Brea tar; the biography of the psychopathic Reverend Jim Jones that I for possibly worrisome reasons chose to write a book report about when I was twelve, reading therein that in his youth Jones had cut the leg off one chicken and stapled it onto another. My mind was like the moon, cratered with all the big impressions things ha
d made.)
According to Ebbesmeyer, those high-seas drift nets had not gone away, and not only because pirate drift netting still takes place. Before the ban, fishermen had lost about half their nets every year, and because the nets are made of nylon, which can last at sea for as long as half a century, those lost nets were still out there, still fishing. “Ghost nets,” they’re called.
When he tells stories like these, Ebbesmeyer will sometimes pause dramatically, or whisper dramatically, or punctuate particularly astonishing facts with his eyebrows. He’ll say something like, “What happens is, the nets keep catching animals, and then the animals die, and then after a while, the nets get old, and they roll up on a coral reef, and the waves roll it along”—he pauses, leans forward, continues in a stage whisper—“like a big avalanche ball, killing everything in its path.” Then his bushy white eyebrows will spring up above his glasses and stay there while he looks at you, wide-eyed with autodumbfoundment.
And killer drift-net balls are genuinely dumbfounding, like something from a B horror movie—so dumbfounding that, smelling a hyperbole, I later checked Ebbesmeyer’s facts. A ghost net may not kill everything that crosses its path, but it sure can kill a lot. News reports describe nets dripping with putrefying wildlife. Just three months before I showed up on Ebbesmeyer’s doorstep, NOAA scientists scanning the ocean with a digital imaging system from the air had spotted a flock of a hundred or so ghost nets drifting through the North Pacific Garbage Patch. When they returned to fetch them, they found balls of net measuring thirty feet across. “There is a lot more trash out there than I expected,” one of the researchers, James Churnside, told the Associated Press. A few years earlier, Coast Guard divers had spent a month picking 25.5 tons of netting and debris—including two four-thousand-pound, fifteen-mile-long high-seas drift nets—out of reefs around Lisianski Island in the Northwestern Hawaiian Archipelago. They estimated that there were six thousand more tons of netting and debris still tangled in the reefs when they left.
In Ebbesmeyer’s opinion ghost nets may pose a still greater danger once they disintegrate. While we were conversing on his patio, he handed me the oldest of the drift-net floats. “Hold this a minute,” he said. It weighed almost nothing. “Now put it down and look.” On the palm of my hand, the float had left a sprinkling of yellow dust, plastic particles as small as pollen grains in which, Ebbesmeyer believed, the destiny of both the Floatees and of the ocean could be read.
Sitting on his patio, I mentioned to Ebbesmeyer my dream of following the trail of the toys from beginning to end.
“It’s an expensive thing to do the kind of traveling you want,” he said.
I told him I’d travel on a shoestring, roughing it, freeloading, hitchhiking, crewing on boats, whatever. I was convinced it could be done. Perhaps a shipping line would let me earn my passage to China as a cabin boy. Perhaps a magazine would send me to the Arctic on assignment.
Still skeptical, Ebbesmeyer nevertheless gave me a lead. “Probably you’ll want to go with Charlie out on his boat,” he said.
Charlie was Charles Moore, captain of a fifty-one-foot catamaran, the oceanographic research vessel Alguita. In August of 1997, after competing in the Transpac, an annual Los Angeles-to-Hawaii sailboat race, Moore had for no particular reason motored north into the Subtropical Convergence Zone, known to sailors as the doldrums. In a 2003 article for Natural History magazine, Moore described what he discovered during his detour. Approximately eight hundred miles from California, the wind speed fell below ten knots, the water turned glassy calm, and drifts of garbage began to appear. “As I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean,” Moore wrote, “I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic. It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments.”
A year later, Moore, a furniture repairman turned organic farmer turned charter boat captain turned self-trained oceanographer, turned himself into a plastic hunter, sailing back out to the Subtropical Convergence Zone, this time equipped with a trawl net and a volunteer crew. They began collecting water samples from the eastern edge of the Subtropical Gyre, trawling along a 564-mile loop encompassing exactly one million square miles of ocean. The larger items that Moore and his crew retrieved included polypropylene fishing nets, “a drum of hazardous chemicals,” a volleyball “half-covered in barnacles,” a cathode-ray television tube, and a gallon bleach bottle “that was so brittle it crumbled in our hands.” Most of the debris that Moore found had already disintegrated. Every time he lowered his net he caught in its fine mesh “a rich broth of minute sea creatures mixed with hundreds of colored plastic fragments.”
Moore didn’t discover this “plastic-plankton soup,” as he called it; since before Jules Verne invented Captain Nemo, oceanographers have known that convergence zones collect debris, and since the 1960s they’ve been worried about the persistence of “pelagic plastic,” which they’ve found in all the oceans of the world, including the Arctic. What Moore did discover were greater quantities of pelagic plastic than anyone suspected were out there. In 2001, he published a paper about his research in a scientific journal called the Marine Pollution Bulletin. The undramatic title, “A Comparison of Plastic and Plankton in the North Pacific Central Gyre,” belied its dramatic findings. The total dry weight of plastic Moore’s samples contained—424 grams—was six times greater than the total dry weight of plankton and half again as much as any similar study had previously found. Moore and his coauthors proposed two hypotheses to explain these results: either the concentrations of plastic in this part of the ocean are aberrantly high, or else “the amount of plastic material in the ocean is increasing over time.” Subsequent research has shown that both hypotheses are likely correct: the amount of plastic material in the ocean is increasing, in convergence zones especially.
Out on his front lawn, as I was leaving, I asked the heavyset Dr. E. what he thought of Ten Little Rubber Ducks. Despite the ominous future he’d augured in that handful of plastic dust, he thought Carle’s cheerful picture book was “delightful,” and he hoped that it would “make the ocean fun to kids.” He did have one criticism. He couldn’t figure out why Carle along with just about everyone else seemed compelled to turn the four Floatees into rubber ducks. Coverage of the story in newspapers and magazines almost always showed a picture of a solitary rubber duck, and usually not even the right kind of duck. What was wrong with the three other animals? “Maybe it’s a kind of bigotry,” Ebbesmeyer speculated. “Speciesism.”
Ebbesmeyer loaned me a set of the toys that had survived his experiments, to be returned when I was done with them. I have been carrying them around with me ever since, and they are at present perched before me on my desk as I write. Monochromatic and polygonal in a Bauhaus sort of way, they bear little resemblance to the rubber ducks in Carle’s book or, for that matter, to any other toy animal I’ve seen. Though blow-molded out of a rigid plastic (low-density polyethylene, I would eventually learn), they look whittled from wax by some tribal artisan.
The frog’s four-fingered hands (the left smaller than the right) seem folded in prayer. The limbs of the turtle are triangular stubs, its shell a domed puzzle of hexagons and pentagons. The duck’s head, too large for the flat-bottomed puck of a body it sits on, is imperfectly spherical, the flat plane of its beak continuing like a crew-cut mohawk over the top of the skull. Poke an axle through the duck’s puffed cheeks and its head would make a good wheel. Wildly out of scale and dyed a lurid, maraschino red, the beaver seems altogether out of place in this menagerie, a mammalian interloper from somebody’s acid trip. A seam left by the split mold bisects all four animals asymmetrically, and there’s a little anal button of scarred plastic where the blow pin, that steel umbilicus, withdrew.
CUTE NEIGHBORS
“Why do precisely these obje
cts we behold make a world?” Thoreau wonders in Walden. “Why has man just these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this crevice?” Since Thoreau’s time ecologists have explained why that mouse filled that crevice, and since then Walden Woods has grown far less bewildering. For Thoreau the distinction between the natural world and the man-made one matters less than that between the subjective experience within and the objective world without. For him, both rocks and mice are objects that he perceives as shadows flickering on the walls of his mind. For him, anthropomorphism is inescapable. All animals, he writes, are “beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts.”
The word synthetic in its current sense of “chemically unnatural” would not appear in print until 1874, twenty years after the publication of Walden and three years after the invention of celluloid, the first industrial synthetic polymer. In its 140-year history, the synthetic world has itself grown into a kind of wilderness. With the exceptions of our fellow human beings and our domestic pets, the objects that make the worlds we behold today are almost entirely man-made.
Consider the following: In nature, there are 142 known species of Anseriformes, the order to which ducks, swans, and geese belong. Of those species only one, the white Pekin duck, a domesticated breed of mallard, produces spotless yellow ducklings. Since the invention of plastic, four known species of Anseriformes have gone extinct; several others survive only in sanctuaries created to save them. Meanwhile, by the estimates of an American sociologist of Chinese descent named Charlotte Lee, who owns the largest duckie collection in the world, the makers of novelties and toys have concocted around ten thousand varieties of rubber duck, nearly all of which are yellow, and most of which are not made in fact from rubber, nor like the Floatees from polyethylene, but from plasticized polyvinyl chloride, a derivative of coal. Why has man just these species of things for his neighbors, a latter-day Thoreau might ask; as if nothing but a yellow duck could perch on the rim of a tub?
