by Donovan Hohn
Let’s draw a bath. Let’s set a rubber duck afloat. Look at it wobbling there. What misanthrope, what damp, drizzly November of a sourpuss, upon beholding a rubber duck afloat, does not feel a Crayola ray of sunshine brightening his gloomy heart? Graphically, the rubber duck’s closest relative is not a bird or a toy but the yellow happy face of Wal-Mart commercials. A rubber duck is in effect a happy face with a body and lips—which is what the beak of the rubber duck has become: great, lipsticky, bee-stung lips. Both the happy face and the rubber duck reduce facial expressions to a kind of pictogram. They are both emoticons. And they are, of course, the same color—the yellow of an egg yolk or the eye of a daisy, a shade darker than a yellow raincoat, a shade lighter than a taxicab.
Like the eyes of other prey (rabbits, for example, or deer) and unlike the eyes of a happy face, the rubber duck’s eyes peer helplessly from the sides of its spherical head. Its movement is also expressive—joyously erratic, like that of a bouncing ball, or a dancing drunk. So long, that is, as it doesn’t keel over and float around like a dead fish, as rubber ducks of recent manufacture are prone to do. It’s arguable whether such tipsy ducks deserve to be called toys. They have retained the form and lost the function. Their value is wholly symbolic. They are not so much rubber ducks as plastic representations of rubber ducks. They are creatures of the lab, chimeras synthesized from whimsy and desire in the petri dish of commerce.
Apologists for plastics will on occasion blur the semantic lines between the antonyms “synthetic” and “natural.” Everything is chemical, they rightly say, even water, even us, and plastic, like every living creature great and small, is carbon-based and therefore “organic.” But to my mind the only meaningful difference between the synthetic and the natural is more philosophical than chemical. A loon can symbolize madness or mystery, and a waddling duck can make us laugh. But the duck and the loon exist outside the meanings with which we burden them. A loon is not really mad or, so far as it’s concerned, mysterious. A duck is not really a clown; it waddles inelegantly because its body has evolved to dabble and dive and swim. A rubber duck, by comparison, is not burdened with thought. It is thought, the immaterial made material, a subjective object, a fantasy in 3-D.
INSIDE PASSAGE
One night, during the twenty-ninth week of her pregnancy, my wife and I attended a practicum in infant CPR. With the other expecting parents, we’d sat around a conference table set with babies—identical, life-size, polyethylene babies, lying there on the Formica like lobsters. The skin of these infantile mannequins was the color of graphite. Even their eyeballs were shiny and gray. Their mouths had been molded agape, so that they seemed to be gasping for air. To dislodge an imaginary choking hazard, you were supposed to lay the baby facedown over your left forearm and strike its back with the heel of your right hand. If you struck too hard, its hollow head would pop from its neck and go skittering across the linoleum. The morning after my visit with Ebbesmeyer, hurtling up the eastern shore of Puget Sound aboard the Amtrak Cascades bound for Bellingham, it occurs to me that “garbage patch” sounds like “cabbage patch,” and for a moment I am picturing a thousand silvery, gape-mouthed heads bobbing on the open sea.
The old woman across the aisle, a retired high school chemistry teacher from Montana, tells me that she and her husband are traveling the globe. All they do is travel. She loves every minute of it. They have been to every continent but Antarctica. She teaches me how to say, “I don’t have any money” in Norwegian. She tells me about the mural she saw in Belfast depicting a masked man and a Kalashnikov. She tells me about her grandson, who has in fact been to Antarctica. He spent a night dangling from the ice shelf in something like a hammock. National Geographic named him one of the top rock climbers in the world, she says. Then he died in an avalanche in Tibet. Left three little boys. She smiles as she says this. In the window behind her, the blue waters of Puget Sound flash through the green blur of trees.
A few seats away, facing me, riding backward, there’s a young couple dressed in matching khaki shorts. She is holding an infant. He has a toddler in his lap. A bubble balloons from the toddler’s right nostril and pops. She laughs deliriously and slaps the window, leaving snotty little handprints on the glass. “Choo-choo!” she exclaims. “Bye-bye! Woowoo! I see cows!”
The train groans into a curve. Suddenly there are green and orange and blue containers stacked atop flatbed train cars parked on a neighboring track. The polyglot names of shipping companies speed by: Evergreen, Uniglory, Hanjin, Maersk. Then, at a clearing in the trees, the great brontosaural works of a gantry crane loom up above a Russian freighter loaded with what looks like modular housing. PORT OF SEATTLE , a sign on the crane reads.
We are somewhere east of the Strait of Juan de Fuca—Juan de Fuca, whom I read about in one of the many books I packed into my wheeling suitcase. He was a Greek sailor in the Spanish navy whose real name was Apostolos Valerianos. He claimed to have discovered the entrance to the Northwest Passage at the 48th parallel in 1592. The transit from the Pacific to the Atlantic had taken a mere twenty days, he reported, and the northern lands between these oceans were rich in silver and gold. Despite how familiar this tale must have sounded, for centuries people actually believed him. Although no one knows for certain whether the Greek sailor ever even visited the North Pacific, his description of the entrance to the passage, then known as the Strait of Anian, bears a superficial resemblance to the entrance of Puget Sound, and so the Strait of Juan de Fuca memorializes the pseudonymous perpetrator of a hoax, and so even our most accurate maps are imaginary. Looking out at the flashing waters of Puget Sound, I am filled with the desire to sail out across them, through Juan de Fuca’s fanciful strait, down across the currents of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, into its crowded, lovely heart, the heart of garbage. But I’m short on time. A ferry ride to Sitka will have to suffice.
At the Bellingham ferry terminal, I find a café table overlooking the harbor and spend the day reading about the science of hydrography and the history of the North Pacific. Beside me a bronze seagull the size of a condor points a wing at the sky, while beneath it a real gull hops around eyeing my sandwich. Although we are scheduled to embark a little before dusk, the M/V Malaspina is already waiting at its dock. Viewed from shore, it is a splendid sight, its white decks gleaming, a yellow stripe running the length of its navy-blue hull, its single smokestack painted in the motif of the Alaskan state flag—gold stars of the big dipper against a navy-blue sky. All the motor vessels in the Alaska Marine Highway system are named for Alaskan glaciers, and the Malaspina is named for the largest, a 1,500-square-mile slow-moving mesa of ice, which is in turn named for an eighteenth-century Italian navigator, Alessandro Malaspina, whose search for the Northwest Passage ended in 1791 at the 60th parallel, in an icy inlet that he christened bahía del desengaño , Disappointment Bay.
When I wheel my suitcase down the gangway that evening, the splendor of the M/V Malaspina diminishes with every step. The ferry is, I see upon boarding it, an aging, rust-stained hulk, repainted many times. Posted in a display case of documents near the cocktail lounge one can read a disconcerting open letter in which “past and present crew members . . . bid farewell to this proud ship.” Queen of the fleet when it was first launched in 1962, the Malaspina, the letter explains, “will cease scheduled runs of Alaska’s Inside Passage on October 27, 1997.” Why the old ferry is still in service eight years later the documents in the display case do not say.
The solarium on the sundeck, where I will sleep for free in a plastic chaise longue, is a kind of semitranslucent cave, glazed in panes of scratched Plexiglas that admit a yellowy view. Electric heaters hang from the solarium’s ceiling, their elements already glowing orange, like those inside of toasters. By the time I drag a plastic chaise to a spot near the back and lock my suitcase to a rail, I am dripping in sweat.
Outside the solarium, in the open air, backpackers are pitching their tents, duct-taping them down so that the wind won’t
toss them overboard. Soon a rustling nylon village of colorful domes has sprung up. “Tent city,” the veteran ferry riders call it. The evening is cool and exhilarating, the sky clear save for a distant, flat-bottomed macaroon of a cloud from which a tendril of vapor rises and coils. The wavelets on Bellingham Bay are intricate as houndstooth, complicated by cross-breezes and by ripples radiating from the hulls of anchored boats.
At last the ferry’s diesel engines rumble to life. I am going to sea! Who can resist an embarkation? The thrill of watery beginnings? The dock falls away. On the forested hills of Bellingham, the houses face the harbor. How festive the ferry must look from up there! As the ship turns and slithers toward the horizon, the low sun moves across the windows of the town, igniting them one by one. I stand at the taffrail and think to myself taffrail, enjoying the reunion of a thing and its word.
There is something quaintly democratic about the Alaska Marine Highway. Cheap and utilitarian, it exudes a faith in government that, like the Malaspina itself, was supposed to have been decommissioned years ago, around the same time that Amtrak went quasi-private and the U.S. Postal Service became a trademarked brand and PBS started licensing Big Bird to toymakers. The ferries have survived, I suspect, because there is no money to be made from what is essentially a maritime municipal bus system connecting the isolated fishing villages and resort towns that dot the islands of the Alaska Panhandle. For most of those towns, the Inside Passage is the only thoroughfare that leads to the outside world, and there are many locals as well as many tourists aboard the Malaspina today. The Marine Highway’s misleading name suggests what its creators had in mind—a public works project in the spirit of Eisenhower’s interstates. And yet travel by ferry no more resembles the solitary confinement of the automobile than these coastal waters resemble a four-lane road.
For one thing, travel by ferry is slow going; the cruising speed of the Malaspina is sixteen knots, or approximately twenty miles per hour. You can if you are so inclined, as I am, draw pictures of a mountain or an island before it disappears from view, and after several hours, the drone of the engines and the sameness of the scenery induce either boredom or peace of mind, or possibly both. It will take us three days and three nights to travel the 952 nautical miles between Bellingham and Sitka, a distance planes fly in less than two hours.
And then, for another thing, life aboard the public ferry is inescapably communal. It’s true that the passengers in the tiny staterooms belowdecks have purchased some privacy, but since staterooms are cheap and the most desirable spaces on the ship are public, there’s little sense of economic segregation. We squatters on the sundeck prefer the open air. Everyone eats in the same cafeteria, where the plebeian menu of grayish Salisbury steak and scrambled eggs matches the Cold War-era decor—seats upholstered in vinyl, tables enameled in sparkly Formica. In an America increasingly devoted to the service economy, even the relationship between the paying passengers and the crew feels atypically egalitarian. The crew keeps the Malaspina shipshape, but it does not serve. There are no chambermaids or stewards aboard.
If anything divides the ferry’s passengers, it’s age. Tent city has the feel of a floating youth hostel, or even a floating campground—hence the stenciled sign that prohibits campfires and cookouts (but not, alas, folksy sing-alongs). The retirees tend to congregate on the boat deck in the observation lounge, a sightseeing theater overlooking the bow. Sitting there in the anchored, amply cushioned chairs, it’s hard not to feel as though the wraparound windows are movie screens on which footage of the passing scenery plays, though every now and then a passenger outside will walk through the foreground and break the spell. Often as not the passenger in the foreground is a dude in orange-tinted sunglasses and a cowboy hat who seems to be intent on walking a marathon before we make Sitka.
The main source of onboard entertainment is Ed White, a bespectacled “interpreter” employed by the National Forest Service. “Interpreter” is what the Forest Service calls a ranger who is also a tour guide, and I love what the title implies: that a place is like a language. In this case, though, I can’t help feeling that something has been lost in translation. Once or twice a day, in the observation lounge, White delivers presentations on topics such as commercial fishing and local wildlife. He informs his audience, for instance, that there are 300,000 hairs on every square inch of a sea otter’s pelt. Then he puts his charts and markers away, and the spectators go back to looking at the mountains and the trees, or reading their Carl Hiaasen novels.
For the kiddies, there are daily screenings of family-friendly films on the senescent television in the recliner lounge. My favorite is Alaska’s Coolest Animals, which features video footage of Alaska’s “coolest flyers,” “coolest walkers,” and “coolest swimmers,” accompanied by the voices of children reading from a script. All their lines seem to end in exclamation points. “If a moose doesn’t get enough food, it might get starved and covered in snow!” one child says. “Hey, that’s a big bear!” says another. Sometimes the narrators use the first person. “I’m sleepy,” one says when a bear puts its head on its paws. “I want to go to bed. Bed!”
During the middle of the first night, off the eastern shore of Vancouver Island, the temperature drops, a fog shuts down, and my cell phone loses reception. So much for daily phone calls home. A plastic deck chair, it turns out, makes for a miserable mattress. Cold air seeps between the slats. The government-issue cotton blanket I rented from the ship’s purser for a dollar is far too thin. Some of my neighbors in the solarium move inside to sleep like refugees on the carpeted floor of the recliner lounge. I rent a second blanket for the second night, but it hardly makes a difference. The space heaters, too, have little sensible effect. Shivering in a fetal position, I think about that rock climber dangling from the Antarctic ice shelf in a hammock and feel faintly ridiculous. After two nights in the solarium of a cruise ship—a state-operated, poor man’s cruise ship, but a cruise ship nonetheless—I have already had my fill of adventuring.
The Alaskan stretch of the Inside Passage snakes through the Alexander Archipelago, a chain of one thousand or so thickly forested islands, some small as tablecloths, some large as Hawaii. These are, in fact, the tops of underwater mountains, part of the same snowcapped range visible on the mainland to the east. Most rise steeply from the water and soar to cloudy heights. Before going there I expected Southeast Alaska to feel like a giant outdoor theme park—Frontierland—and the shopping districts of the resort towns where the gargantuan cruise ships dock confirm my worst expectations. Cruise ship companies now own many of the businesses in those districts and may soon be able to “imagineer” (as the folks at Disney call it) every aspect of your vacation experience. But the backwaters of the Inside Passage, too narrow and shallow for the superliners to enter, are something else. They contain lost worlds.
In the narrowest of the narrows, it feels as though we are motoring down an inland river—some Amazon of the north—rather than along the ocean’s edge. Although this is the Pacific, the water doesn’t look, smell, or sound like the sea. Neither waves nor flotsam gets past the outer islands to the placid interior. In the summer, the rain and the streams of glacial melt together make the channels so brackish they seem fresh enough to drink, and in places the minerals those streams carry turn the channels a strangely luminous shade of jade. The forested banks sometimes loom so close you could play Frisbee with a person standing on shore. Hours go by when we see no other ships, or any sign of civilization besides the buoys that mark the way among the shoals.
Early in the morning, fog rises here and there from the forests of hemlock, cedar, and spruce. It is as if certain stands are burning, except that the fog moves much more slowly than smoke. In some places it forms tall, ghostly figures, and in others, it spreads out horizontally like wings. On the far side of one mountain, a dense white column billows forth like a slow-motion geyser that levels off into an airborne river that flows into a sea of clouds. I’ve begun to notice currents everywhe
re, a universe of eddies and gyres. Phytoplankton ride the same ocean currents that carried the Floatees to Sitka. Zooplankton follow the phytoplankton. Fish follow the zooplankton. Sea lions, whales, and people follow the fish. When, at the end of their upriver journey, salmon spawn and die en masse, their carcasses—distributed by bears, eagles, and other scavengers—fertilize the forests that make the fog, which falls as rain, which changes the ocean’s salinity. All deep water travels along what oceanographers, when speaking to laymen, call the “conveyor belt,” which begins in the North Atlantic, where surface currents, warmed by the tropical sun, made salty by evaporation, carried north by the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift, upon arriving in these cold latitudes, chill enough to sink below the comparatively fresh water spilling from the Arctic.
There, off both the east and west coasts of Greenland, the sunken Atlantic water creeps slowly south, through the abyss, beneath the Gulf Stream, over the equator, into the Antarctic Circumpolar current, which carries it to the South Pacific, where it begins creeping north. After a thousand years—a millennium!—some of that deep water conveyed by the conveyor ends here, in the North Pacific, where the ancient, life-giving element wells up, carrying nutrients with it, nutrients that fertilize the Alaskan fisheries. Much of what oceanographers know about where deep water goes they learned studying radioactive isotopes released into the sea as fallout from nuclear tests. I’m becoming a devout driftologist. The only essential difference between rock, water, air, life, galaxies, economies, civilizations, plastics—I decide, standing on the Malaspina’s deck, totally sober, watching the fog make pretty shapes above the trees—is the rate of flow.
