by Donovan Hohn
Still a recent coinage, the word beachcomber in 1849 meant approximately what we mean by “beach bum”: it evoked a character like the narrator of Melville’s Omoo, a transient ne’er-do-well who had fled from civilization hoping to sample tropical women and tropical fruits and loaf around beneath the blowsy palms. “Idle, drunken, vagabond,” one Australian author wrote in 1845, “he wanders about without any fixed object, cannot get employed by a whaler or anyone else, as it is out of his power to do a day’s work; and he is universally known as ‘the beach-comber.’ ” The local Cape Codders whom Thoreau met on his seaside rambles usually took him for a traveling salesman. What other explanation could there be for a vagabond with a walking stick and a knapsack full of books?
By the 1980s, when Amos Wood published his how-to manuals, American beaches had become seaside playgrounds frequented not by dogs or crows but by the sun-worshipping masses. As for our vagrant beachcomber, he had become, in Wood’s definition, “any person who derives pleasure, recreation, or livelihood by searching ocean, lake, and river shores for useful or artful objects.” Inclusive as that definition sounds, Wood’s books are intended not for “the casual visitor to the beach” strolling barefoot along the shore plucking up pretty pebbles and seashells as keepsakes, but for “the serious beachcomber,” a mercenary, methodical prospector of the sands. The casual visitor to the beach “flits about” without any “specific purpose,” Wood writes, whereas a “serious searcher plans his hike, selects the tide and wind conditions that are favorable, prepares for an extended trip, and has a particular objective in mind.”
Thoreau’s rambling style of beachcombing—extravagant sauntering he would call it—appeals to me far more than Wood’s forensic treasure hunting does. If I tried to follow Wood’s advice, I wouldn’t last a weekend before retiring my metal detector to that cabinet of fleeting enthusiasms which also contains various musical instruments, a teach-yourself-Russian CD-ROM, and a guide to bicycle repair.
The Orbisons have read Wood’s books and have followed some of his advice, though much of what he says about beachcombing in California and Washington does not pertain to the shores of Alaska, where glass fishing floats tend to shatter on the rocks. Although they probably know more about beachcombing in Alaska than anyone, I doubt that either Tyler or Dean would consider himself a serious searcher. They are outdoorsmen. Their beachcombing grew out of their hunting. They hunt animals and in the intervals between hunting seasons they hunt shipwrecked junk, and the way they talk about spotting a plastic duck and killing a bear makes it seem like there’s no great difference between the two. “When I was younger, Dean would find a glass ball before me,” Tyler says, “and I would get so mad. And when you’re mad you walk right over them. To me it’s a lot like hunting: You’ll do a lot better if you’re chilling and hanging out.”
In the Orbisons’ living room are stacks of pelts, a glass cabinet containing, as of that summer, 120 Floatees (the largest collection Curtis Ebbesmeyer knows of), another containing Japanese fishing floats, and another of skeletons and skulls. I ask Tyler to identify the skulls on one shelf. “Bear, bear, gorilla, bear,” he says, his finger bouncing from skull to skull. “The gorilla we bought, but the bears, we shot those. That’s an elk. Birds, all sorts of birds down there. We do a lot of trapping too, so we have mink, marten, rabbit, otter, fox.”4
In the summer of 1993, when they began discovering bath toys, the Orbisons gave up collecting for driftology. Tyler was just twelve at the time, but he was the one to find their first toy, one of the beavers, and he remembers the moment vividly. “We were on Kruzof Island, looking for glass balls,” he says. “We didn’t really know what else to look for. It was beautiful weather; the reason we went to Kruzof is because it’s really hard to get ashore, and that’s where we go when the weather’s good. We were up beyond the high tide line. It was in the drift a ways. It had been there for a little bit. And I thought, This is cool. It was bleached out, exactly like the beavers we find now. I would say it had been there since the winter storms.”
They assumed that their beaver was a solitary castaway, but when they arrived back in town, talk of the mysterious invasion was in the air. Dean and Tyler went looking for more plastic animals, and found them. They started keeping meticulous records, treating the Floatees as data, which they eventually reported to Ebbesmeyer. A year or two later, the oceanographer began publishing Beachcombers’ Alert! and the Orbisons were among his first subscribers. They own every issue. “Curt tells us what to look for, and we go out there and find it,” Dean explains. This year, at Ebbesmeyer’s bidding, they searched for and found a computer monitor, Japanese surveying stakes, hockey gloves, “antisandals” (a sheet of rubber from which flip-flop-shaped blanks have been stamped), part of a naval sonobuoy, and six new Floatees, including a turtle they chiseled from the ice. After cataloging the junk on their porch and showing it to Ebbesmeyer, they take most of it to the dump.
QUACK, QUACK
We make plans to go beachcombing together the next day so that Dean and Tyler can show me how it’s done, and I return to my hotel daydreaming of an extravagant saunter along some wild shore, but that night, I come down with a nasty fever that I must have caught aboard the Malaspina. I spend the weekend alone, shivering and sweating in the smallest, cheapest hotel room in Sitka. On the walls are framed paintings of snowy New England farms. The window offers a view of a neighboring rooftop where two beer cans lie crumpled in a puddle and, beyond, appearing and disappearing from within a veil of fog, of the green slopes of Mount Verstovia. It rains. I sleep. Hours pass. I hear voices from the bar below. The window curtains brighten and dim. My wife calls the hotel—my cell phone is still out of range—to tell me what she learned at this week’s obstetric exam. Her cervix is “partially effaced,” and the baby’s head is low. He or she is ready to be born. Does this mean I should fly home? There’s no telling, no sure sign; the due date is as unpredictable as ever, and I have yet to set foot on an Alaskan beach, yet to go hunting for flotsam on the sand. I am of two minds, and of two hearts, and feverish—it feels—with ambivalence.
When my fever breaks for good, I don my yellow slicker and my quick-dry nylon pants (“Adventure” pants, the label said) and flee into the long Alaskan dusk. After two days indoors, the rainy air feels blessedly cool and smells both of the ocean and of the green mountains soaring up from behind the onion minaret and steeple of St. Michael’s, Sitka’s historic Russian Orthodox cathedral. Made of wood, painted gray and white, St. Michael’s is pretty but looks to me more like an ornate barn than a cathedral. Nonetheless, a cathedral it is. I slurp down some udon at a sushi place and saunter extravagantly around town.
Although the bars are open, and loud, the streets of Sitka are strangely quiet, and I realize why: almost no one’s driving. Tourists like me are mostly on foot and few locals appear to be out and about. In the darkened windows of the gift shops mannequins wear G-strings upholstered in fur from which plastic eyeballs gaze. BALEEN FOR SALE, reads a hand-lettered sign in the window of a Native arts cooperative. Fronds of the hairy stuff are on display, as are instructions telling you what to do “if you come across a dead stranded marine mammal.” Down at Crescent Harbor, gray, molten slivers of Sitka Sound shine like tines between the dark spars of outrigging and masts.
To the northwest, neighboring Kruzof Island shelters the harbor from winter storms and heavy surf, but to the southeast the sound opens wide onto the Pacific, which explains why this spot has become a mecca for beachcombers. The only major town in Southeast Alaska situated on the windward side of the Alexander Archipelago, Sitka lies in the path of transoceanic waves, waves that may have originated in the coastal waters of Russia or Japan.5 Peering from a dock, I search the water for my elusive quarry. No luck.
The residents of Sitka all seem to know the story of the bath toys, which they invariably refer to as “the duckies” or “the ducks.” The one person I meet who has not heard of the ducks is a young commercial fisherman nam
ed Fred who came to Sitka a year or so ago. I run into him one rainy night at the Pioneer Bar.
The “P bar,” as locals call it, caters to commercial and recreational fishermen, who keep odd hours. It therefore opens early and closes late. The window blinds almost never come up. Rows of black-and-white photographs, mostly of fishing vessels, hang on the walls above the bottles. I find Fred curled around the bar like a C-clamp, leaning on his elbows, the sleeves of his sweatshirt pushed up, dangling a beer from his fingers and nursing at the foam. Emboldened by whiskey, I introduce myself. I tell him my story, the one about the rubber ducks, and he tells me his. He used to be a corporate copywriter for GMAC in Dearborn, Michigan, and made a decent but anesthetizing living. On top of his job, he had to take care of his brother who has “a psychological problem” and is “basically a dependent.” Then, a year ago, Fred cut loose. He gave his brother the keys to his house and fled to Sitka to seek his fortune on the seas. Sketching little diagrams on napkins, he teaches me about the different kinds of commercial fishing—purse seining, gill netting, longlining.
He buys one round, I buy another. The mood turns confessional. I feel guilty about my pregnant wife in New York. Fred feels guilty about his poor brother in Michigan. There’s also the girlfriend he broke up with when he left. So far things haven’t worked out as planned, he confides. He wants a spot on a longline trawler because those guys earn six figures. It’s hell while you’re out there on the Bering Sea, but you can cash in after a year. Problem is, a spot on a longline trawler is hard to get, so maybe he’ll take up day trading, or maybe he’ll write a novel, he has a great idea for a novel, or maybe he’ll go back to Michigan and settle down. He thinks he’d be a great father, if only he could earn enough money to take care of both his family and his brother. Suddenly, he’s on the verge of tears, and I feel obliged to offer comfort or advice.
What do I, a quixotic duckie hunter, possibly have to say to this wayward prospector fallen on hard luck? I tell him that it sounds like he has a lot of choices, that he’ll probably be happier once he decides, at which suggestion Fred grabs my arm and leans close, his moist eyes glittery with freaky excitement. “That’s it, you’re so right,” he says. “I’ve got to decide.” He lurches from his stool. “I want you to meet someone.” He leads me down the bar to an old woman in a black leather motorcycle jacket. She is smoking a long cigarette and staining the filter with lipstick. How and to what degree Fred knows this woman is not clear. Neither is her age. Neither is my mind. I am, I realize, totally shitfaced. Fred wants me to tell this woman about the voyage of the ducks, but she already knows the story.
“Who the hell gives a rat’s ass about that?” she asks, rotating on her stool to appraise me. Then, without warning, she reaches around my shoulders, snaps the yellow hood of my slicker up over my head, and barks, “You look like a rubber duck.” She and several other patrons of the P bar are laughing at my expense. Their faces blur around me, like the faces of carousel horses. But the old woman in the motorcycle jacket is not satisfied just yet. She wants to hear me quack.
An attentive calm falls over the patrons of the P bar. Everyone—the bartender, the fishermen in their quilted vests—is listening, watching, waiting. Or so it seems to my foggy mind.
“Quack,” I say.
“Again,” the old woman says, with sadistic glee.
“Quack,” I say. “Quack, quack.”
BAHÍA DEL DESENGAÑO
Standing at the helm of the Morning Mist—a white twin-engine troller with outrigging as tall as flagpoles and orange floats the size of beach balls dangling like ornaments from its rails—is Larry Calvin, a spry, thin, white-haired fisherman in suspenders. On Calvin’s black ball cap a fish leaps above the words ABSOLUTE FRESH. Back in the Morning Mist’s cabin are a dozen-odd academics. Out the windows of the Morning Mist are mountains and water and, so far as I know, though I can’t see them, whales and yellow ducks.
A self-employed left-wing entrepreneur who subsidizes his fishing with profits earned in the building supply business, Calvin embodies an old brand of American individualism that seems to flourish in the strange demographic conundrum that is maritime Alaska, a place both rural and coastal, both red and blue, Western and Tlingit, industrial and aquacultural and wild. In a magazine rack in the ship’s cabin I spot the latest issue of the Nation and a copy of David C. Korten’s antiglobalization jeremiad When Corporations Rule the World. The bridge of Calvin’s ship looks like a cross between a cockpit and an office. Above the big silver steering wheel and the ball-tipped throttle levers there flickers an array of computer monitors connected to the antennae bristling from the roof. Beyond the monitors, out the windshield, the bright water stretches west to the horizon. With our course for Kruzof Island set, Calvin doffs his cap, drops it on the dashboard, steps halfway out the door, and stands there, left hand on the throttle, face in the sun, white hair blowing in the wind.
The academics aboard the Morning Mist include oceanographers, archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, historians—all of whom have come to Sitka for the annual Paths Across the Pacific Conference, a symposium that coincides with the Beachcombers’ Fair. Curtis Ebbesmeyer is here wearing his sea-bean necklace and a baseball cap decorated with stickers from Seattle coffeehouses. So is Dean Orbison, dressed in his customary plaid woodman’s shirt and a pair of Sitka sneakers—the local name for knee-high rubber boots. The organizing theory of the conference is this: people started crossing the Pacific Ocean by boat tens of thousands of years ago, far earlier than was previously thought. Some Asian immigrants sailed to America by mistake when blown astray. Some came on purpose, paddling along the coast of the Beringian ice shelf, traveling a little farther east with every generation. Little is known about these ancient migrations, and on the way to Kruzof Island, an oceanographer named Thomas Royer tells me one reason why. Sea levels have risen so much since the last ice age that the earliest settlements in Alaska are now one hundred meters underwater.
Another passenger, an archaeologist, interrupts to contest Royer’s figures. Sedimentation adds about a centimeter a year to the ocean floor, this archaeologist says, which means you’d have to dig deeper than one hundred meters. You’d have to dig about four hundred meters to find any artifacts.
Most of the chitchat aboard the Morning Mist is similarly interdisciplinary and esoteric. When did people first begin using boats—forty thousand years ago? Fifty thousand years ago? What does it take to start a migration—a critical mass, or a few individuals with the itch to explore? Why did people migrate in the first place—the profit motive? Hunger? Exile? Chance? Computer models like OSCURS may help these marine archaeologists reconstruct the routes of those transoceanic migrations, the history of which is inseparable from the history of global climate change. In other words, it is humanity’s own past and future that the oceanographers are scrying in the tangled drift routes of the toys.
Looking out from the cabin of the Morning Mist, Royer teaches me how to read the surface of the sea. “You see that smooth area there?” he asks. “Either temperature or the salinity will change the surface tension of the water, so the same wind will ruffle the water in one spot, but not in another.” All variations in the surface are the effects of hidden causes. What to me looks like an homogeneous expanse is in fact a kind of shifting, aquatic topography.
In the half hour or so it takes us to get to Kruzof, centuries seem to recede. Sitka disappears into a blur of blue horizon. The world out here would not have looked much different a millennium ago, I think. It resembles the opening verses of Genesis. There is only the land, the water, the trees. And then, in my peripheral vision, an orange figure swoops and dives. It’s a kite. A kite shaped like a bird, and there on the beach below it are three figures, a father and his children, dressed in colorful swimsuits. They have rented one of the two rustic cabins that the National Forest Service maintains on Kruzof Island. The cabin itself becomes visible now, tucked back into the trees. Here, in the forest primeval at t
he foot of a dormant volcano, is a scene from the Jersey Shore. Larry Calvin anchors the Morning Mist well away from the rocky shallows and ferries us in several at a time aboard his aluminum skiff. The father flying the kite hollers hello, the children eye us warily. Ebbesmeyer hands out white plastic garbage bags in which to collect our riddles and discoveries. Dean Orbison will lead one beachcombing party to the south. I join Ebbesmeyer’s party, headed north.
I try to remember what the Orbisons and Amos Wood have taught me. Up ahead, where the beach curves and tapers into a sickle, there’s lots of jackstraw and even a little color—a fleck of blue, a daub of red. To get there we have to cross Fred’s Creek, which spills down through the trees over terraces of rocks before carving a delta of rivulets and bluffs through the sand. The delta is perhaps a dozen yards wide, and those of us without Sitka sneakers have trouble getting across. I manage to leap from rock to rock. Ebbesmeyer, who ambles effortfully along, is in no state to go rock jumping. He hikes up into the trees and crosses where the creek narrows. Reuniting on the far shore, we make our way down the beach spread out in a line, scanning the sand. Ebbesmeyer launches into one of his litanies of facts. Bowling balls float, he informs us, or rather the nine-, ten-, and eleven-pounders do. Heavier ones sink. And did you know that the valves of clams are not symmetrical? A colleague of his once surveyed the clamshells along a mile of beach. “At one end of the beach, it’s mostly rights, and the other end it’s mostly lefts.” The currents can tell the difference.
