Moby-Duck

by Donovan Hohn

  Back in the 1980s, you may recall, the specter of fouled beaches was one of America’s most frequently recurring collective nightmares. The Jersey Shore was awash in IV bags and used syringes. New York’s garbage barge haunted the world, trailing windblown flotsam in its wake. On the approach to Kennedy Airport, the protagonist of Paradise, a late Donald Barthelme novel, looked out his airplane window and saw “a hundred miles of garbage in the water, from the air white floating scruff.”

  Then, like the ozone hole, all that floating scruff seemed to go away. Perhaps we tire of new variations on the apocalypse the same way we tire of celebrities and pop songs. Perhaps all those syringes and six-pack rings, no longer delivering a jolt of guilt or dread, were carried off by an ebb tide of forgetfulness. By the end of the 1980s, we had newer, scarier nightmares to fear. Who could be bothered about seabirds garroted by six-pack rings when Alaska’s shores were awash in Exxon’s crude? Who could be bothered about turtles tangled in derelict fishing nets when the ice caps were melting and the terrorists were coming?

  Or perhaps—even a well-informed landlubber might be forgiven for thinking—this particular ecological nightmare, like the nightmarish ozone hole, really had been laid to rest. In the mid-1980s New York’s sanitation department began deploying vessels called TrashCats to hoover up scruff from the waterways around the Fresh Kills landfill. Elsewhere mechanical beach sweepers did the same for the sand. In 1987, the federal government ratified Marpol Annex V, an international treaty that made it illegal in the territorial waters of the signatory countries to throw nonbiodegradable trash—that is, plastic—overboard from ships. Later that same year (the same year, it so happens, that members of the United Nations signed the Montreal Protocol, the treaty that banned ozone-destroying chemicals outright), the garbage barge returned to New York after four months at sea and had its cargo incinerated. The good news for the ocean kept coming: In 1988, Congress passed the Ocean Dumping Reform Act, which forbade cities to decant their untreated sewage into coastal waters. In 1989, the Ocean Conservancy held its first annual International Coastal Cleanup, which has since grown into the largest such event in the world.

  But beautification, it seems, can be deceiving. Although many American beaches—especially those that generate tourism revenues—are in fact a whole lot cleaner these days than they used to be, the oceans are another matter. In Garbage Land, her book-length exploration of the American waste stream, the journalist Elizabeth Royte reports that in the mid-nineteenth century, officials in New York cleaned dead horses from the streets by tipping the carcasses into the river along with household refuse. How the times have changed, you might think. At least today there aren’t equine carcasses putrefying beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, or feral pigs scavenging slop from the gutters of lower Broadway, gutters that during those unplumbed, horse-drawn times flowed with shit, equine and porcine and human.

  Yet since the mid-1800s, not only has the volume of New York’s household refuse grown, to four million tons a year; its chemistry has changed. Depending on where they sample, oceanographers have found that between 60 and 95 percent of today’s marine debris—the preferred bureaucratic term for flotsam and jetsam—is made of plastic. Despite the Ocean Dumping Reform Act, according to a 2004 EPA report, the United States still releases more than 850 billion gallons of untreated sewage and storm runoff every year, and in that sewage are what the Environmental Protection Agency charmingly calls “floatables”—buoyant, synthetic things: Q-tips, condoms, dental floss, tampon applicators.

  The tide of plastic isn’t rising only on Alaska’s uninhabited shores. In 2004, oceanographers from the British Antarctic Survey completed a study of plastic dispersal in the Atlantic Ocean, north and south. “Remote oceanic islands,” their survey showed, “may have similar levels of debris to those adjacent to heavily industrialized coasts.” Even on Spitsbergen Island, in the Arctic, the survey found on average one plastic item every five meters. Farther south, in the mid-Atlantic and the Caribbean, at the edge of the Sargasso Sea, they found five times as much—one plastic object every meter. And on “the best-studied and more remote Atlantic shores” the historical data “suggest unabated increase.”

  Not even oceanographers can tell us exactly how much floating scruff is out there; oceanographic research is simply too expensive and the ocean too vast. A 1997 paper, citing studies conducted in the 1970s, estimated that globally 6.4 million tons of garbage were set adrift from ships every year; later estimates are higher still. In 2002, Nature magazine reported that debris in the waters near Britain doubled between 1994 and 1998; in the Southern Ocean encircling Antarctica the increase was a hundredfold.

  The Encyclopedia of Coastal Science, about as somniferously clinical a source on the subject as one can find, predicts that plastic pollution will grow worse in the twenty-first century because “the problems created are chronic and potentially global, rather than acute and local or regional as many would contemplate.” The problems are chronic because, unlike the marine debris of centuries past, commercial plastics persist, accumulating over time, much as certain emissions accumulate in the atmosphere. The problems are global because the sources of plastic pollution are far-flung, but also because, like emissions riding the winds, pollutants at sea can travel.

  Though no oceanographer, Pallister has a theory about where all the flotsam and jetsam on Alaska’s outer coast is coming from. “There’s a weather phenomenon we have here called the Pineapple Express,” he told me in his Anchorage condo. “That’s a winter low that sets this prevailing wind pattern from the Hawaiian Islands right toward the Gulf of Alaska, and it will just funnel this way for days on end if not weeks on end. That wind is blowing right across that bunch of plastic out there.” He was talking, of course, about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

  Like Cliff Chambers, when I first laid eyes on the Opus, what I saw bobbing there among the steel outriggers and fiberglass motorboats gave me pause. The twenty-four-foot-long, eight-foot-wide wood-and-epoxy hull was painted dark red. The plywood cabin, painted gray, resembled the turret of an antique tank. The see-through, snap-on plastic curtains enclosing the tiny deck made the boat look like a floating gazebo—fit for a picnic on a lily pond, perhaps, but not for a nine-hour resupply mission around the Kenai Peninsula’s outer coast. Pallister conceded that the Opus might be “the ugliest boat in the harbor,” but he’d take his homebuilt cabin cruiser over “a cheap, mass-produced” fiberglass Bayliner any day.

  “Opus as in magnum opus?” I asked, noticing the name stenciled in gray block letters over the transom.

  “Opus as in the penguin,” said Pallister. “You know, Bloom County? Berkeley Breathed? Man, that guy was great!”

  Despite appearances, the Opus is perfectly seaworthy, Pallister assured me. Back in the eighties, he built it with the help of a navalarchitect friend according to a “Coast Guard-approved” design. Furthermore, Pallister himself is in the Coast Guard Auxiliary. Members of the Coast Guard Auxiliary, he explained, are boat-owning civilians trained to assist in search-and-rescue operations.

  All this sounded pretty reassuring. Then I learned that there are no life jackets aboard the Opus. Then that there is one survival suit on board but only one, and it is in Pallister’s size, not mine, and Pallister is a little man, wiry and short, so that with his pants tucked into his Sitka sneakers he brings to mind a jockey. At least there is a lifeboat aboard, one of those inflatable skiffs that I now know are generically referred to by the brand name Zodiac. Then again our Zodiac isn’t outfitted with a motor, only a pair of plastic oars, and its very presence atop the roof of the Opus brings to my schoolteacher’s mind Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat,” a masterful short story based on Crane’s harrowing, true-life survival, in 1896, of a shipwreck off the coast of Cuba. “Many a man ought to have a bath-tub larger than the boat which here rode upon the sea,” Crane wrote. The same could be said of our Zodiac and, almost, of the Opus.

  Then I learned that not only are there no l
ife vests aboard, nor a survival suit in my size, nor a motor for the Zodiac; there is no water maker with which to make potable water, just a big plastic five-gallon bladder that Pallister filled up in Seward Harbor with a hose. Nor is there what we seafarers call a “head,” only a Porta Potty stowed in a little hatch beneath the planking of the deck, planking currently obstructed, like most of the deck, by boxes and coolers of provisions purchased yesterday morning at the Anchorage branch of Costco. In these boxes and coolers are, for instance, pillows of spinach, vats of mayonnaise, packages of hot dogs the size of vibraphones. If the outboard should stall, and if we should run out of fresh water, at least we have plenty of food and a few cases of Pepsi and Dr Pepper to drink. Pallister is opposed to bottled water, for reasons both thrifty and ecological, as well as to coffee, for reasons neurochemical and moral; he considers coffee an addictive drug and therefore a substance abused by weak people like me. But for inexplicable reasons all varieties of Pepsi and Dr Pepper—bottled, canned, diet, sugary, and, yes, caffeinated—are in Pallister’s weird book A-OK.

  Even if I could easily access it, the use of the Porta-Potty would require a new level of intimacy between me and my commanding officer, a level of intimacy that, despite the alpine altitudes of intimacy to which we’ve already climbed in the past forty-eight hours, I don’t particularly wish to explore, suffering as I intermittently and unpredictably do from that variety of sphincteral stage fright that men are prone to experience—a surprisingly large number of men, I suspect, considering the demure metallic and to my mind excellent barriers that one increasingly finds protruding between the urinals of public restrooms.

  When he needs to relieve himself on a long voyage aboard the Opus, Pallister will simply pull into the sheltered lee of some island or peninsula, put the outboard in neutral, clamber nimbly onto the swim deck, and offer up a steamy contribution to the hypothermically cold Alaskan sea. Affixed to the stern, the swim deck of the Opus is about the size of a park bench. When last Pallister stopped to tinkle, a couple of hours ago, back in the shallows of Wildcat Pass, I gave the swim deck one look and concluded I could wait.

  “Suit yourself,” Pallister said with the characteristic note of head-shaking disapproval with which he greets the mostly idiotic behavior of his fellow hominids.

  Thus, on top of gingery queasiness and an aching postoperative lumbar scar, I am now, as we go bucking and crashing through the tide rips off Gore Point, also experiencing serious urological distress, not to mention serious misgivings about having impulsively accepted a free ride to a wild isthmus I’d never heard of, from a heartsick conservationist I’d never met.

  Armed with a brand-new GPS gizmo, familiar with the route, confident of his seamanship, Pallister has neglected to bring along a copy of United States Coast Pilot volume 9, Pacific and Arctic Coasts Alaska: Cape Spencer to Beaufort Sea. The Coast Pilot is the navigator’s most trusted guide to America’s territorial waters, which radiate from the land like a blue nimbus two hundred miles thick. Anyone worried that the Image has vanquished the Word can seek solace in its pages. All nine volumes are marvelous documents, each paragraph distilling centuries of firsthand observations made by both sailors and scientists. They are like literary atlases, those nine volumes, literary Google Earths, translating the great big mysterious world into detailed descriptive prose.

  In addition to harbors and landings and facilities and interesting geographic features, the Coast Pilot alerts mariners to assorted perils of the sea, and if Chris Pallister or I had brought along volume 9, and if we’d turned to chapter 4, page 197, we would have come upon a note warning us about the perilous “tide rips with steep, short choppy seas . . . 3 to 5 miles S of Gore Point.”

  Other navigational descriptions of Gore Point are similarly cautionary. According to Exploring Alaska’s Kenai Fjords: A Marine Guide to the Kenai Peninsula’s Outer Coast, a copy of which Cliff Chambers keeps aboard the Patriot, “Mariners unfamiliar with this unforgiving area tend to pass through without stopping to sightsee.” One such mariner, Charles Clerke, captain of the Discovery, companion ship to Captain Cook’s Resolution, put it more blasphemously and memorably. Coasting in the vicinity of Gore Point in 1778 on a search for the Northwest Passage, the Resolution encountered thick fog and gale-force winds. “This seems upon the whole,” Clerke wrote in his journal, “a damn’d unhappy part of the World.”

  Poor Charles Clerke. He was more damn’d than he knew. From Alaska, the Resolution and Discovery would retreat to the warm, tropical shores of Hawaii. On a previous stop, they’d found the island to be a garden of earthly delights inhabited by gift-giving, scantily clad, erotically generous, if somewhat kleptomaniacal natives. The idyll they dreamed of while weathering Alaskan storms would prove, like most idylls, a fleeting illusion. For historically obscure reasons—possibly because the Hawaiians mistook Captain Cook for a fertility god named Loho, possibly because the English overstayed their welcome, draining the resources of their hosts, but mostly because Cook attempted to punish Hawaiian thieves—the natives turned hostile. While attempting to take their king hostage, Cook would meet his death at the hands of an angry crowd. Charles Clerke would replace him as the expedition’s commanding officer, but not for long. Off the damn’d, unhappy coast of Siberia, he too would succumb, not to natives but to tuberculosis, leaving in command one John Gore, the namesake of Gore Point.

  At least I can’t complain about the weather. All day, the sea conditions have been perfect—lots of sunshine, a breeze out of the northeast that is refreshingly cool but not cold. When we embarked from Seward this morning, there were lots of other boats out on Resurrection Bay—tour boats taking tourists for a peep at Bear Glacier, charter boats full of fishermen hoping to land a halibut, little speedboats full of day trippers celebrating the beauty of the Kenai Fjords with coolers of beer.

  Over the shining, turquoise water we went, past Bear Glacier, past the tour boats full of tourists admiring Bear Glacier, past Fox Island, where the artist Rockwell Kent spent the winter of 1918 roughing it with his nine-year-old son, Rockwell III, an experience Kent later wrote about in a book, titled Wilderness, that is, mostly on account of Rockwell III, quite possibly my very favorite of the many, many books—transcendental, survivalist, sociological, satirical—that outsiders have written about their Alaskan adventures.7

  Personal circumstances have no doubt biased me in favor of Kent’s book. I’ve entirely failed to reconcile fatherhood with adventuring. When I decided to quit my job and resume the chase, Beth and I recognized that my intermittent but prolonged absences would be hard on me, harder on her, and especially hard on our son, Bruno. But we’d told ourselves that he would profit vicariously from my travels, my discoveries. I would come home with souvenirs and pictures and stories that would fill his little mind with wonderment. I would bequeath to him a patrimony of curiosity—about Alaska, the ocean, the mysterious land on the other side of the planet whence most of his possessions came—and instill in him a sense of responsibility for the natural world. And perhaps that is how it will turn out in the end. For now, though, all I seem to have bequeathed to him is timidity.

  Bruno, about to turn two, is this summer afraid of fire engine sirens; of the skeletons at the natural history museum; of Spider-Man, whose face to his eyes resembles that of a skeleton at the natural history museum; of SpongeBob SquarePants, whom he calls “that funny snail”; of the Wild Things in Where the Wild Things Are. Even Sesame Street characters scare him (he doesn’t like their “googly-eyes”). He is also, Beth told me when I called her one last time this morning from Seward just before Pallister and I shoved off, afraid of the sea. Hearing this, I thought with affectionate distress, He is his father’s son.

  Although in adulthood I’ve learned to bluff, I am an exceptionally fearful person, ill-suited to the role of journalist, or adventurer, or errant duckie hunter. The greatest among my many fears—greater than a fear of heights that makes me faint-headed if I stand too close to a plate-glass window i
n a skyscraper; greater, even, than my fear of mysterious contagions, or of terrorists, or of bankruptcy, or of disgrace—is my fear of sharks and therefore of the sea. For that fear I hold neither myself nor my parents responsible.

  Those whom I hold responsible are the feckless counselors of the summer camp to which my parents sent me at the impressionable age of seven or eight. Those counselors, coaches and college kids mostly, would subject us campers to a morning routine of desultory sport involving pink rubber kickballs. In the afternoon, they would gather us around a television on a wheeling cart and plunk into the boxy maw of a VHS player a film.

  One afternoon the film of choice was Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. There I sat, cross-legged on the linoleum, trying as best I could to be a well-behaved child, a good child, and there on the screen coeds lounged around a campfire on a beach, smoking something. And there on the screen one of the female coeds ran naked into the moonlit waves. And on the screen, as she swam, there came a sudden jerk, and a look on her face of awful yet somehow comical surprise. And there on the screen the naked coed disappeared beneath the waves. Across the water spread a slick of blood. And on the beach, the following morning, there appeared a dismembered forearm. And although I once dreamed of becoming a marine biologist, I have been afraid of the sea ever since—so afraid that even now on trips to the seashore I’ll wade in waist deep but no farther.

  I mentioned none of this to Beth when I spoke to her this morning. Friends of ours had invited Beth and Bruno to spend the weekend at a beach house in Delaware. The house was beautiful, she told me, and Bruno was having a grand time playing with the daughter of their hosts. All the same Beth was beginning to wish they’d stayed home, on account of Bruno’s fears. Yesterday, when they went to the beach, he’d refused to go near the waves. Today, he was refusing to go to the beach at all. She’d tried coaxing him, goading him, coercing him, but the very mention of the beach sent him into screaming, sobbing paroxysms of dismay.