Moby-Duck

by Donovan Hohn

  I told her what parents always say when trying to reassure each other or themselves—“It’s just a phase.” I told her this, but in truth I wondered if my absence might be partly to blame, my absence and my genes. Perhaps, I suggested, Bruno would like to hear his father’s voice? Beth summoned him to the phone, and at the mention of my name, he came running, running so excitedly he tripped. I heard it happen. The crash, the wail, Beth rushing to comfort him. Standing there on the Alaskan coast, gazing out past the marina at Resurrection Bay, listening to my son wailing inconsolably somewhere on the coast of Delaware, in a house I couldn’t imagine, I felt like a truant, a deadbeat dad. Like a serial deserter who’d dressed up his restlessness in the trappings of a quest.

  Still sniffling, Bruno finally took the phone, or more likely his mother held it to his ear. I could almost see them, him slumped in her cross-legged lap. “I slipped,” he said in his tiny toddler’s voice, which on the phone seemed tinier still. “I fell on the floor.”

  “I’m in Alaska,” I said, hoping he’d think of the picture book I’d given him, called Alaska, in which appear illustrated mountains, illustrated eagles, illustrated sled dogs, illustrated bears. If he was thinking of such marvels, he gave no sign, so I tried again: “Last night, I slept on a boat.”

  “I slipped,” Bruno repeated.

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  No answer. Probably he was nodding, yes, forgetting that I couldn’t see him nod. He had only just begun to learn the magic of telecommunication, the trick of speaking to a disembodied voice. Into the silence between us came the cosmic hiss of satellites, the static of the spheres. If he were nine years old instead of two, perhaps I could have brought him with me, and perhaps it would have done him some good. In Wilderness, as the Rockwell Kents, younger and elder, are crossing Resurrection Bay, braving a storm in their open boat, Rockwell III, showing “a little panic,” says to his father, “I want to be a sailor so I’ll learn not to be afraid.”

  At his first glimpse of his hermitage on Fox Island, Kent the elder had said to himself, “It isn’t possible, it isn’t real!” Which just about sums up how I felt motoring across Resurrection Bay in the copilot seat of the Opus. So many books have been written about Alaska, and so many cruise ship commercials shot there, that the place, even when you’re in the midst of it, can seem a symbolical mirage.

  In his late twenties, in pursuit of that mirage, Pallister persuaded his high school sweetheart, at the time pregnant with their first child, to move with him to Anchorage because of a map—a map of Prince William Sound that he’d happened upon in the back of Field & Stream. Growing up in Montana, he’d fallen in love with the mountains of the American West. He and his brothers hiked in them, camped in them, hunted deer and mountain goats in them. Then, as a teenager, Pallister read Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World and dreamed of going to sea. What he glimpsed in Field & Stream seemed to him, as Fox Island had seemed to Kent, a kind of paradise, an American wilderness that was maritime and mountainous both. Thirty-five years later, the spell had yet to break, though the place of Pallister’s dreams has receded into the blue, nostalgic distances of remembrance. To his great dismay, there are plenty of other people in the world who want in on his paradise.

  Although Pallister scorns organized religion, considering it the enemy of reason, there is something puritanical about his brand of conservationism, which is in large part a crusade against idiotic hominids. Like many conservationists in Alaska, he dates the beginning of his activism to March 24, 1989, the day the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef. What troubled Pallister the most wasn’t the spilled oil, however; it was the crowds—the volunteers, the cameramen, the news anchors, the oilmen, the politicians. “All of a sudden there were literally thousands of people in places where I’d never seen people before,” he told me. “I thought to myself, ‘Holy Christ! This is on the national news. Everybody’s going to see how beautiful this place is. It’s going to be a tragedy for Prince William Sound.’”

  What he feared had come to pass. On the eve of our embarkation, when we were towing the Opus over the Kenai Mountains, the traffic on the Seward Highway had been thick as on the Long Island Expressway at rush hour. So thick it felt as though we were participating in some sort of exodus or pilgrimage. It was the weekend, a weekend in the middle of July, at the height of Alaska’s tourist season. The salmon were running and the creeks were crowded with fishermen scooping up silvers with dip nets, so many fishermen and so many silvers (the water in places was dark with them), you might have thought it was actual silver the fishermen were prospecting for.

  All these travelers in all these cars and trucks and recreational vehicles were joining the rush, heading out with their boat trailers and tackle and kayaks and mountain bikes to worship recreationally on whatever vestiges remain of the so-called Last Frontier. To drink beer beside a campfire. To make an offering of wild salmon to some wild, American god. Pallister and I were heretics in their midst. Or maybe heretics isn’t the right word; maybe I was an apostate in their midst, and Pallister a fanatic. In any case, we both had nonrecreational reasons for making the pilgrimage to Resurrection Bay, and Pallister’s reasons were different from mine. I was on a possibly quixotic quest to get my hands on a hollow plastic duck. Pallister was on a possibly quixotic quest to regain a paradise lost.

  This morning, after a night on the Opus, the first of several to come, after gassing up, it was thrilling to be out on the water, far more thrilling than my slow, soggy, fever-inducing ferry ride to Sitka two years ago, for much the same reason that riding a motorcycle or horse is more thrilling than riding a Greyhound bus. The Opus is so small, even the short, six-foot seas of Resurrection Bay made the boat indulge in nearly every one of the six degrees of freedom. The copilot’s seat is so close to the water, I could put my hand out the Plexiglas port window and feel the spray. When a pair of Dall’s porpoises started racing alongside us, cavorting, braiding their wakes around ours, they seemed near enough almost to touch. Beyond Fox Island we emerged from Resurrection Bay and into the Gulf of Alaska. Before us the North Pacific stretched all the way to Sitka, all the way to Hawaii, all the way to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, all the way to Hong Kong and Guangzhou.

  On we coasted, on a southwesterly bearing, among the forested tops of partially submerged mountains, past the point where the tour boats ventured, on and on, until there were not even any fishing boats to be seen, including the Patriot, only wildlife—orcas, Dall’s porpoises cavorting at metabolically improbable speeds through submarine canyons, puffins dragging their football bodies over the waves as they flap-flap-flapped their little wings. White mountain goats speckled the sorrelgreen lower slopes of snowcapped granite peaks. A pair of black dorsal fins described momentary arcs then vanished, their owners, a humpback mother and calf, having slipped below the surface without breaching or turning fluke, much to my disappointment.

  It was hard to carry on a conversation over the rebuilt outboard’s roar. That Pallister is slightly deaf—or as he puts it, “deaf as a stump”—made it harder still. Mostly he shouted and I listened. He shouted about the metric system, how crazy it was we hadn’t adopted it. He shouted about overpopulation, how it was the root of all environmental evils. He shouted about exercise, to which he objected almost as strenuously as he did to overpopulation. “People go walking out in the road with weights in their hands!” he exclaimed in disbelief. “Why don’t you build a wall or dig a hole in the ground?” That’s one reason he likes cleaning up beaches: “It makes me feel like I’m doing something that’s real important! It gives me a reason for being alive!”

  Between these bursts of opinion, we stared in silence at the horizon, Pallister gnawing on jerky, I popping ginger candies, the outboard sucking down boat diesel—$200 worth. Pallister would aim the Opus at some speck of land in the distance, and for what seemed like hours we’d watch the speck grow into the forested top of a partially submerged mountain, until finally we were
alongside it, and then, suddenly, beyond it, where yet another expanse of ocean would open up before us, and far ahead there would be a new speck of land to aim for.

  Sometimes Pallister steered us into narrow passes where the shallow currents ran riotous as river rapids over hidden rocks that sent our electronic depth finder into a beeping tizzy of alarm. “That’s one thing about this boat!” he shouted as we were transiting one narrow pass. “I’ve been driving it around for so damn long that I can take it places that I wouldn’t take a big boat! I can go in damn shallow water! Cliff doesn’t want to go through these smaller passes!”

  Overhead on the cabin roof, ten white tubes—scrolled up NOAA charts with place names scrawled on them in marker—kept working their way out of their wooden rack. Every so often, Pallister would shoot a glance in their direction, curse under his breath, and, with a flick of his left hand, swat them back into place, where they would immediately begin working loose again. And every so often, the half of the windshield with the broken wiper would get so scummy with salt spray that I, the solitary deckhand, would fill an empty Gatorade bottle from our five-gallon bladder of fresh water, stick my hand out the port window, and douse the windshield clean.

  At last, the speck of land on the horizon was Gore Point, which, even more than Kruzof Island, resembled the edge of some new world. While Pallister was rhapsodizing about the radial musculature of dolphins, I peered through the starboard Plexiglas at Gore Point’s windward shore, searching the jackstraw for the abundance of color Pallister’s descriptions had led me to expect. All I could make out at that impressionistic distance were the white hem of the breaking surf, a gray stripe of rocky beach, a bone-white stripe of driftwood, a green band of trees. Then the tide rips reared up and we slammed into the first of many steep, choppy, ten-foot waves. Then the second. Then the third.

  “There are some hellacious forces in nature, aren’t there?” Pallister shouted.

  FOREBODING

  In the lee of Gore Point, the ten-foot whitecaps subside as abruptly as they arose. Pallister pilots the Opus into the tranquil lagoon he’s told me about, our wake unzipping widening V’s behind us. The landscape that now reveals itself: a gray crescent beach that stretches between the mainland and Gore Peak, the tip of which, according to the United States Coast Pilot, “can easily be mistaken for an island” when viewed from sea.8 At its northern end, the gray crescent of pebbles terminates at the foot of a great cliff five hundred feet tall, an insurmountable granite palisade that has at this late hour cast a third of the lagoon into bottle-green shadow. Behind the pebbles stretches the forested isthmus. The vertiginous geography of the Kenai Fjords—cliffs plunging into underwater canyons—is the work of two geological forces: tectonics and glaciation. Sixty-five million years ago, colliding plates crumpled the land into valleys and peaks. Two million years ago, in the Pleistocene, advancing glaciers buried the Kenai Peninsula under an ice sheet that extended all the way to the continental shelf, gouging valleys in the land above water, trenches on the seafloor below, all the while grinding mountains down into boulders, boulders into rocks, rocks into pebbles and gravel, which—around twelve thousand years ago, as the Ice Age ended and the ice sheets (by then four thousand feet thick) went into retreat—sedimented into moraines, providing the tides and currents with the raw material for a pebble beach. Geologically as well as historically, this is indeed a comparatively new world, a work still very much in progress—or at least very much in flux.

  A few dozen yards from shore, in the shadowy shallows of the lagoon, floats Pallister’s big boat, the Johnita II, a fifty-foot Murray Chris-Craft twin-engine yacht. It is in this gray-green world an incongruously harlequin sight, at once shabby and luxurious, white fiberglass radiant above the dark water, colorful laundry fluttering from chrome rails. Atop the uppermost deck rises a structure resembling a treehouse, an unpainted wooden scaffolding enclosed with plastic tarps. Pallister pulls the Opus alongside the yacht, cuts the engine, balances himself on the port gunwale, springs at exactly the right moment onto the Johnita II’s swim deck, and lashes the two boats together. When he’s finished, the Opus looks like the yacht’s sidecar. I crawl from little boat to big boat on hands and knees, voice recorder and digital camera hanging by lanyards from my neck.

  The Johnita II was clearly intended to be a pleasure craft, not a floating bunkhouse. It has three decks, four cabins, two lounges furnished with armchairs and sofas, a mess the size of a breakfast nook, a wellappointed galley well-stocked with Pepsi, a neglected wet bar, a washer, a dryer, and, praise be, two heads, one of which I retreat to posthaste.

  Several owners ago, the yacht allegedly belonged to Ed McMahon of The Tonight Show—an allegation that I have not been able to confirm, though the early-eighties decor (burnt-orange curtains, faux-wood paneling) lends some credence to the claim. “He and Johnny Carson had parties on this boat,” Doug Leiser, GoAK’s crew manager, tells me when I emerge from the head. For the past two weeks, Leiser has been cohabiting the Johnita II with his and Pallister’s sons, employed for the better part of the summer as GoAK’s professional remediation contractors, earning $200 a day apiece—a not inconsiderable sum that Pallister, a bit defensively, insists is fair. “These are all rugged guys,” he told me, rugged and hardworking and far more efficient than volunteers; volunteers are good for “community outreach”—nonprofit-speak for “public relations”—but are unpredictable, not to mention expensive to insure. Furthermore, his paid crew would be out here in the wilderness for a month or more, longer than most volunteers can stand, effectively on the job 24/7, with no shore leave for R & R, at least not shore leave of the sort they’d like.

  “The boys,” as everyone at Gore Point calls GoAK’s five remediation contractors, are all approximately college age, give or take a year, so it’s no surprise that after two weeks their close quarters have come to resemble a frat house. There are dirty dishes in the galley, Playboys on a couch, fragrant sports sandals piled among rubber boots beneath a coatrack heavy with wet-weather gear. There is even, we will later discover, a secret stash of beer that Pallister’s sons have hidden from their teetotaling father.

  I notice a tattered copy of Tortilla Flats beside a rumpled sleeping bag. It belongs to Keiler Pallister, the eldest and tallest of the boys. Of Steinbeck’s novel Keiler will later remark, “They sure drink a lot of wine in that book!” From Steinbeck he’ll move on to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, of which Erik Pallister, the next eldest, will remark, “That the one about the marlin? The whole book’s about that?”

  Pallister’s youngest son, nineteen-year-old Ryan, is the one I find most sympathetic, in part because he reminds me of my more likable students (he wants to know everything I have to tell him about the chemistry and history of plastic), and in part because Pallister is far harder on Ryan than he is on Keiler and Erik. When I mention my son Bruno’s fear of sea bathing, Doug Leiser says, “You just got to make him do it.”

  “And if he doesn’t want to,” Ryan says sardonically, “pressure him.”

  These days the Johnita II belongs mainly to John Cowdery, a Republican state senator in the Alaskan legislature. Cowdery, per Pallister, isn’t much of a “boat guy.” During the winter of 2001, while the Johnita II was tied up at the docks in Whittier, so much snowmelt gushed from a leaky drainage hose into the hull that the yacht sank to its upper decks. “I guess that pickled it pretty good,” says Leiser.

  Once a salvage team managed to float it to the surface, Cowdery had the yacht towed around the Kenai Peninsula to Anchorage. Pallister bought a 49 percent share in the wreck for a song and then spent the next five years making it shipshape. He put in new water tanks, rewired the electrical system, replaced the rotten carpeting, built that weird wooden treehouse thing above the exposed upper deck, and cleaned oily bilgewater from the furniture, gray streaks of which remain. He finished his restoration, most of it, last fall. This is the yacht’s first summer in action.

  Along a shelf under a window
the boys have arrayed an exhibit of castaway curiosities scavenged from Gore Point’s windward shore: a thimble-size likeness of R2-D2, a hollow plastic witch riding a hollow plastic broom, a weird turtle with a hole in it like a doughnut, a bottle labeled HANDS CLEARNSER [sic], and—lo and behold!—Floatees: three frogs, two beavers, one turtle, one duck. Although I’ve already seen the Orbisons’ impressive collection, seeing these, out here in the wild, at the scene of their recent discovery, feels different, as though I’m getting closer and closer to one of the X’s marked on my map. As expected, the frogs are still green, the one turtle still blue, whereas the formerly maraschino beaver has faded to a milky beige, and the duck—the duck has turned the yellowy white of banana flesh.

  Although Leiser and Pallister are old friends, it’s clear that in the field Pallister is boss. Like a general visiting his troops, he stomps about inspecting the yacht, assessing damages, exclaiming “Holy Christ!” in response to the mess the boys have made, barking commands (“Someone had better get up here and pin down these clothes before they blow overboard!”), all the while demanding intelligence from Leiser.

  GoAK’s crew has worked fast, faster than expected, Leiser tells us. We are almost too late. The Gore Point midden heap is almost gone. In the past two weeks, ten workers—Leiser, the boys, field manager Ted Raynor, and three volunteers from Homer—have already filled around 1,200 garbage bags weighing, on average, fifty pounds each. In my notebook, I do the math. That’s sixty thousand pounds of trash collected along a single half-mile beach. By comparison, consider this: volunteers participating in the Ocean Conservancy’s 2006 International Coastal Cleanup picked up on average eight thousand pounds of trash per mile from the coast of New York State. “There’s probably a day’s work left out here, one good swath,” Leiser says.