Moby-Duck

by Donovan Hohn

  Impressive as Leiser’s numbers are, the success of GoAK’s rescue mission remains in doubt. Pallister still doesn’t know how in the hell he’s going to get all that trash off that windward shore once his crew finishes bagging it. The original plan was to load the bags onto six-wheel all-terrain vehicles, drive them across the isthmus to the protected lagoon, and transfer the bags onto an amphibious barge. As during the cleanup of the Valdez oil spill, the barge would ferry the bags eighty nautical miles to the landfill in Homer. But archaeologists with the State Parks Department, worried that the ATVs could damage the Unegkurmiut house pits, recently told Pallister, no six-wheelers. So now how is he supposed to get those bags across the isthmus? Sweat equity? Zip lines? Helicopters?

  Nor does Pallister know how he is going to cover his multiplying costs even if he works out the logistics. He still hasn’t raised all the cash and in-kind donations that his $115,000 matching grant from NOAA requires, and he won’t see a penny of federal money until he does. Last spring, Pallister campaigned hard to convince Alaska’s state legislature to chip in. He sent letters accompanied by photographs of debris. This is state land, he reasoned, so it only makes sense that the state should help clean it up. When his appeals seemed to fall on deaf ears, he did what any citizen well educated in the ways of American politics would do: he hired a pair of lobbyists. The lobbyists began persuading pro-development representatives in Juneau that GoAK isn’t “ just another environmental group”—that, in other words, the group poses no threat to anyone’s profitable interests.

  The lobbyists delivered, winning a $150,000 allocation for GoAK by a narrow margin. But at the last minute, Alaska’s new Republican governor—the once obscure, now infamous Sarah Palin—vetoed the allocation. When he first put out his call for volunteers on the local evening news, Pallister described the “super camp” that GoAK intended to build out here. There’d be an electrified bear fence, he said. There’d be tents. There’d be food. More than a hundred Alaskans answered his call. But without that state allocation, he had to slash his budget. The super camp was downsized to an unfortified, bring-your-own-food-and-tent, dumpyour-own-shit volunteer ghetto. Instead of a hundred volunteers, he ended up with five, each of whom had enlisted for a single ten-day tour. Scrambling to come up with the matching funds his NOAA grant required, Pallister turned to corporate donors, notorious polluters among them: Princess Cruises, the Alyeska Pipeline, and British Petroleum, whose sunflower logo decorates most of GoAK’s garbage bags.

  Still falling more than $60,000 short of his estimated costs, with the end of the cleanup drawing near, he began entertaining the unthinkable: hitting up Exxon, an act regarded in Alaska’s environmental community as tantamount to signing a contract—in North Slope crude and otter blood—with Satan. What choice did he have? A chartered helicopter would run him approximately $2,000 an hour, the amphibious barge $4,000 a day, and already he was bouncing checks.

  After we’ve unloaded the Opus, Ted Raynor and the boys pull on their knee-high rubber boots and ferry us ashore, Raynor’s brindled pit bull Bryn perched like a figurehead at his rubber skiff’s prow. Pallister’s sons are everything I preconceived their father to be. They seem to have stepped from the pages of an outdoor adventure magazine. They carry around carabiners, which they refer to as “beaners.” They wear striped knit caps and lots of polar fleece but no life jackets. During their time at Gore Point, they’ve grown beards. They enjoy punching each other in the arm. Earlier today, to access a beach just north of here, they freeclimbed a fifteen-foot cliff. And, I now discover, they can launch and land a Zodiac with acrobatic grace. As we approach the breaking surf, Erik, in a pair of mirrored sunglasses, cuts the outboard. As if on cue, Keiler and Ryan leap out, splashing up onto the pebble beach, hauling the Zodiac with me in it behind them.

  In the long midsummer twilight, glacial pebbles clattering beneath their boots, their shadows tall as spruce trees, the boys toss around the new Nerf football that I and Pallister have brought for them, doing their best to keep it from Bryn, who popped their last football with a single chomp. Eyes on the ball, Raynor’s pit bull runs barking from boy to boy to boy. “That damn dog just bit my ass!” one of them shouts.

  Meanwhile, two volunteers, Bree Murphy, a researcher from the Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies, and Michael Armstrong, a reporter for Homer News, are playing bocce ball with plastic fishing floats on a sandy course they’ve groomed clean of pebbles. Looming over the scene is a shipwreck. Rusted, sundered, half-sunken into the pebbles, it is in an advanced state of decay, but its name—Ranger—can still be read, written in white block letters on the remnants of its black bow.

  Pallister and I are anxious to have a look at the cleanup site before dinner. Ted Raynor leads the way, Bryn racing on ahead, sniffing the ground for marmots and bears. Raynor is a forty-something bachelor, with close-cropped hair turning from orange to gray, but like me he still has boyish cheeks, cheeks so ruddy with sunburn and burst capillaries, he seems to be blushing even when he isn’t. As we walk, he rants. He rants against “the idiot” who wrecked the Ranger and didn’t bother to clean it up. He rants about the archaeologists and their precious “culturally modified trees”—the ones modified by Unegkurmiut. “If I take my chain saw and cut down a tree tomorrow, four thousand years from now they’re going to be worshipping me because I culturally modified a tree,” he rants. “I, Ted Raynor, modified it.”

  In response to this remark I think and feel complicated thoughts and feelings. When you embed as a journalist, no matter which subcultural group you embed in, it’s hard to resist the tug of sympathy, which is perhaps why organizations from the U.S. armed forces to the Gulf of Alaska Keeper invite strangers like me into their midst. Strong as gravity, the tug of sympathy can pull you out of your detached point of view into the foggy atmosphere of relativism. It’s kind of like the Stockholm syndrome, or what happens in Heart of Darkness to Mr. Kurtz. Before you know it, you’re rooting for your sources even if, under other circumstances, under the influence of different sources, you might root against them.

  I want GoAK to succeed. I also sympathize with the archaeologists. The Unegkurmiut didn’t merely alter trees when they were hungry. These spruce forests were for them what whale oil was in Melville’s time and what fossil fuels are in ours—the resource on which the entire economy, the entire material culture, depended. Spruce bark served as siding for Unegkurmiut houses and steam baths. With the pitch they patched the skin hulls of their kayaks and bidarkas, waterproofed their wooden bowls, started their fires. They chewed spruce pitch chewing gum, and applied spruce pitch bandages to their wounds. A culturally modified tree is to an Alaskan archaeologist what an oil field or strip mine or, for that matter, a collector beach would be to Raynor’s hypothetical archaeologist of the future.

  Most vehemently, Ted Raynor rants against Sarah Palin and all the blind indifference that she in his mind has come to represent: “You’d think that since this is a state wilderness marine park, the only one we have, the state would take some responsibility, but we got our funding cut by the state, by our governor.” A few hundred yards south of the bocce court, just past a big color wheel that one of the volunteers has assembled out of fishing floats on the gravelly sand, we turn single file through the surfgrass onto a narrow trail. “If state land is not a state responsibility, then is it the Indonesian government who’s responsible?” Raynor asks. He is clearly fond of this line about the Indonesian government. Over the next few days, I will hear him deliver it multiple times. I don’t yet have an answer to Raynor’s question, but Sarah Palin did, an answer both simple and simplistic: since much of the debris comes from elsewhere, it is neither Alaska’s fault, nor Alaska’s responsibility.

  By the end of that summer, I will get to know Raynor pretty well. In addition to delivering screeds, he likes to imagine that his actions are divinely ordained, but his preferred deities, unlike Palin’s, are Mother Nature and his dead pit bull Codi—Saint Codi, Raynor calls him now
. For good luck, he keeps a gold-plated locket of Saint Codi’s ashes on the dashboard of his eighteen-foot tin fishing boat, the Cape Chacon, anchored across the lagoon from the Johnita II. “Mother Nature likes us,” I will hear him say once. “We call what we do ‘wiping Mother Nature’s ass.’”

  Raynor also likes to put on authoritative airs, as if he were in charge of an actual military operation. Instead of answering yes-or-no questions “yes” or “no,” for instance, he’ll say, “affirmative” or “negative,” as when, after a volunteer mentions that Japanese fishermen no longer use glass balls as floats, Raynor replies, correctly: “Negative. They still use them.” Formerly a charter boat captain like Cliff Chambers, a couple of years ago he got sick of chartering. Now being field manager for GoAK’s summer beach cleanups is his only job. Last year he worked six weeks. This year he is going to work ten. “Hey, I’m improving,” he says. The rest of the year he trains for marathons by running up mountains. According to Pallister, Raynor has run eight hundred miles in the past nine months.

  A favorite topic of conversation is which actresses he would and wouldn’t “do.” He finds it amusing to pretend that the actress Jessica Alba is his girlfriend. Sarcastically, he’s given to using what he thinks is fashionable slang—“I’m down with that,” or “You the man.” He’s also given to rhapsodizing, with heartfelt sincerity, about the beauty of the Alaskan wilderness in general and of Gore Point in particular. It is, he feels, one of the most beautiful places on earth. The Alaskan wilderness and his pit bull—the living one—are the two things he cares most about in this world. He tried settling down once, with a kayaking guide. Then one morning she woke up and said, “I thought you might be the one. But you’re not.”

  The trail dips and meanders along the boundary between a spruce forest and a meadow where wildflowers are in bloom. Raynor identifies them for me by name: purple fireweed, lupine, wild geranium, chocolate lily. “Know why they call it a chocolate lily? ’Cause it smells like chocolate. Take a sniff.” I bend the somewhat purple, vaguely chocolate-colored flower to my nostrils. It doesn’t smell like chocolate. It smells like a flower. “Gotcha,” Raynor says, with a big self-satisfied grin that makes it easy to imagine what he was like as a teenager.

  The trail curves into the forest. We pass an Unegkurmiut house pit, and a culturally modified tree. I begin to notice the branches Pallister had mentioned, the ones sheered off by the winter storms. They’re furry with moss. On the forest floor beneath them grows a dense understory of salmonberry and devil’s club, the latter of which Pallister warns me not to touch. Pinching the edge of one of the big flat leaves, he gingerly lifts it up. The underside bristles with thorns that are, he says, “damn hard to get out.”

  Ravens caw in the treetops, and Bryn, AWOL in the understory, barks in reply. Here and there shafts of sunlight penetrate the canopy, gilding the trunks of some of the trees but not others, dropping pretty pools of shine that make the devil’s club fairly glow. As clouds pass overhead, the pools dim and brighten, brighten and dim. In the distance, trash bags, some yellow, others white, flash between the trees. “We used to be walking by garbage already,” Raynor says. We are at present exactly four hundred feet from the ocean. Raynor knows. Michael Armstrong, the reporter for the Homer News, “GPS’d it.” If you listen closely, you can barely hear the faint huzzah of the surf crashing on the windward shore. The huzzah grows steadily louder as we walk.

  “Holy crap,” Pallister says. Our file comes to a halt. Snaking across the forest floor is what appears to be a black plastic anaconda but what is in fact some sort of PVC duct, at least a dozen feet long, pumped full of Styrofoam. “Haven’t seen anything like that before,” says Pallister. “Foam must be to keep it from crushing at depth probably. Christ almighty.” A little farther he spots a hollow stalk of bamboo and shouts, “Hey! Bamboo!” Bamboo, of course, is not native to Alaska. The stalk of it lying there in the devil’s club almost certainly traveled here from Hawaii or Asia. My hopes rise. This second beachcombing expedition promises to be far more fruitful than my day trip to Kruzof Island. I am nearing, I feel certain, the terminus of one thread in my tangled trail.

  I hoped that in following my trail I’d attain some variety of enlightenment, but here, on this wild isthmus, approaching this trail’s end, I am if anything increasingly confused, increasingly, well, bewildered. Maybe Alaskan travelers like John Muir and Rockwell Kent have spoiled me to Gore Point’s wild beauty, leading me to expect too much.9 The wild beauty—and “purity” and “sublimity”—of such Alaskan places have been remarked on so often that Gore Point’s wild, pure, sublime beauty seems to me unremarkable. The usual words and thoughts and metaphors, the comparisons between a forest and a cathedral, or between the wilderness and the Louvre, have been worn out from overuse, the Alaskan scenery wrung dry of its power to astonish or exhilarate or enrapture. I can’t help wondering whether we need to reimagine the meanings of wilderness yet again, or perhaps abandon the word altogether. Perhaps its contradictory associations have worn the word out. Perhaps it signifies so much, it signifies nothing. Perhaps the more we worship it, preserve it, memorialize it, manage it, the more humanized, the more man-made, the more iconic, the more synthetic the wilderness becomes. Gore Point isn’t simply an isthmus in the wilderness, after all; it’s an isthmus in a state-protected wilderness park. Can a park be wild?10

  The trail bends 90 degrees as it nears the shore, and then we are there, before a great cairn of trash bags, pilgrims before a shrine. Among the bags are spherical fishing floats strung like beads the size of melons onto loops of rope. Pallister is dumbstruck, rapt with admiration. “I’m amazed you guys got this cleaned up this fast,” he finally says. “I’m completely amazed.” Surveying the scene, we can see other heaps of bags, distributed every few dozen yards along the length of the beach near the forest’s edge. There are more bags piled about back in the forest. Here and there, clustered in the grass, are loose objects too big or heavy for bags—the wheel of a car, a microwave oven, a television screen that, shorn of its cabinet, looks naked somehow, like a brain without a skull. Crusty sucker rings left by gooseneck barnacles dot its glossy screen. The barnacles themselves are long gone, scraped away in the surf, perhaps, or plucked off by scavenging birds.

  A hundred yards farther we leave the trail and wade through the devil’s club, thorns catching at our pants, to the last acre yet to be cleaned up. Behind the moldering trunk of a fallen spruce, a great drift of flotsam has collected, like water behind a dam. As we approach, the mossy earth begins to crackle and crunch underfoot. How strange! What is that sound? And then I recognize it, a sound one does not expect to hear in an old-growth forest: that of crumpling plastic bottles, a whole stratum of them, buried under humus and moss. This is what the entire shore was like two weeks before, Raynor says, and given the bagged evidence, I believe him.

  I climb down into the remaining drift and rummage around. At the surface, drift-net floats of the sort Ebbesmeyer showed me on his patio are the most abundant item; polyethylene water bottles, the second-most, many of them embossed with Asian characters.

  “An amazing amount of crap, isn’t it?” Pallister says.

  It is. Lost in a crap-inspired reverie, the three of us marvel for a moment in silence. Off in the understory Bryn is still barking at the ravens. Somewhere nearby a creek is flowing over rocks. The sunlit leaves of the devil’s club brighten and dim. Along with the wind in the branches, you can hear the unseen waves. And I’m sitting atop plastic. I unearth a flip-flop, and then, a few moments later, an empty container of Downy, the fabric softener. Surely, somewhere in this great drift there is yet to be found a Floatee.

  Pallister had answers to some of my doubtful questions about the value of a pristine wilderness. He thought the Gore Point midden heap was unsightly, but he objected to it on ecological as well as aesthetic grounds. This waste, he believed, was genuinely hazardous. “They’re pulling plastic out of that gyre and analyzing what’s on the surfac
e of it,” he told me back in Anchorage, “and they’re finding concentrations of persistent organic pollutants a million times higher than in the surrounding seawater.” By “they” Pallister mainly meant the legendary Charlie Moore and his crew of sailors and researchers.

  The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not merely a cosmetic problem, Moore like Pallister contends, nor is it, he believes, merely a symbolic one. No one knows exactly how many marine mammals and sea turtles and seabirds die when they entangle themselves in debris or ingest it. One widely cited if dubiously round estimate puts the toll of casualties at 100,000 animals a year. “Entanglement and ingestion, however, are not the worst problems caused by the ubiquitous plastic pollution,” Moore wrote in his Natural History article. Plastic polymers, as any toxicologist can tell you, have the peculiar propensity to adsorb chemicals colloquially known as POPs—those “persistent organic pollutants” Pallister was talking about.

  Such substances are “hydrophobic,” meaning that water molecules repel them. In the ocean, they collect at the surface, much as olive oil collects atop vinegar. POPs are also lipophilic, which means that oily substances attract them—or “adsorb” them, to use the term of art. In chemistry, when one substance is absorbed by another it permeates it. An adsorbed substance merely coats the surface, which is what POPs do to oily solids such as petrochemical plastics. The propensity of plastics to adsorb such substances is so well-known, in fact, that in the lab, toxicologists will sometimes dip a wand of sterilized plastic into a water sample to see what it collects. POPs also happen to include many of the villainous poisons made famous by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—PCBs, dioxin, DDT. Now controlled in most developed nations but less so elswhere, such toxins are surprisingly abundant at the ocean’s surface. Even in the U.S., where they’ve been banned, PCBs continue to leach from dumps—on coastlines, on abandoned military bases in the Aleutians—into the watershed. By concentrating these free-floating contaminants, Moore worries, even microscopic particles of plastic could become “poison pills.”