by Donovan Hohn
But the editor to whom I’m most indebted is Lewis Lapham’s successor at the helm of Harper’s, Roger Hodge. It was Roger who, when I called him from my classroom one afternoon in the spring of 2005 and recounted what little I then knew about the legend of the rubber ducks lost at sea, saw what I saw: the germ of a story, the makings of a quest. At the time I was already under commission to write a piece about the elephants of the Detroit Zoo. “Have you heard about this?” I said to Roger. “In 1992, a bunch of rubber ducks fell off a container ship.” Roger’s response: the elephants of the Detroit Zoo could wait. Throughout the past five years, he’s offered unceasing support, reading many drafts in progress, offering counsel and encouragement.
I’m similarly indebted to many of the people—scientists, beachcombers, naval architects, supernumeraries, toymakers—I met during the course of my travels. Eddy Carmack, Amy Bower, Robie Macdonald, Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Thomas Royer, John Toole, and Willa France were especially generous with their time. I’m also grateful to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where I underwent a weeklong crash course in oceanography.
I never would have made it home from the Arctic, book in hand, or at least in mind, were it not for the generous support of the Whiting Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. I wouldn’t have made it from idea to book without the guidance of my agent, Heather Schroder at ICM. Or from rough draft to final draft without the help of Emily Votruba, copy editor, and my intrepid research assistants, Joseph Bernstein and Justin Stone. Matt Fishbane, Lia Miller, and Ted Ross also helped check many facts. Alice Karekezi, Claire Jeffers, and Matt Flegenheimer spent long, tedious hours transcribing recordings. I’ve tried hard to get the facts right, but any errors are mine alone.
In Seattle, Pat, John, and Clare O’Connor repeatedly provided me with a safe harbor, fetching me from the airport and from the docks, feeding me, listening to me carry on about seafaring and childhood and currents. In Ann Arbor, Jeremiah Chamberlin and Natalie Bakopoulos let me use their home as a writer’s retreat. In Manhattan, John and Angela Chimera provided a heroic amount of grandparenting while their son-in-law was off having a look at the watery part of the world. My own father helped in innumerable ways, not least of all by believing in this possibly foolish errand of mine.
To anyone who thinks that those who can’t do, teach, I say, teaching is doing; and furthermore, many of those who “do,” can’t teach; and furthermore, many of those who can teach, also “do.” The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from sailor to schoolmaster. I’ve been waiting decades to acknowledge some of the teachers who taught me: Mrs. Peskin (thanks for The Little Prince!); Mr. Rees (for everything); Mr. Tacke; Mr. Wright; Ms. Lyons; David Walker (also for everything); David Young (forgive me); Ralph Lombreglia; Charles Baxter; Eileen Pollack. Then there are the teachers at Friends Seminary with whom I taught—Maria Fahey and Sarah Spieldenner, especially. Then there are the students whom I taught, and from whom I learned—too many to name here, but I will mention one student in particular, the one who, by introducing me to the legend of the rubber ducks lost at sea, changed my life: Evan “Big Poppa” Drellich, no longer pudgy, now a journalist. Evan, may Luck Duck continue to bring you luck.
Finally, to my wife, I say: Beth, it was a long and at times arduous journey, but we made it.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans.
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Sitting on a sea-chest, and swaying to and fro because the ship compelled me to a figure of woe, I began to consider whether it was only the books about the sea which I had loved hitherto, and not the sea itself.
—H. M. Tomlinson, The Sea and the Jungle
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NOTES
1 Confusingly, the conventions for indicating the directions of currents contradict those for indicating the direction of winds. An easterly wind blows from east to west; an easterly current flows west to east.
2 Later, I looked up the passage in The Day of the Locust in which the phrase “sargasso of the imagination” appears. As he contemplates the jumbled stage sets on that Hollywood backlot, Nathanael West’s protagonist is reminded—just as I’d been reminded of The Day of the Locust when listening to Ebbesmeyer—of something he’d once read, an adventure novel for boys called In the Sargasso Sea by a certain Thomas Allibone Janvier. Curious what West’s protagonist had in mind, I procured a copy of In the Sargasso Sea. Published in 1898, the novel recounts the fantastical adventures of a twenty-three-year-old mechanical engineer named Roger Stetworth who at the outset of his journey—as he freely admits with the benefit of hindsight—was “very young and very much of a fool.” While crossing the Gulf Stream aboard a slave ship called the Golden Hind, Stetworth strikes up a conversation with a kindly mate, the only kindly mate aboard, and this kindly mate tells him the legend of the Sargasso Sea, comparing the flotsam stranded there to “a sort of floating island . . . as big as the area of the United States.” The second mate’s description, Stetworth says, “took a queer deep hold upon me, and especially set me to wondering what strange old waifs and strays of the ocean might not be found in the thick of that tangle if only there were some way of pushing into it and reaching the hidden depths that no man ever yet had seen.” Thereafter ensues a series of improbably disastrous and fortuitous plot twists that will—surprise!—deliver Stetworth into those hidden depths, where he discovers what he variously describes as a “strange floating continent,” “a hideous sea-labyrinth,” “a graveyard” of dead ships, “a hideous wilderness,” “a great marine museum.”
3 Or, better yet, something like,There be many shapes of mystery,
And many things God makes to be,
Past hope or fear.
And the end men looked for
Cometh not,
And a path is there where no man sought.
So hath it fallen here.
(Lines by Euripides, chosen by Evan Connell as the epigraph for Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel.) The message inside the Orbisons’ bottle reads as follows: “SOS. I’m on a small Pacific island in the South Pacific. Paul.” Saint Paul, perhaps?
4 Sitting in the Orbisons’ living room, I remember something I’d read in Miles Harvey’s The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime. Harvey asks the psychologist Werner Muensterberger, author of Collecting: An Unruly Passion, to explain the mind of the obsessive collector, and in reply Muensterberger tells him about a man who stopped hunting big game and started buying African art. In the psychologist’s opinion, both trophy hunting and art collecting could be traced to the primal animism of hunters and gatherers. “There is reason to believe that the true source of the habit is the emotional state leading to a more or less perpetual attempt to surround oneself with magically potent objects,” Muensterberger writes in his book. I can’t help wondering if the buying habits of Americans don’t derive from that emotion
al state that Muensterberger describes. Perhaps we are hunter-gatherers of the mall. Perhaps our perpetual dissatisfaction derives from the ease of the hunt and the never-ending supply of magically potent objects that beckon us, only to lose their potency once possessed, because enchantment has an evanescent half-life. Perhaps this explains the ten thousand varieties of rubber duck.
5 In fact the name of the town is a contraction of shee atika, Tlingit for “the ocean side of Shee Island.” What exactly shee means, no one seems to know.
6 On the first floor of his condo in a kind of rec room was a great ziggurat of cardboard boxes that he hadn’t bothered to unpack, and upstairs in the carpeted living/dining room were a few Christmas decorations he hadn’t bothered to put away—two stuffed snowmen on a windowsill, a bowl of sparkly balls on a counter, a string of unlit Christmas lights entangled in an ivy plant, the leafy vines of which tumbled from ceiling to floor down a macramé hanger. Neither had Pallister bothered to remove Jane’s message from the answering machine. He still hoped to win her back.As it happened, Jane was there in the kitchen that night, but only briefly, to bake a batch of homemade cookies. They were for her three sons, who’d been out at Gore Point for the past two weeks. In their absence, I felt a bit like a surrogate, like an exchange student adopted by a host family of strangers, a dysfunctional host family of strangers. It would be the next day before Pallister confided in me about Jane’s desertion. But like many people brought up in unhappy families, I felt I possessed a kind of sixth sense for marital discord. It didn’t take long for me to detect in that kitchen, beneath the homey smell of melting marshmallows and morsels, the old familiar signals—the unrequited glance, the small talk freighted with simmering subtextual resentments that threatened to boil over any second into a quarrel. Pallister plucked an oatmeal cookie from a baking sheet. Jane flashed him a glare, which he ignored.
