by Donovan Hohn
And PCBs aren’t only carcinogenic. They impair the immune system, increasing vulnerability to opportunistic viruses. They reduce fertility. In laboratory tests conducted on monkeys, they’ve been shown to stunt “neurological development,” specifically “short term memory and learning.” They concentrate in breast milk. And according to the laws of biomagnification, the predators at the top of the food chain carry the heaviest contaminant burden. The killer whales of the North Pacific are among the most intoxicated mammals on earth. So are human populations that eat a fishy diet. So are the albatrosses that nest on Laysan Island. Look again at the plastic duck Bryan Leiser found just north of Gore Point; you won’t see any of this. You’ll see a faded, sea-battered bath toy, an icon of childhood. “Everything tells a story,” Ebbesmeyer likes to say. Perhaps, but not all stories are visible, no matter how illimitably long you study the evidence. Some stories only a mass spectrometer can tell.
16 Additionally you will pass a sign reading MARK TWAIN MONKEY POD TREE. In his Hawaiian travelogue, Twain makes mention of riding a mule to the summit of Kilauea, of visiting the scene of Captain Cook’s death, of trying in vain to procure coconuts by hurling rocks at them, of enjoying himself lecherously at a hula dance, of investigating the burial cave of a dead Hawaiian king (where he and his traveling companion blundered upon a skeletal hand in a burial canoe). He even makes mention of a cistern tree that collects freshwater and a mango tree that collects exceptionally delicious mangoes. But nowhere does he mention planting a monkey pod tree, or of planting any other sort of tree. Perhaps he did and neglected to mention it. The tree that he supposedly planted blew down in a hurricane in 1957. This impostor grew from a salvaged shoot.
17 Whether or not it was now, Moore’s Spanish hadn’t always been perfect: he’d intended to name his research foundation after an endangered species of Mexican seaweed that he thought was called algalita. In fact, the Spanish for the weed is alguita—little algae. Hence the name of his catamaran. Until his fateful detour into the North Pacific in 1998, protecting and restoring kelp forests had been one of the foundation’s main missions.
18 In the spring of 2010, cetologists in Washington State would use similar forensic methods, investigating the stomach of a thirty-seven-foot-long gray whale that had washed up, dead, near Seattle. Among the items they found: duct tape, electrical tape, fabric (miscellaneous), sock, sweatpant leg, towel, fishing line, golf ball, green rope, nylon braided rope, red plastic cylinder, black fragments, CapriSun juice pack, miscellaneous bag material (times twenty-six), red plastic stake, sandwich bag, ziplock bag, rubbery string, surgical glove, “unknown shell-like material, possibly natural.”
19 It didn’t help that in a book on oceanography, I’d recently learned why NOAA research vessels no longer permit swim calls—not long ago, a scientist swimming in the Caribbean lost a leg to a tiger shark. Nor did it help that Amy Young had told me about a surfer friend of hers who’d lost a ham-size hunk of thigh to the jaws of a shark. Nor did it help that, aboard the Alguita, I’d been reading and admiring Peter Matthiessen’s Blue Meridian, about a search for the great white. Matthiessen includes many impressively detailed accounts of attacks by what South Africans call the “white death.”
20 Like those facing the Laysan albatross, the threats to monk seals, a biologist named Bud Antonelis explained to me, are legion. There’s the increase in shark predation caused in part by the dredging of lagoons. There’s the loss of breeding grounds to rising, warming seas. There’s the toxic waste dumped by the U.S. military, the toxoplasmosis contracted from cat pee, the spread of West Nile virus. Of all the perils monk seals face, the most memorable one to my mind is this: changing phocine demographics have led to a shortage of females, and in response to this shortage horny bull seals have grown murderously, pedophilically aggressive, drowning and suffocating female pups while attempting to mate with them, thereby reducing the female population further still. And although the number of entanglements has fallen since the cleanup efforts began, the rate of entanglement in 2004 was actually seven times higher than in 2000. What accounts for the spike? During El Niño years such as 2004, the boundaries of the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone shift south, engulfing the monk seal’s habitat. Even in more typical years, the ocean deposits an estimated fifty-two tons of debris on the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
21 If I don’t make it to Kamilo Beach then at least I’d like to make it to Green Sand Beach, which I read about in The Rough Guide to Hawaii: “It is greenish in a rusty-olive sort of way, but if you’re expecting a dazzling stretch of green sand backed by a coconut grove you’ll be disappointed. The only reason to venture here is if you feel like braving a four-mile hike along the oceanfront, with a mild natural curiosity at the end.” The green sand is pulverized olivine. Olivine sounds like a cosmetic product or else a butter substitute but is in fact a mineral forged in volcanoes.
22 Later, traveling alone in Guangzhou, I would hire a twenty-two-year-old freelance translator who called herself Amy, a name she preferred to the Chinese one her parents gave her. Her ideas of America were strongly influenced by her favorite television show, Sex and the City, the appeal of which was obvious: the lives of its characters were like fantasy versions of Amy’s own. She too was a single, independent woman who’d come to the big city seeking excitement and glamour, and although she’d so far attained more of the former than the latter, she was by China’s standards a success, an entrepreneurial escapee from Guangdong’s formerly rural countryside, lifted up by her good English from the life of drudgery to which some of her friends and family are still condemned. When she was growing up, everyone in her town worked in the fields. Now they work in a factory making electrical cables, she said.She was the first woman in her family to have gone to college, the first to have moved away, the first to have traveled abroad on business (to Hong Kong, Vietnam, and once to Stuttgart). Even though she struggled to pay her rent, she was helping to put her younger brother through school. Evenings she taught English to salespeople. By day she worked as a translator and sourcing agent for foreign businessmen who came to inspect factories or find suppliers. “My mother’s Buddhist,” she told me, “but I’m not anything,” except, that is, “a workaholic.” She almost never returned home to visit her family—no trains go there, you have to take three different buses, and furthermore, the mosquitoes there are really big. “It’s crazy!” she said of the mosquitoes. “Crazy” was her favorite English word. The characters on Desperate Housewives were “really crazy.” Her friends told her she was crazy for working so much. Someday, she’d like to live abroad, preferably in Australia, though she’d settle for Germany. In the meantime, she spent most of her free time on her cell phone or at her computer, surfing the Web, keeping up with her clients via Skype, the Internet phone service. Afraid that she wasn’t skinny or pretty enough, yet unafraid to speak her mind (“Put me in your book!” she said when I told her I was a writer), she reminded me a lot of the young Americans I used to teach.
23 Vendors sell black-market goods openly on the streets of Guangzhou. One night outside my hotel there, a man would approach me with what looked like a deck of cards, fanning them with his thumb and saying, “Would you like some girls?” Each card showed a different photograph.
24 MGA Entertainment, the maker of Bratz dolls, insisted at the time that the National Labor Committee had mischaracterized the conditions in this factory, though similar practices have been documented at other Guangdong toy factories.
25 As the ferry made its way up the Pearl River, there would materialize out of the smog, like ghost ships, idle barges and little junks and great container ships awaiting repair. At one point the span of a bridge suddenly loomed overhead, an unfinished bridge; the span terminated in midair. Zooming toward China, I paged through Jonathan D. Spence’s In Search of Modern China, and stumbling upon the following passage, written in the early 1800s by a scholar named Gong Zizhen, I thought of the Pearl River’s smog: “When the wealthy
vie with each other in splendor and display while the poor squeeze each other to death; when the poor do not enjoy a moment’s rest while the rich are comfortable; when the poor lose more and more while the rich keep piling up treasures; when in some ever more extravagant desires awaken, and in others an ever more burning hatred; when some become more and more arrogant and overbearing in their conduct, and others ever more miserable and pitiful until gradually the most perverse and curious customs arise, bursting forth as though from a hundred springs and impossible to stop, all of this will finally congeal in an ominous vapor which will fill the space between heaven and earth with its darkness.”
26 About that breakdown and vanishing act, it’s the old, familiar story: the parent, sometimes a sad-sack father, sometimes a clinically depressive mother, takes flight from his or her life of quiet desperation and runs off in search of some Northwest Passage of the mind or heart. My mother searched for hers every few years and finally, failing to find it, tried unsuccessfully to overdose on tricyclic antidepressants. There was institutionalization. She recovered, partially. Today she lives alone, unemployed, in a condominium her exhusband, my father, bought for her so that she would stop showing up, needy and homeless, on his sons’ doorsteps. On the rare visit I pay her, she will occasionally try to resurrect that old alliterative sobriquet, Donovan Duck, speaking in a baby voice, as if I were still two, as if time could be turned back. Every so often, my mother will dig out a snapshot of me as a child and mail it to me. Her reasons for choosing a particular photograph are always a bit mysterious. I study them for significance. Not long ago, she sent a photograph in which, naked, ten months old, sitting in the bath across from my brother, I appear to be attempting to gnaw through my rubber duck’s skull. The picture is dated January 1973.
27 Writes the art historian Anne Higonnet, “The modern child is always the sign of a bygone era, of a past which is necessarily the past of adults, yet which, being so distinct, so sheltered, so innocent, is also inevitably a lost past, and therefore understood through the kind of memory we call nostalgia.”Take a look, for instance, at one of the most famous representations of childhood, Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy, for which the painter dressed up a neighbor’s son in a luxurious costume so dazzling it seems spun from sky. To a contemporary eye, the lad’s blue satin suit, beribboned shoes, and lace collar look old-fashioned, but no more so than the painting itself. It was painted in 1770, after all, when people favored such fancy getups, we assume. In fact, the outfit was already old-fashioned in Gainsborough’s time, as was the pristine natural landscape over which the boy so aristocratically presides. What to a contemporary eye appears to be the portrait of a noble scion, commissioned no doubt by his proud parents, is actually a bit of mise-en-scène, an eighteenth-century precursor to photographs of children dressed like shepherdesses or cowboys and posed before painted scrims at Coney Island or Sears.
A hundred years after Gainsborough painted The Blue Boy, the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais gave the world another famous portrait of childhood, Bubbles. Here again is a child fancifully dressed in a lace collar and an antiquated suit, this time of green velvet rather than blue satin. Millais’s preschooler is younger than Gainsborough’s tween, and he is also cuter—porcelain-faced, pink-lipped, with a curly mop of strawberry blond hair. Whereas the Blue Boy gazes directly at the viewer, assuming the conventional, almost cocky pose of an adult, Millais’s moppet has been transfixed by the bubble he has just blown from a pipe. He is, it seems, assuming no pose at all. The original title of the painting was A Child’s World—that realm so unlike our own into which the painting offers a voyeuristic glimpse. Rather than presiding over a landscape, the boy sits on a block of weathered stone in a garden of potted plants, the sort of place one might encounter in the pages of Beatrix Potter. The scenery has grown more domestic, more suburban, but it still evokes a bygone, preindustrial past. Thanks to Pears Soap, which purchased the copyright to Bubbles and turned it into a print advertisement, Millais’s mass-produced image eventually eclipsed Gainsborough’s museum piece in the iconography of childhood, adorning collectible plates and ephemeral toiletries as well as the pages of magazines. Soap bubbles have been a symbol of innocence ever since.
In her amply illustrated study Pictures of Innocence, Anne Higonnet identifies several subgenres of child portraiture. Along with children in costumes (the genre to which Bubbles and The Blue Boy belong), there is, for instance, the genre of children with pets. Antique costumes, Higonnet argues, make the child seem timeless; pets make them seem like animals—less conscious than us, less human, more natural: “Usually the pets are small and cuddly—kittens, puppies and bunnies were favorite choices—cueing the viewer’s interpretation of the child.”
28 The reefers must be plugged into special electrified bays or their contents will spoil. Hazardous chemicals must be stored in special compartments belowdecks to minimize the danger of a conflagration or spill. The lightest containers must go on top, or the forces impinging on the bottom containers when the ship begins to pitch and roll may be greater than they can bear, and the entire stack will topple, sending the top containers tumbling overboard. The weight to starboard must balance the weight to port, or the ship may dangerously list.
29 A surprisingly good poet, considering that her autobiographical, book-length poem, called Incunabulum, is self-published. A passage:I’ve woven dreams from streams and rivers
and seas of water. See what has become
of the vision that guided my hand: a strand
of fresh Lake Wisota water from the cove
sheltering sailboats of a seven year old’s
imagination. Threads from the swift Chippewa,
that swept my message in a bottle down
the Mississippi to the sea. Whole bolts
of wild, salty spray, rough-nubbed twill
from Greenland’s southern coast. Grief-
stitched, musty, smelling of the unrescued,
of the drowned, and the faint, sickly-sweet
stain of fuel slicking the spot where
their ship had been.
30 While the customs agents inspected my passport, I thought of Melville, who, in 1866, once again living in the insular city of the Manhattoes, stopped trying to earn a living from his decreasingly profitable writing and took a day job as a customs agent. For two decades he clung, Hawthorne’s son-in-law later put it, “like a weary but tenacious barnacle to the N.Y. Custom House.”
31 One afternoon at Woods Hole I listened to a behavioral biologist explain the surprising discovery that killer whales exhibit the rudiments of culture; hunting methods, taught to the young, can vary from pod to pod. In the Woods Hole necropsy lab, I visited a sub-zero meat locker where dolphins in yellow body bags hung like dry cleaning from a motorized rack. “Know how you anesthetize alligators?” the lab technician quipped. “Stick’em in the fridge.”
32 What is the ocean?Tyler (17, totally blind since birth)
The ocean is a vast area of salt water. The salt from the water creates a unique scent in the atmosphere. The fast moving waves create a sound that is pleasing to the ear. The swiftly moving water is pleasing to the touch when one is standing or swimming in it. The ocean and its many effects provide many benefits to one’s physical and emotional well-being.
Jon (16, partially blind)
THE OCEAN
Vast treacherous waves
Ships travel to continents
Gone for months on end.
Minh (17, totally blind since birth)
The sea reminds me of romance, and meditation. It’s a rough and dangerous world. It’s like our world except in an animal way. The sea also has moods, for example being stormy, or it can be as calm as a river. Or it can flow smoothly like a stream. The sea can be known as a bubbling pot of soup with all the waves. Some seas have different temperatures. Sometimes there is more seasoning than most.
Igor (16, totally blind since birth)
The sea is a vast
body of water. It is filled with seaweed. The sea is filled with waves. You would body surf. As you swim in the sea, you would absorb the salt. The salt helps you float. As you walk along the shore, you step on the sand. The sand sticks to your toes. Shells wash up and your feet are tangled up in seaweed.
Michelle (17, partially blind)
It is very big and full of fish. My impression of the ocean: Whoosh, Whoosh, blub, blub . . . .
33 Northern fulmars breed on Arctic cliffs, and when nesting have a memorable weapon with which to defend their single, precious egg: if any predator approaches, a nesting fulmar will vomit onto it a jet of stinky and potentially lethal stomach oil. They can also desalinate seawater, expressing the salt through the tubes on their beaks. (Thus the name “tubenoses.”) Like albatrosses, they forage at the surface, and like albatrosses they end up swallowing a lot of plastic, Fifield says, even up here in Arctic waters, far from the Garbage Patch.
34 By the estimate of the naturalist E. C. Pielou, in the seas east and west of Greenland, there are some ten thousand icebergs afloat at any time and their numbers are greatest here, in Baffin Bay, a body of water rimmed by calving glaciers. The biggest icebergs, Pielou reports, weigh ten million tons and can rise to heights of two hundred feet or more—550 feet being the record. And the part you can see, above the waterline, represents only the uppermost fraction of the thing. An iceberg that rises 200 feet above the waterline might extend 1,600 feet beneath it. Because of their deep keels, the wind has little effect on their motion. It’s the currents that determine their fate, and the currents of Baffin Bay, like those of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, converge. Few icebergs escape into southern waters. The one that sank the Titanic was an aberration. Most stay up here, circling around, diminishing with every lap.
