perished from scurvy and hunger. The winds are gale force. The water is deep and black, and so is the sky. It’s snowing. The decks are slick. Your ears ache, your fingers are numb. Solitary, nocturnal circumambulations of the outer decks by supernumerary passengers are strictly forbidden, for good reason. Fall overboard and no one would miss you. You’d inhale the ocean and go down, alone. Nevertheless, there you are, not a goner yet, gazing up at the shipping containers stacked six-high overhead, and from them cataracts of snowmelt and rain are spattering on your head. There you are, listening to the stacked containers strain against their lashings, creaking and groaning and cataracting with every roll, and with every roll you are wondering what in the name of Neptune it would take to make stacks of steel—or for that matter aluminum—containers fall. Or you’re learning how to tie a bowline knot and say thank you in both Inuktitut and Cantonese.
Or you’re spending three days and nights in a shabby hotel room in Pusan, South Korea, waiting for your ship to come in, and you’re wondering what you could possibly have been thinking when you embarked on this harebrained journey, this wild duckie chase, and you’re drinking Scotch, and looking sentimentally at photos of your wife and son on your laptop, your wife and son who, on the other side of the planet, on the far side of the international date line, are doing and feeling and drinking God knows what. Probably not Scotch. And you’re remembering the scene near the end of Moby-Dick when Starbuck, family man, first officer of the Pequod, tries in vain to convince mad Ahab to abandon his doomed hunt. “Away with me!” Starbuck pleads, “let us fly these deadly waters! let us home!”
And you’re dreaming nostalgically of your former life of chalkboards and Emily Dickinson and parent-teacher conferences, and wishing you could go back to it, wishing you’d never contacted the heavyset Dr. E., or learned of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or met the Ahab of plastic hunters, or the heartsick conservationist or the foulmouthed beachcomber or the blind oceanographer, any of them. You’re wishing you’d never given Big Poppa the chance to write about Luck Duck, because if you hadn’t you’d never have heard the fable of the rubber ducks lost at sea. You’d still be teaching Moby-Dick to American teenagers. But that’s the thing about strong currents: there’s no swimming against them.
The next thing you know years have passed, and you’re still adrift, still waiting to see where the questions take you. At least that’s what happens if you’re a nearsighted, school-teaching, would-be archaeologist of the ordinary, with an indulgent, long-suffering wife and a juvenile imagination, and you receive in the mail a manila envelope, and inside this envelope you find a dozen back issues of a cheaply produced newsletter, and in one of those newsletters you discover a wonderful map—if, in other words, you’re me.
GOING OVERBOARD
[T]he great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
A RIDDLE ON THE SAND
We know where the spill occurred: 44.7°N, 178.1°E, south of the Aleutians, near the international date line, in the stormy latitudes renowned in the age of sail as the Graveyard of the Pacific, just north of what oceanographers, who are, on the whole, less poetic than mariners of the age of sail, call the subarctic front. We know the date—January 10, 1992—but not the hour.
For years the identity of the ship was a well-kept secret, but by consulting old shipping schedules published in the Journal of Commerce and preserved on scratched spools of microfiche in a library basement, I, by process of elimination, solved this particular riddle: the ship was the Evergreen Ever Laurel, owned by a Greek company called Technomar Shipping and operated by the Taiwanese Evergreen Marine Corporation, whose fir-green containers, with the company’s curiously sylvan name emblazoned across them in white block letters, can be seen around harbors all over the world. No spools of microfiche have preserved the identities of the officers and crew, however, let alone their memories of what happened that stormy day or night, and if the logbook from the voyage still exists, it has been secreted away to some corporate archive, consigned, for all intents and purposes, to oblivion.
We know that the ship departed Hong Kong on January 6, that it arrived in the Port of Tacoma on January 16, a day behind schedule, and that the likely cause for this delay was rough weather.