way over there, huge as a continent, was China, where, odds were, someone in some factory was at that very moment bringing new rubber ducks into the world. It was then, as I studied my map, trying in vain to imagine the journey of the toys, that there swam into my mind the most bewitching question I know of—What if?
What if I followed the trail of the toys wherever it led, from that factory in China, across the Pacific, into the Arctic? I wouldn’t be able to do it in a single summer. It would require many months, maybe an entire year. I might have to take a leave of absence, or quit teaching altogether. I wasn’t sure how or if I’d manage to get to all the places on my map, but perhaps that would be the point. The toys had gone adrift. I’d go adrift, too. The winds and currents would chart my course. Happenstance would be my travel agent. If nothing else, it would be an adventure, and adventures are hard to come by these days. And if I were lucky it might be a genuine voyage of discovery. Medieval Europeans divided the human lifetime into five ages, the first of which was known as the Age of Toys. It seemed to me that in twenty-first-century America, the Age of Toys never ends. Yes, stories fictional and otherwise can take us on illusory odysseys, but they can also take us on disillusory ones, and it was the latter sort of journey that I craved. It wasn’t that I wanted, like Cook and Amundsen and Vancouver and Bering and all those other dead explorers, to turn terra incognita into terra cognita, the world into a map. Quite the opposite. I wanted to turn a map into a world.
THE FIRST CHASE
One day Mr. Mallard decided he’d like to take a trip to see what the rest of the river was like, further on. So off he set.
—Robert McCloskey, Make Way for Ducklings
THE HEAVYSET DR. E.
There are two ways to get to the insular city of Sitka—by air and by sea. In my dreams, I would have picked up the frayed end of that imaginary, ten-thousand-mile-long trail that led from Sitka to Kennebunkport and followed it backward, Theseus style, to its source—backward across the Gulf of Maine, backward through the Northwest Passage, that legendary waterway which the historian Pierre Berton has described as a “maze of drifting, misshapen bergs,” a “crystalline world of azure and emerald, indigo and alabaster—dazzling to the eye, disturbing to the soul,” a “glittering metropolis of moving ice.” To Lieutenant William Edward Parry of the Royal Navy, who captained the Alexander into the maze in 1818, the slabs of ice looked like the pillars of Stonehenge.
By that summer, the summer of 2005, global warming had gone a long way toward turning Berton’s maze of bergs into the open shipping channel of which Victorian imperialists dreamed. The following September, climatologists would announce that the annual summer melt had reduced the floating ice cap to its smallest size in a century of record keeping. Nevertheless, a transarctic journey, even aboard an icebreaker, was out of the question if I wanted to make it to and from Sitka by the first of August.
Instead I’d booked passage on the M/V Malaspina, part of the Alaskan Marine Highway, which is in fact not a highway at all but a state-operated fleet of ferries. Sailing from Bellingham, Washington, the Malaspina would reach Sitka five days before the Beachcombers’ Fair began. If I flew home as soon as the fair ended, I would be in Manhattan a week before the baby arrived—assuming he or she did not arrive early, which, my wife’s obstetrician warned us, was altogether possible. Although not at all happy about my plan, Beth had consented, on two conditions: one, that if she felt a contraction or her water broke, I would catch the next flight to New York, no matter the cost; and two, that I would call her by cell phone at least once a day.
Although I would soon be joining up with him in Sitka, I was eager to meet the gumshoe oceanographer in whose footsteps I was following. On my way to Bellingham I made time for a stopover in Seattle. A reporter for the Oregonian once referred to Curtis Ebbesmeyer’s beachcombing correspondents as “disciples,” and he is an unlikely prophet figure of sorts, mailing out his epistles to the faithful, preaching the circuit of beachcombers’