fairs, making oracular pronouncements in the press, pronouncements like, “I think the ocean is writing to us. And I’m trying to figure out what it all means.” Or, “Why do we like to walk on the beach? . . . All the cells inside our bodies realize they’re close to their mom.” Or, my personal favorite: “The literature of things that float from here to there is so scattered, it makes no sense until you compress it. Then it begins to take on a glow, like radium.” When you’ve read too many issues of Beachcombers’ Alert! back to back, as I had, a faint, sickly glow did seem to radiate from the newsletter’s pages. Even its exclamatory title conveys a hint of apocalyptic alarm, and there are troubling ecological portents strewn among all the ruins and marvels.
But Ebbesmeyer is a conflicted prophet. He prefers the role of entertainer, taking corny, avuncular delight in his fabulous stories of messages in bottles and derelict boats. He enjoys the nicknames people have given him over the years, names that make him sound like a character from a comic book—Dr. Curt, Dr. Duck, Dr. Froggie. Jacques Cousteau’s movie Sea Hunt made Ebbesmeyer first consider a career in oceanography, and he shares with Cousteau a self-dramatizing flair. Every oceanographic study Cousteau conducted was an adventure. Ebbesmeyer, on the other hand, prefers the genre of mystery. He is a great fan of Arthur Conan Doyle, whose rationalistic, Victorian version of the gothic has exerted an obvious influence on the oceanographer’s imagination. When bodies or body parts wash up on the shores of the Pacific Northwest, detectives often give Ebbesmeyer a call, and he seems to take macabre delight in investigating these mysteries, mysteries like the case of the dismembered feet, or of the corpse packed into a suitcase.
“Shrill violin sounded from the second-story window at 221B Baker Street,” he begins one dispatch in Beachcombers’ Alert! written in the form of a lost Sherlock Holmes story, “The Case of the Baobab and the Bottle.” Ebbesmeyer appears in this fictional parody as the “heavyset” Dr. E., driftological specialist in messages in bottles (or MIBs, as he likes to call them), summoned by Holmes and Watson to Baker Street to provide expert testimony. But the oceanographer’s real alter ego in the parody is Holmes himself. “He desperately required a puzzle to occupy his mind which saw universes in the most trivial fact,” Ebbesmeyer says of the detective. The same could be said of him.
His own Baker Street is a quiet block in a quiet neighborhood near the main campus of the University of Washington, where back in the sixties he earned his Ph.D. Smaller than the adjacent houses, his bungalow, purchased from the fisherman who built it, exhibits a kind of cultivated slovenliness. Its peaked roof rests atop two squat brick columns. On the day I visited, a white rose trellis, bare and slightly askew, leaned against one of these columns as if left there by a distracted gardener. In the middle of the front lawn, inside a concrete planter box almost as big as the lawn itself, Ebbesmeyer’s wife was growing a miscellaneous assortment of vegetables and flowers—lavender, agapanthus, squash—above which the purple pom-poms of onion blossoms swayed atop their stalks. Navy-blue awnings overshadowed the porch, and peering into the semidarkness I could see four matching forest-green Adirondack chairs, lined up, side by side, as if to behold the vista of the lawn. Next to the front steps, a small American flag protruded from a terra-cotta pot. (It had been only a week since Independence Day.) At the top of the steps, a cat dish sat on a ledge beneath a little bell. Ebbesmeyer himself greeted me at the door. “Come in, come in,” he said.
His face was familiar to me from photographs I’d seen in the press and in the pages of Beachcombers’ Alert! where he makes frequent cameo appearances, displaying a water-stained basketball, hoisting a plastic canister that was supposed to have delivered Taiwanese propaganda to the Chinese mainland, gazing down deifically at the four Floatees perched on his furry forearm. He has a white beard, a Cheshire grin, and close-set eyes that together make his face a bit triangular. In the portrait that decorates the masthead of Beachcombers Alert!—small as Washington’s on a dollar bill—little pennants of light fly across the lenses of his glasses, which are large and square. Since Ebbesmeyer likes to wear Hawaiian shirts and a necklace of what appear to be