Ebbesmeyer had given me, not the one I’d retrieved from Gore Point, and seriously considered chucking him overboard just to see with my own eyes that image I had been imagining, the image of a lone duck on the open sea. No one was around to stop me. I put my hand in my pocket. I felt the little plastic ball of its head. How easy it would be.
The movement of water along the hull of a boat is deceiving. With no fixed point, it’s hard to separate the speed of the ship from the movement of the waves, which is why sailors in the past would throw a log overboard and count the knots of rope that unraveled behind it in order to calculate speed. How would the duck move across the chaos of the surface? I wondered. The Ottawa, big as it was, seemed hardly to move at all, but surely a little plastic duck would change the scale, making the ocean seem all the grander. Surely it would topple about, overturning and righting and overturning again, though I supposed it was possible that it might ride upright over the waves, the way we would like to picture it, sliding backward up to the crest, and then tipping as it slid down the other side, the waves moving beneath it. I withdrew my duck from my pocket, held it the way you’d hold a baseball, and leaned over the rail.
But I hesitated. Jettisoning it seemed wrong, and not simply because I wanted to keep it, nor because I had promised to return it to Curtis Ebbesmeyer when I was done with it and still meant to keep my promise, nor because by jettisoning it I would be violating international law and making an infinitesimal contribution to the pollution of the sea. It seemed wrong because Moby Duck is and has always been a dream. The story I and others were enchanted by was enchanting because it was illusory, and no matter how much forensic evidence I assembled, it would remain illusory. A reenactment would get me no closer to that event. That event had taken place, but that place could not be visited, because not even a container ship can subdue the seas of time. I knew that if I threw my duck overboard it would fall far short of the dream. I knew that if I threw it overboard, watching that yellow evanescent dot drift off, I’d be filled not with exhilaration but with disappointment and regret.
Pocketing my duck, I opened my notebook. What to write? I should have prepared something! “Fare thee well,” I began, then scribbled it out, remembering the line from Moby-Dick. “Good-bye, Moby Duck!” I began again. “Thou cans’t never return! God keep thee!” Writing this, I wasn’t even sure what I meant by this. To what would Moby Duck wish to return?
I tore the page free and folded it into quarters. On one side I drew a little duck, inscribing THE FIRST YEARS across its wing. On the other side, I wrote, QUACK! Then over the port rail of the deck I flung this little folded farewell, this prayer, the wind snatching it away faster than I’d anticipated. I lost sight of it the instant it left my fingers, and my heart sank. I had wanted to watch it drift away. But then, running to the taffrail, I saw it, leaping and spinning and diving over the boiling churn, blown open, fluttering, borne aloft by gusts of turbulence as if it were alive, dancing in the air. Then it dove suddenly down onto the white wake and was gone.
I stood there, inside the thunderous cavern of the Ottawa’s stern, gazing at the spot while water dripped down onto my head from the containers above, and my hands went numb on the cold rail, and my ears ached in the wind, and I felt sad—not unsatisfied. Not wishing I could do something more. Not wishing I could tip 28,800 toys into the sea to watch them float away, or uncork a bottle of champagne. Not disappointed, exactly, but sad, as though I had lost something.
I’m back in my little cabin now. It’s a slushy, half-frozen rain that I can see falling at an angle past my two portholes, the one looking out onto the maroon container, the other onto the white one. Although we are five days from Seattle, I think this trip may already be over. I just realized that we are,