horizon, like some resurrected twenty-first-century Atlantis rising up out of the water into the night sky, which it polluted deliciously with light, an electrical dawn, my spirits rose too.
It was well after midnight by the time we reached pier 5, Hanjin’s container terminal in Seattle. Bob and Claire and much of the crew had gone to sleep, content to disembark the following morning. Not me. As a tugboat nosed the colossal ship toward the dock, I stood at the starboard rail, bags already packed. Ashore, a car and a truck materialized, and longshoremen climbed out. In hard hats and life vests, they took up their positions beside the yellow bollards, waiting for deckhands to throw them the lines. As soon as the ship had tied up, customs agents came aboard, and as soon as they cleared me, I rushed down the gangway onto the deserted sodium-lit pier.30 Among containers stacked six high in rows, I wandered, searching for the exit.
I’d had enough of seafaring. I was ready to fly—not sail, carbon footprint be damned—to the insular city of the Manhattoes and stay there a good long while. Ready to pend myself up in lath and plaster, tie myself to a counter, nail myself to a bench or clinch myself to a desk, so long as said pending, tying, nailing, or clinching came with decent health benefits and a retirement plan. Ready to circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon in the company of my long-suffering wife and my paternally neglected son.
To my paternally neglected son, when I got home, I’d read the opening chapters of The Wind and the Willows, and then, some Sabbath afternoon, I’d take him rowboating not on the life-threatening waters of Resurrection Bay but on the pond in Central Park, just as, in the very first chapter of The Wind and the Willows, River Rat takes landlocked Mole rowboating on the downstream backwaters of the river Thames. I, the oarsman, would play the part of River Rat. Young Bruno would be landlocked Mole. As he leaned back in his seat and felt the boat sway lightly under him, I would recite to him, dreamily, in character, the famous line: “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
In short, I was ready to come home. But I couldn’t. Not yet. What I’d gone searching for had yet to be found. I had one last riddle to puzzle out, one last journey to take—or rather to finish. It had begun one September morning, before I went sailing with Charlie Moore or visited the Po Sing plastics works or crossed the Pacific on the Hanjin Ottawa at the height of the winter storm season. It would end, months later, after a long hiatus and numerous detours, deep in the interior of the Canadian Arctic on the icy shores of the Northwest Passage.
THE BLIND OCEANOGRAPHER
At the main dock behind Smith Laboratory on Water Street in downtown Woods Hole, the research vessel Knorr was preparing to depart. Forklifts zipped around, beeping. Stevedores and deckhands walked the aluminum gangway, busy as leafcutter ants, loading and stowing cargo—provisions, instruments, a big cardboard box containing a new Nordic-Track treadmill for the Knorr’s onboard gym. Through the main dock’s chain link security gates, a silver minivan arrived, and a woman descended from the passenger seat. Forty-six years old, she was on this mid-September morning girlishly attired—as if for an afternoon of yachting on Vineyard Sound—in a rose-and-white waterproof jacket, white shorts, white sneakers. She had a pair of sunglasses pushed up into her coppery, shoulder-length hair and clutched a black leather pouch in her left hand. This was Amy Bower, a senior scientist in the Department of Physical Oceanography at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the chief scientist on the first leg of the voyage that was about to begin—voyage 192 it was officially and forgettably called. A photographer asked Bower to pose for a few publicity shots, dockside, against the picturesque backdrop of the Knorr.
Since its maiden voyage, in 1968, the Knorr had carried scientists to every corner of the ocean, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, the Gulf of Alaska to the Gulf of Maine, the Bay of Bengal to the Bay of Fundy. Aboard the Knorr scientists had collected the first images of the wrecked Titanic. They’d revealed the secrets of plate tectonics at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. In February 1977, above the Galápagos Rift, they’d sent a camera 8,250