I tug at my suit’s recalcitrant zipper with fingers gloved in spongy rubber, across the helipad, trying to extrude his right hand through the elastic cuff of a watertight sleeve, Gerd Braune, the Swiss reporter for the German wire service—balding, bespectacled, mustachioed, looking clerical—is muttering under his breath what I assume are German profanities. Other people are stumbling about like clumsy contortionists, tipsy Houdinis, yellow sleeves flapping. In the manner of a preschool teacher readying her wards for an outing in the snow, Lacombe assists us one by one, the Coast Guard inspector following after her, scribbling observations on a clipboard and checking his watch.
Lacombe, though she has the high voice and haircut of a choirboy, is a big woman, almost as tall as I am, and considerably wider and stronger. When she reaches me, she yanks my suit’s zipper to my chin, pulls the yellow hood over my head, and clasps the Velcro face mask across my mouth like a gag. Only my eyes and nose are left exposed to the warm, midsummer Nova Scotian afternoon. I feel like a cosmonaut, or astronaut, or aquanaut—some sort of naut. A cryonaut, I suppose you’d call someone equipped for a dip in the ice. Mummified in yellow neoprene, poaching in my own body heat, waiting to be inspected by the inspector with the clipboard, I find myself thinking that, overboard in a survival suit, if one wished, one could reenact the Arctic journey of the toys, or at least four hours of it. “When seamen fall overboard” in Arctic waters, Melville writes, “they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued in amber.”
The first leg of our voyage will take us to Resolute (population 229). There, the Snapper, the Australians, and Gerd Braune will all disembark, and several new supernumeraries will come aboard. Among them will be this expedition’s architect, a visionary oceanographer named Eddy Carmack. At Woods Hole, whenever I asked about the mystery I was trying to solve, those who didn’t summarily dismiss the journey of the toys as “folk science” and me as a fool in possession of an errand, John Toole among them, almost always said the same thing: the person you should really talk to is Eddy Carmack. This turns out to have been good advice.
Carmack, I was pleased to discover, is a believer in driftology. Last January, the day after the Hanjin Ottawa tied up in Seattle, I paid a visit to his office at the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, British Columbia. A fan of Beachcombers’ Alert! Carmack had known Ebbesmeyer since his graduate school days at the University of Washington, where the young Dr. E. was Carmack’s teaching assistant in an advanced physical oceanography course. “I just find it fascinating,” he said of Ebbesmeyer’s flotsam studies. “High-tech aside, this is telling us stuff million-dollar instruments can’t tell us—where stuff really goes.”
Although Carmack has spent much of his career studying the ocean the high-tech way, with conductivity-temperature-depth rosettes, geochemical tracers, and expendable bathythermographs, he’s also, every year since the year 2000, studied it the old-fashioned way, by setting bottles adrift. The Drift Bottle Project, he calls this ongoing Lagrangian experiment. With the help of sailors and scientists and Nova Scotian schoolchildren, he’s scattered more than four thousand bottles in icy water. Replies have come in from Alaska and Nunavut but also from exotic destinations—Russia, Brazil, England, France, Norway. “Norway, the Faroes, Orkney—those places are bottle magnets for bottles dropped in the eastern Arctic or the Irminger Sea,” Carmack told me.
It’s thanks to Carmack and to the Drift Bottle Project that I’ve been offered a cabin aboard the Louis. Officially speaking, I’m not a member of the press corps. Officially speaking I’m an unpaid research assistant, a volunteer bottle tosser. We’ve all been given a list titled “Crew on Board” and beside my name appear the words “Scientific Staff,” words that I would like to photocopy and send—triumphantly or perhaps vindictively or perhaps, come to think of it, pathetically—to my eleventh-grade chemistry teacher, Ms. H——, who snuffed out, as if they were the blue flames of so many Bunsen burners, the fanciful, marine biological dreams I’d once entertained. In fairness to her, my idea of a marine biologist was a romantic one, influenced far more by Doc from John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row than by the Krebs cycle or the table of the elements or the melting point of magnesium. As it so