from other drift experiments, both intentional and disastrous, suggest that flotsam can cross the Arctic in three years, or in six years, or eight, or ten, or more.
Gazing into the indeterminate mists of his climatological crystal ball, Ebbesmeyer nevertheless hazarded an augury, one in which he’d had enough confidence, back in 2003, to put the beachcombers of New England on alert: seven or eight years after the day or night they fell overboard, five or six years after entering the ice pack, some of the toys would escape through Fram Strait and find themselves abob again, this time among icebergs and melting floes. In the North Atlantic some would catch an offshoot of the Gulf Stream and ride it to Northern Europe. Those that strayed west into the Labrador Current would begin the long, two-thousand-mile journey south toward Kennebunkport.
Before flying to Seattle, I’d made a day trip to Maine to visit that beachcombing couple who thought they’d seen a Floatee. Bethe Hagens and her boyfriend Waynn Welton—drawn to each other, perhaps, by the unusual spellings of their first names—had taken me to the southeast end of Gooch’s Beach, the scene of their discovery. On that afternoon in 2003, the sun had been shining and the tide had been out. There had been sailboats on the blue water. The day I visited, by contrast, was damp and drizzly. The tide was at full flood. All that remained between the stone seawall and the surf was a narrow runner of sand. A lit Marlboro in one hand and his sandals in the other, rain beading on the lenses of his glasses and in his beard, Waynn Welton strode knee-deep into the sea and sloshed around until, phantasmal in the drizzle, he found what he’d gone wading for. “It was right there!” he hollered, a wave darkening the hem of his shorts. “Right around where that sippy cup is!” I followed his pointed finger. Where at low tide one sunny afternoon a duck—maybe yellow, maybe white—had perched atop the seaweed, a blue sippy cup with a pink lid now floated alone inside a corral of rocks. A wave came in and the cup rolled and bumped around.
I’d assumed that Ebbesmeyer shared my doubts about Hagens and Welton’s alleged discovery. The question marks he’d printed on his map suggested as much. Now, however, he told me that there was “no question” in his mind that the couple had indeed seen one of the 7,200 ducks lost at sea. Hagens was a trained anthropologist, after all, with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He drew a courtroom analogy: “It’s sort of like, you have an accident at a stoplight. What did you see? Well, there are some good observers and there are some bad observers. Somebody who details what they saw precisely, the jury will listen to that.” Besides, Hagens wasn’t his only eyewitness. He’d received one other credible report, from “a lady in Scotland” who’d happened on a frog: “Again she didn’t pick it up. I said, ‘What did it look like?’ She said, ‘Well, it was kind of buried in the sand.’ I sent her a picture, and she said, ‘That’s it.’ ”
Hagens had described her duck after hearing Ebbesmeyer describe one on the radio; instead of asking his witness in Scotland to pick her partially buried frog from a lineup of frogs, Ebbesmeyer had sent her a mug shot of the suspect. Objection! I thought, but didn’t say. Who was I to accuse the learned oceanographer of leading a witness? Of confabulating facts? Of making believe? Besides, like him, like the subscribers to Beachcomber’s Alert! and to newspapers and magazines the world over, like Eric Carle and his juvenile readers, like Bethe Hagens and Waynn Welton and Big Poppa, I wanted to believe.
Although his library of shoes may suggest otherwise, Ebbesmeyer has not amassed a museum of flotsam in his basement. He collects stories and data, not things. Fat three-ring binders occupy most of the shelf space. They contain “a small portion” of the studies he has conducted over the years. Reading the handwritten labels masking-taped to their spines, I wondered how many of these studies had scientific value and how many were merely the glorified puzzles with which the heavyset Dr. E. had desperately occupied his mind.
I saw binders labeled “Fishing Floats” and “Vikings,” “Phytoplankton” and “Drifting Coffins,” “Eddies” and “Icebergs.” Beside a paperback copy of The Egyptian Book of the Dead was an entire binder devoted to Isis and