Osiris, the star-crossed Egyptian gods. Ebbesmeyer told me the tragic ending of their tale: “Osiris’s brother killed him, put his body in a coffin, put the coffin in the Nile River, and it washed up three hundred miles to the north of Lebanon. His wife, Isis, went to find it, and she did. That’s the first documented drift of an object between point A and point B that I know of.” It was self-evident to me why oil companies had commissioned Ebbesmeyer to study the eddies swirling unpredictably through the Gulf of Mexico, knocking oil rigs from their moorings, and I knew that peer-reviewed oceanographic journals had published his studies of flotsam. But Isis and Osiris seemed more like armchair archaeology than hard science.
Ebbesmeyer must have sensed my doubts, or else he’d heard them from other skeptics before. In the backyard, seated on the patio, where a string of rubber duckie Christmas lights festooned a grape arbor and wind chimes made mournful noises on the breeze, he waxed ecclesiastical. “There’s nothing new around,” he said. Take Osiris. Even today, when the Nile floods, flotsam follows that same route. Not even pollution is new. He told me to think of volcanic eruptions, of the tons of pumice and toxic ash an eruption throws into the sea. No, when you studied the history of flotsam long enough you realized that only one thing was fundamentally different about the ocean now, only one thing since the time of the ancient Egyptians had changed. He took a sip of coffee from his mug, which was decorated with a painting of a cat. “See, pumice will absorb water and sink,” he said. “But 60 percent of plastic will float, and the 60 percent that does float will never sink because it doesn’t absorb water; it fractures into ever smaller pieces. That’s the difference. There are things afloat now that will never sink.”
Ebbesmeyer went inside and returned a moment later carrying what at first glance appeared to be exotic produce—a new, flatter variety of plantain or summer squash, perhaps. He spread these yellowy lozenges out on the patio table. “Remnants of high-seas drift-net floats,” he said. There were four of them, in varying stages of decay. The best-preserved specimens had the hard sheen of polished bone. The worst was pocked and textured like a desiccated sponge that had been attacked with a chisel. Ebbesmeyer picked the latter float up. “This is a pretty cool old one,” he said. By “cool,” he meant that it told the story of drift-net floats particularly well.
“High-seas drift nets were banned by the United Nations in 1992,” his version of this story began. “They were nets with a mesh size of about four inches, but they were, like, fifty miles long. The Japanese would sit there and interweave these for fifty miles. There were something like a thousand drift nets being used every night in the 1980s, and if you do the math they were filtering all the water in the upper fifty feet every year. Well, they were catching all the large animals, and it clearly could not go on.”
(I’d heard this part before. As a kid, I’d made my parents buy certified catch-free tuna after reading about how dolphins would get tangled in the nets and drown. The idea of dolphins drowning—dolphins, which spent most of their time swimming around with curvy little smiles on their faces—had made a big impression on me. But then lots of things made big impressions on me as a kid: bloody harp seal pups; the scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where something you can’t see tugs the little boy out the doggy door; a picture in a book of a saber-toothed tiger thrashing in vain as it sank into the La Brea tar; the biography of the psychopathic Reverend Jim Jones that I for possibly worrisome reasons chose to write a book report about when I was twelve, reading therein that in his youth Jones had cut the leg off one chicken and stapled it onto another. My mind was like the moon, cratered with all the big impressions things had made.)
According to Ebbesmeyer, those high-seas drift nets had not gone away, and not only because pirate drift netting still takes place. Before the ban, fishermen had lost about half their nets every year, and because the nets are made of nylon, which can last at sea for as long as half a century, those lost nets were still out