the time Carmack and I traveled together aboard the Louis, he’d begun collaborating with Ebbesmeyer on a scientific paper analyzing data from the Drift Bottle Project. One conclusion they would eventually draw: “Our data . . . show the boundary between the subarctic and subtropical waters to be a near-impenetrable wall.” Out of 1,184 bottles launched in the eastern Arctic and recovered elsewhere, only one had headed south, to Puerto Rico. The rest the Gulf Stream and its branches had swept east, toward Europe. It was, in other words, statistically likely that the duck allegedly glimpsed in Maine was a counterfeit, an impostor, a figment, a will-o’-the-wisp, and that the advert created by that British cell phone company was as fantastical as any advert, as childlike as Ten Little Ducks, more childlike than Make Way for Ducklings, far more childlike than Paddle to the Sea, and that my errand, from the outset, was indeed that of a fool.
MOONWALK
In helicopter 363. Once again in the backseat. Once again in a jumpsuit. Once again a headset clapped onto my ears. Just because the ducks never made it to Maine doesn’t mean, as per Carmack’s Northern Drift hypothesis, that they never made it here, into the Northwest Passage. I’ve got four days left to search. And I mean to. In fact, I’ve printed up WANTED posters, illustrated with the blue, green, yellow, and red likenesses of the toys. They’re pretty snazzy, I think. I even put the word WANTED in an old-timey, Wild West font, and at the bottom I cut a little fringe of tear-away tags bearing my e-mail address. I’ve already posted some in Nuuk, on my way home from the Labrador Sea (so far, no replies), and some more in Resolute, and I’m ready to post more on every bulletin board I encounter before flying home for good. Granted, here, in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, there’s a hell of a lot of shoreline—87,000 miles of it—and a hell of a lot of sticky, rubbery ice, and a dearth of bulletin boards.
With me and pilot Chris Swannell in helicopter 363 are a pair of men who, like me, seem to have been arrested by their childish imaginations, men who boarded the Louis in Resolute dressed as if for an expedition to the planet Hoth, in white snow pants and white parkas with furry hoods, parkas decorated with a cryptically Hellenistic logo of the sort one might encounter on the facade of a college fraternity. Even in the main mess, at breakfast, these strangers have been striding around in black knee-high jackboots of the sort favored by Napoleonic cavalrymen. This duo belongs to an outfit called the Phaeton Group, named, curiously, for the doomed son of the Greek god, the one who steals his father’s solar chariot as if it were a Buick and takes it for a reckless spin, a whimsical crime for which Zeus, like some celestial traffic cop, executes Phaeton with a lightning bolt. The Phaeton Group, according to their literature, is “a science and consulting organization that carries out research and provides communications services to media and educational clients.” They offer “public outreach” and “media savvy” and both “enlightenment and excitement.” Publicists with the Canadian Coast Guard have hired them to produce educational posters about icebreakers. We’re flying out now so that they can collect footage of an icebreaker in action. I’m here because Chris Swannell refuses to be photographed or filmed and they need a human figure to stand in the foreground, on the ice, providing a sense of scale.
In their getups, the duo from Phaeton look—to me, to the crew of the Louis, or at least to those members of the crew I overheard gossiping yesterday in the computer lounge—ridiculous, and they don’t seem to know it, but who, while looking or being ridiculous, ever does?
Up we go. Helicopter 363 circles the Louis at two hundred feet, collecting footage to aft, astern, abeam. The back door is wide open and the Phaeton cameraman, buckled into a harness, the wind ruffling his hood’s furry ruff, is leaning out. I hope his glasses don’t fall off. I hope he doesn’t drop his fancy camera. At his direction, we ascend, Phaetonlike, to a thousand feet. At this height, except for the plume of yellowy exhaust rising from its stack, the Louis very much resembles a red toy boat in an icy bathtub. Now we fly miles ahead, over the ice, the hummocks and bummocks flickering below us.39 The Louis