than they can bear, and the entire stack will topple, sending the top containers tumbling overboard. The weight to starboard must balance the weight to port, or the ship may dangerously list.
29 A surprisingly good poet, considering that her autobiographical, book-length poem, called Incunabulum, is self-published. A passage:I’ve woven dreams from streams and rivers
and seas of water. See what has become
of the vision that guided my hand: a strand
of fresh Lake Wisota water from the cove
sheltering sailboats of a seven year old’s
imagination. Threads from the swift Chippewa,
that swept my message in a bottle down
the Mississippi to the sea. Whole bolts
of wild, salty spray, rough-nubbed twill
from Greenland’s southern coast. Grief-
stitched, musty, smelling of the unrescued,
of the drowned, and the faint, sickly-sweet
stain of fuel slicking the spot where
their ship had been.
30 While the customs agents inspected my passport, I thought of Melville, who, in 1866, once again living in the insular city of the Manhattoes, stopped trying to earn a living from his decreasingly profitable writing and took a day job as a customs agent. For two decades he clung, Hawthorne’s son-in-law later put it, “like a weary but tenacious barnacle to the N.Y. Custom House.”
31 One afternoon at Woods Hole I listened to a behavioral biologist explain the surprising discovery that killer whales exhibit the rudiments of culture; hunting methods, taught to the young, can vary from pod to pod. In the Woods Hole necropsy lab, I visited a sub-zero meat locker where dolphins in yellow body bags hung like dry cleaning from a motorized rack. “Know how you anesthetize alligators?” the lab technician quipped. “Stick’em in the fridge.”
32 What is the ocean?Tyler (17, totally blind since birth)
The ocean is a vast area of salt water. The salt from the water creates a unique scent in the atmosphere. The fast moving waves create a sound that is pleasing to the ear. The swiftly moving water is pleasing to the touch when one is standing or swimming in it. The ocean and its many effects provide many benefits to one’s physical and emotional well-being.
Jon (16, partially blind)
THE OCEAN
Vast treacherous waves
Ships travel to continents
Gone for months on end.
Minh (17, totally blind since birth)
The sea reminds me of romance, and meditation. It’s a rough and dangerous world. It’s like our world except in an animal way. The sea also has moods, for example being stormy, or it can be as calm as a river. Or it can flow smoothly like a stream. The sea can be known as a bubbling pot of soup with all the waves. Some seas have different temperatures. Sometimes there is more seasoning than most.
Igor (16, totally blind since birth)
The sea is a vast body of water. It is filled with seaweed. The sea is filled with waves. You would body surf. As you swim in the sea, you would absorb the salt. The salt helps you float. As you walk along the shore, you step on the sand. The sand sticks to your toes. Shells wash up and your feet are tangled up in seaweed.
Michelle (17, partially blind)
It is very big and full of fish. My impression of the ocean: Whoosh, Whoosh, blub, blub . . . .
33 Northern fulmars breed on Arctic cliffs, and when nesting have a memorable weapon with which to defend their single, precious egg: if any predator approaches, a nesting fulmar will vomit onto it a jet of stinky and potentially lethal stomach oil. They can also desalinate seawater, expressing the salt through the tubes on their beaks. (Thus the name “tubenoses.”) Like albatrosses, they forage at the surface, and like albatrosses they end up swallowing a lot of plastic, Fifield says, even up here in Arctic waters, far from the Garbage Patch.
34 By the estimate of the naturalist E. C. Pielou, in the seas east and west of Greenland, there are some ten thousand icebergs afloat at any time and their numbers are greatest here, in Baffin Bay, a body of water rimmed by calving glaciers. The biggest icebergs, Pielou reports, weigh ten million tons and can rise to heights of two hundred feet or more—550 feet being the record. And the part you can see, above the waterline, represents only the uppermost fraction of the thing. An iceberg that rises 200 feet above the waterline might extend 1,600 feet beneath it. Because of their deep keels, the wind has little effect on their motion. It’s the currents that determine their fate, and the currents of Baffin Bay, like those of the North