Ebbesmeyer, hurtling up the eastern shore of Puget Sound aboard the Amtrak Cascades bound for Bellingham, it occurs to me that “garbage patch” sounds like “cabbage patch,” and for a moment I am picturing a thousand silvery, gape-mouthed heads bobbing on the open sea.
The old woman across the aisle, a retired high school chemistry teacher from Montana, tells me that she and her husband are traveling the globe. All they do is travel. She loves every minute of it. They have been to every continent but Antarctica. She teaches me how to say, “I don’t have any money” in Norwegian. She tells me about the mural she saw in Belfast depicting a masked man and a Kalashnikov. She tells me about her grandson, who has in fact been to Antarctica. He spent a night dangling from the ice shelf in something like a hammock. National Geographic named him one of the top rock climbers in the world, she says. Then he died in an avalanche in Tibet. Left three little boys. She smiles as she says this. In the window behind her, the blue waters of Puget Sound flash through the green blur of trees.
A few seats away, facing me, riding backward, there’s a young couple dressed in matching khaki shorts. She is holding an infant. He has a toddler in his lap. A bubble balloons from the toddler’s right nostril and pops. She laughs deliriously and slaps the window, leaving snotty little handprints on the glass. “Choo-choo!” she exclaims. “Bye-bye! Woowoo! I see cows!”
The train groans into a curve. Suddenly there are green and orange and blue containers stacked atop flatbed train cars parked on a neighboring track. The polyglot names of shipping companies speed by: Evergreen, Uniglory, Hanjin, Maersk. Then, at a clearing in the trees, the great brontosaural works of a gantry crane loom up above a Russian freighter loaded with what looks like modular housing. PORT OF SEATTLE , a sign on the crane reads.
We are somewhere east of the Strait of Juan de Fuca—Juan de Fuca, whom I read about in one of the many books I packed into my wheeling suitcase. He was a Greek sailor in the Spanish navy whose real name was Apostolos Valerianos. He claimed to have discovered the entrance to the Northwest Passage at the 48th parallel in 1592. The transit from the Pacific to the Atlantic had taken a mere twenty days, he reported, and the northern lands between these oceans were rich in silver and gold. Despite how familiar this tale must have sounded, for centuries people actually believed him. Although no one knows for certain whether the Greek sailor ever even visited the North Pacific, his description of the entrance to the passage, then known as the Strait of Anian, bears a superficial resemblance to the entrance of Puget Sound, and so the Strait of Juan de Fuca memorializes the pseudonymous perpetrator of a hoax, and so even our most accurate maps are imaginary. Looking out at the flashing waters of Puget Sound, I am filled with the desire to sail out across them, through Juan de Fuca’s fanciful strait, down across the currents of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, into its crowded, lovely heart, the heart of garbage. But I’m short on time. A ferry ride to Sitka will have to suffice.
At the Bellingham ferry terminal, I find a café table overlooking the harbor and spend the day reading about the science of hydrography and the history of the North Pacific. Beside me a bronze seagull the size of a condor points a wing at the sky, while beneath it a real gull hops around eyeing my sandwich. Although we are scheduled to embark a little before dusk, the M/V Malaspina is already waiting at its dock. Viewed from shore, it is a splendid sight, its white decks gleaming, a yellow stripe running the length of its navy-blue hull, its single smokestack painted in the motif of the Alaskan state flag—gold stars of the big dipper against a navy-blue sky. All the motor vessels in the Alaska Marine Highway system are named for Alaskan glaciers, and the Malaspina is named for the largest, a 1,500-square-mile slow-moving mesa of ice, which is in turn named for an eighteenth-century Italian navigator, Alessandro Malaspina, whose search for the Northwest Passage ended in 1791 at the 60th parallel, in an icy inlet that he christened bahía del desengaño , Disappointment Bay.
When I wheel my suitcase down the gangway that evening,