swallows, many peacocks, a jay who wishes he were a peacock, many swans, two nightingales, two larks, an owl, a glutinous seagull, a thrush ensnared in birdlime, and nary a single duck.
Aesop’s fables exhibit considerable ornithological knowledge, but their primary aim is to transmute animal behavior into human meaning—to burden them, as Thoreau would say, with some portion of our thought. The closest thing to a duck in Aesop’s fables is the famous goose, the one who lays the golden egg and then succumbs to the carving knife. In a Kashmiri version of the same tale, Aesop’s barnyard-variety waterfowl becomes the Lucky Bird Huma, a visitor from the magical avian kingdom of Koh-i-Qaf. A Buddhist version of the tale replaces the egg-laying goose with one of the only mythical ducks I have found, a mallard plumed in gold, which turns out to be a reincarnation of the Bodhisattva. (The birds of myth, as Leda learned, are often divinity in disguise.)
In all three versions of the fable, the human beneficiaries sacrifice their magically profitable waterfowl on the altar of their greed. The farmer kills the goose, cuts it open, and finds no eggs. Dreaming of rupees, a Kashmiri woodcutter accidentally asphyxiates the Lucky Bird Huma while carrying him to market in a sack. A family of Brahmin women decide to pluck out all of the Bodhisattva’s golden feathers at once; they turn into the worthless feathers of a crane. Unlike the others, the Buddhist version tells the fable from the bird’s point of view, and for that reason it is peculiarly affecting. Both Aesop’s fable and the Kashmiri one show us the folly of human desire, and it is satisfying, reading them, to watch our wicked, bumbling protagonists endure dramatically ironic reversals of fortune. The Buddhist fable shows us the folly of human desire, but it also makes us experience that folly’s cost, the debt of suffering our appetites can incur. The tone of the final sentences is more sorrowful than ironic. Trying to escape, the once golden mallard stretches his plucked wings but, featherless, finds he cannot fly. His captors throw him into a barrel. With time, his feathers grow back, but they are plain white ones now. He flies home, never to return.
Not all the passengers aboard the Malaspina are transported, or even entertained, by the Alaskan scenery. There is, for instance, a teenager vacationing with his parents—vacationing, I’m inclined to guess, against his wishes. He is almost always alone, wandering or sitting around, lost in adolescent thought. He wears the same outfit every day, jeans and a black T-shirt on which appears the cryptic, presumably ironical phrase IRON CHEFS ARISE.
When the rain lets up, which it rarely does, he adjourns to the outer deck to practice martial arts. On the last night of my passage to Sitka, I watch him one deck below striking poses of graceful ferocity in the shadowy deck light. He kicks his leg out high and holds it there an impressively long time. He stiff-arms an imaginary foe. The clouds have blotted out the stars and moon. No lamps burn onshore. Beyond the Malaspina’s rails, the only light is the shine the ferry casts on the black water—that and the green and red twinkling of the buoys.
More than the sublime scenery we’ve passed through, more than the charismatic megafauna we’ve seen both on-screen in the recliner lounge and live, this is the scene I will remember best from my ferry ride, I feel certain—this karate kid with his black ponytail and his ironical shirt, out there shadow dancing in the deck light as we thread our way brightly and noisily among green and red beacons, past quiet islands we sense but cannot see.
BEACHCOMBING THE PACIFIC
On the morning I disembark, Tyler and Dean Orbison are just returning from a two-week, three-hundred-mile beachcombing expedition to Lituya Bay and back. They go on such expeditions every summer, traveling farther and farther afield every year, poking around in bunkers abandoned at the end of World War II, walking beaches where the only footprints in the sand are animal tracks. They have a cabin cruiser big enough to sleep in and an aluminum skiff for going ashore. From the cruiser, they look for V-shaped coastlines that funnel the tides, and they look for “jackstraw”—driftwood logs jumbled like a pile of pick-up sticks—and, most important of all, like prospectors panning in the tailings, they look for “good color,” their term for plastic debris visible from afar. Where there’s some color,