labyrinth of wave-washed boulders into which the footprints continue. “Stonehenge for bears,” says Michael Wilson, a Canadian geoarchaeologist who later this week will deliver a lecture titled “Natural Disasters and Prehistoric Human Dispersal: The Rising Wave of Inquiry.”
Wilson, in Sitka sneakers and jeans, follows the footprints into the boulders, talking loudly. The wind is behind us, and we assume that the bear will keep its distance, but you can tell that Ebbesmeyer’s feeling nervous. I am too. We both start glancing into the trees. Wilson’s spotted something, something big and blue, and runs ahead to see what it is, the red windbreaker tied around his waist trailing like a cape. Now we’re following two pairs of footprints, Wilson’s and the bear’s. His discovery turns out to be an empty plastic barrel with the word “toxic” printed on the lid—an empty drum of boat fuel, most likely. It appears to be watertight. Wilson thumps it like a bongo then hoists it up above his head and roars like one of the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
We’d like to take the barrel back with us, but, deciding that the damn thing is just too big, end up leaving it where we found it, among the rocks. As we turn to retrace our steps I think of Wallace Stevens’s anecdotal jar: The wilderness rose up to it, / And sprawled around, no longer wild.
Some of the archaeologists in our beachcombing expedition have studied the midden heaps of shells that prehistoric seafarers left around the Pacific Rim. Garbage often outlasts monuments, and if a millennium or three from now, archaeologists come looking for us, they may well find a trail of plastic clues.
I have yet to reach the end of my own trail of clues. The toys first made landfall on Kruzof Island in the autumn of 1992. So far only a thousand or so of them have been recovered by beachcombers. The rest are still out there, circling the Gulf of Alaska, or riding an ice floe through the Arctic, or lying under wrack and sand in some out-of-the-way cave of the ocean. And at least one or two could be stranded in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, circling around among ghost nets and fishing floats and refrigerator doors. Ebbesmeyer believes that patch betokens nothing less than the “end of the ocean.” If he’s right, then the yellow duck I’ve been chasing is not only an icon of childhood but a genuine bird of omen, and the legend of the rubber ducks lost at sea is not merely a delightful fable suitable for children but a cautionary environmental tale. I don’t yet know whether to believe Ebbesmeyer’s auguries. There are more riddles to solve. For now, though, I’ve followed the trail—and pushed my luck—far enough.
In 1827, returning from another failed attempt to find the Northwest Passage, Lieutenant Parry, upon learning that he was to become a father, sent a letter home to his pregnant wife: “Success in my enterprize,” he wrote, “is by no means essential to our joy, tho’ it might have added something to it; but we cannot, ought not to have everything we wish.”
On Kruzof Island, for the first time since Bellingham, my cell phone is picking up a signal. Certain that I’ll be able to catch up with the rest of our search party, or at least with the slow-moving Dr. E., I fall back and call Beth. Just to be safe I’ve decided to fly home from Alaska three days sooner than planned, I tell her, gazing out at lapping waves. A week after my return, following a difficult, 30-hour labor, she’ll give birth to a son, the sight and touch of whom will dispel my usual, self-involved preoccupations and induce a goofy, mystical, sleep-deprived euphoria. Holding our pruny, splotchy, meconium-besmirched, coneheaded son, she’ll cry, and when she does, so will I. These will be tears of joy, of course, but also of exhaustion and awe and, truth be told, of sadness. Holding my son for the first time, I will feel diminished by the mystery of his birth and by the terrible burden of love, a burden that, requiring hopefulness, will feel too great to carry, but which I will take up nonetheless.
In the meantime, back on Kruzof Island, there is Fred’s Creek to cross.
Loaded down with our plastic bag of scavengings, Ebbesmeyer is standing at the creek’s edge, contemplating the water and the rocks, looking for the way. It’s shallow, Fred’s Creek, but he’d rather