reporter’s speculations. Yes, indeed, a shipment of Floatees had been lost at sea. “Solved: Mystery of the Wandering Bathtub Toys,” ran the lead headline in the Sentinel’s Weekend section a month after Punderson’s ad first appeared. And that is where the story should have ended—as an entertaining anecdote in the back pages of a provincial newspaper. Mystery solved. Case closed. But then something else unexpected happened. The story kept going.
The story kept going in part because Ebbesmeyer and his beachcombers joined the hunt, in part because the toys themselves kept going. Years later, new specimens and new mysteries were still turning up. In the autumn of 1993, Floatees suddenly began sprinkling the shores of Shemya, a tiny Aleutian island that lies about 1,500 miles closer to Siberia than to Sitka, not far from the site of the spill. In 1995, beachcombers in Washington State found a blue turtle and a sun-bleached duck. Dean and Tyler Orbison, a father-son beachcombing team who annually scour uninhabited islands along the Alaskan coast, added more toys to their growing collection every summer—dozens in 1992, three in 1993, twenty-five in 1994, until, in 1995, they found none. The slump continued in 1996, and the Orbisons assumed they’d seen the last of the plastic animals. Then, in 1997, the toys suddenly returned in large numbers.
Thousands more were yet to be accounted for. Where had they gone? Into the Arctic? Around the globe? Were they still out there, traveling the currents of the North Pacific? Or did they lie buried under wrack and sand along Alaska’s wild, sparsely populated shores? Or, succumbing to the elements—freezing temperatures, the endless battering of the waves, prolonged exposure to the sun—had they cracked, filled with water, gone under? All 28,800 toys had emerged from that sinking container into the same acre of water. Each member of the four species was all but identical to the others—each duck was just as light as the other ducks, each frog as thick as the other frogs, each beaver as aerodynamic as the next. And yet one turtle had ended up in Signe Wilson’s hot tub, another in the jaws of Betsy Knudson’s Labrador, another in an otter’s nest, while a fourth had floated almost all the way to Russia, and a fifth traveled south of Puget Sound. Why? What tangled calculus of causes and effects could explain—or predict—such disparate fates?
There were still other reasons why the story of the toys kept going, reasons that had nothing to do with oceanography and everything to do with the human imagination, which can be as powerful and as inscrutable as the sea. In making sense of chaotic data, in following a slightly tangled thread of narrative to its source, Eben Punderson had set the plastic animals adrift all over again—not upon the waters of the North Pacific, but upon currents of information. The Associated Press picked up the Daily Sitka Sentinel’s story and far more swiftly than the ocean currents carried the castaway toys around the globe.
The Floatees made brief appearances in the Guardian and the New York Times Magazine, and a considerably longer appearance in the Smithsonian. Like migrating salmon, they returned almost seasonally to the pages of Scholastic News, the magazine for kids, which has reported on the story seven times. They were spotted in the shallows of People and MSNBC, and in the tide pools of All Things Considered. They swirled through the sewers of the Internet and bobbed up in such exotic lagoons as a newsletter for the collectors of duck-themed stamps, an oceanography textbook for undergraduates, and a trade magazine for the builders of swimming pools.
These travels wrought strange changes. Dishwasher safe the toys may have been, but news-media safe they were not. By the time they drifted into my own imagination late one winter night several years ago, the plastic animals that had fallen into the Pacific in 1992 were scarcely recognizable. For one thing, the plastic had turned into rubber. For another thing, the beavers, frogs, and turtles had all turned into ducks. The day Eben Punderson published an unusual ad in the pages of the Sitka Sentinel a metamorphosis had begun, the metamorphosis of happenstance into narrative and narrative into fable—the Fable of the Rubber Ducks Lost at Sea.
Far across the ocean, in a toy factory made of red brick, a pinkly Caucasian woman in a brick-red dress and a racially ambiguous brown man in a sky-blue shirt work side by side at an assembly line. From a gray