machine, yellow-billed and lacking irises in the whites of their eyes, rubber ducks emerge, one by one, onto a conveyor belt. Chuckedy-chuckedy-chuck goes the rubber duck machine. As the ducks roll past, the woman in the brick-red dress paints their bills brick red with a little brush. The man in the sky-blue shirt paints their irises sky blue. It is beautiful, this unnamed country across the sea. Green grass grows around the factory. A grass-green truck carries the ducks to a waiting ship named the Bobbie. Away the Bobbie chugs, carrying five cardboard boxes across a blue-green sea, a white streamer of smoke trailing behind it. Smiling overhead is an enormous sun the color of a rubber duck. Then a storm blows up. Waves leap. The Bobbie tosses about. The white-bearded captain cries and throws his hands out a porthole. Down goes a cardboard box. Ducks spill like candy from a piñata. Slowly, they drift apart. One frolics with a spotted dolphin. A second receives a come-hither look from a blueberry seal in a lime-green sea. A polar bear standing on an ice floe ogles a third. And so their journeys go, each duck encountering a different picturesque animal—a flamingo, a pelican, a sea turtle, an octopus, a gull, a whale. Finally, who should the tenth rubber duck meet but a brood of real ducks. “Quack!” says the mother duck. “Quack! Quack! Quack!” say the ducklings. “Squeak,” says the rubber duck. So ends Eric Carle’s Ten Little Rubber Ducks.
Carle’s picture book was, perhaps inevitably, inspired by one of the many newspaper articles that appeared after Ebbesmeyer put the beachcombers of New England on alert. Having crossed the Arctic, having drifted south on the Labrador Current, along the wild coast of Newfoundland, past Nova Scotia and the Grand Banks, some of the Floatees would reach the Eastern Seaboard of the United States in the summer of 2003, the clairvoyant oceanographer predicted. A savvy publicist at The First Years, smelling a marketing opportunity, sent out a press release advertising a bounty: Kiddie Products would give a U.S. savings bond worth $100 to any beachcomber who found one of the castaway toys on an East Coast beach. All along the coasts of Massachusetts and Maine, people began to hunt. There was, as there usually is, a catch—two catches, actually: (1) to claim the reward, the lucky beachcombers would have to surrender the evidence, and (2) Ebbesmeyer would have to confirm a positive match. As intended, the press release provoked a flurry of coverage. Once again, news organizations large and small recounted the “rubber duck saga,” as the Montreal Gazette dubbed it that summer.
A scrap of the article that Carle happened on, torn from an uncredited source, accompanies his author’s note:RUBBER DUCKS LOST AT SEA
In 1992, a shipment of 29,000 rubber bathtub toys including ducks, beavers, turtles and frogs, fell overboard from a container ship.
Some of these rubber toys have washed up on the shores of Alaska, while others have made their way through the Bering Strait, past icebergs, around the northern coast of Greenland and into the Atlantic Ocean.
“I could not resist making a story out of this newspaper report,” Carle’s note explains. “I hope you like my story.” Beautifully illustrated with Carle’s signature mix of paint and paper tearings, Ten Little Rubber Ducks is hard not to like. Studies have shown that the primary colors, smiling faces, and cute animals in which Carle’s book abounds—and of which the rubber duck may well be the consummate embodiment—have the almost narcotic power to induce feelings of happiness in the human brain. The metamorphosis that had begun in the pages of the Daily Sitka Sentinel was complete: in Carle, the fable had finally found its Aesop.
It’s easy to see why Carle found the story irresistible. It was an incredible story, a fabulous story; the sort of head-shaking, who’d-a-thunk anecdote suited to an entry in Ripley’s Believe It or Not, perhaps, or to cocktail party banter, or to a lighthearted closing segment on the evening news, or most of all to a picture book for children.
Visit the kids section of your local public library and you’ll find dozens or possibly even hundreds of stories about inanimate objects that come magically to life or go on incredible journeys. Such stories are so common, in fact, that they constitute a genre—the “it-narrative,” literary scholars have called it. Think of Pinocchio. Or The Velveteen Rabbit. Or Winnie-the-Pooh. Or the improbable eighteenth-century bestseller The Adventures of a Pincushion. The it-narrative