that the legend of the castaway ducks most resembles surely must be Holling Clancy Holling’s Paddle-to-the-Sea, the 1941 Caldecott winner in which a boy in the Canadian wilderness carves a wooden Indian man in a wooden canoe, carries his creation up a nearby mountain, and sets it atop a bank of snow. “The Sun Spirit will look down at the snow,” the boy says. “The snow will melt and the water will run downhill to the river, on down to the Great Lakes, down again and on at last to the sea. You will go with the water and you will have adventures that I would like to have.”
What distinguishes Paddle-to-the-Sea from most other it-narratives is its painstaking realism—realism so painstaking that the book feels like nonfiction. Carle, by contrast, has always preferred allegory to realism. Think of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, his best-known book, the protagonist of which, a glutinous larva with eyes like lemon-lime lollipops, is an entomological embodiment of childish appetites. He’s born on a Sunday, binges for a week, and then the following Sunday nibbles contritely on a leaf, in reward for which penance, he pupates, abracadabra, into a butterfly, an angelic butterfly. It’s a Christian allegory with which any American child can identify, an allegory about conspicuous consumption: The Prodigal Caterpillar, Carle might have called that book, or The Caterpillar’s Progress.
In Ten Little Rubber Ducks, on the other hand, there are no choices, no consequences. There is only chance. The human imagination is by nature animistic. It can even bring a pincushion to life. But Carle’s ten identical rubber ducks remain inanimate—psychologically empty, devoid of distinguishing characteristics, appetite, emotion, or charm. Carried along by ocean currents rather than by the lineaments of desire, they drift passively about, facial expressions never changing.
BIG POPPA
A few months before Carle’s book hit bookstore shelves, I likewise happened on the legend of the rubber ducks lost at sea, not in a newspaper report but in an essay by one of my students. Late one night, after my wife, Beth, had gone to sleep, when few windows remained lit in the building across the street, I stayed up as usual to grade papers. Mostly I taught the sorts of poems and novels and plays typically prescribed to American teenagers as remedies for short attention spans and atrophied vocabularies—Hamlet, for instance, or Their Eyes Were Watching God, or Leaves of Grass. And mostly the papers I graded were the sorts of essays English teachers typically ask American teenagers to write—five or six paragraphs on the role of prophecy in Macbeth or the motif of walls in “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” that sort of thing. But every spring I also taught a journalism course.
One of my favorite assignments I’d devised asked students to practice what James Agee called the archaeology of the ordinary. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, of the overalls that Depression-era sharecroppers wore, Agee writes, “I saw no two which did not hold some world of exquisiteness of its own.” Everywhere Agee went during his Alabaman travels, he found exquisite worlds, doing for the material lives of sharecroppers what Thoreau did for Walden Pond, or Melville for whaling. If like Agee my students could learn to study a thing—any particular thing—“almost illimitably long,” as Agee recommended, they too might begin to perceive “the cruel radiance of what is” rather than the narcotic shimmer of what isn’t. Or so my hopeful thinking went.
One year one student chose to write about a venerable brand of shoe polish, discovering therein the lost world of the New York City shoe-shine boy, who in most instances wasn’t a boy at all. Another chose a taxidermy crocodile. Another a charm bracelet her mother had given her. Another a baseball he’d caught in the stands of Yankee Stadium. This last student had studied his subject matter so illimitably he’d sawed the damn thing in half. And one student, a pudgy, myopic kid who’d given himself the nickname “Big Poppa,” chose to write about the rubber duckie he carried around in his pocket for good luck. Luck Duck, he called it. It was his mojo, his talisman, his totem, his charm.
I myself was a struggling, part-time archaeologist of the ordinary. Like Professor Indiana Jones—or so I sometimes fancied—I lived a double life. Summers, after classes had ended, on a magazine assignment, I would hang up my olive-green corduroy blazer with the torn lining and the baggy pockets full of chalk nubbins, pull on my hiking boots, pick up