synopsis—the container spill, the oceanographers in Seattle, the journey through the Arctic. The toys were supposed to have reached the coast of New England by the summer of 2003. It was now March 2005. Had they made it? Big Poppa didn’t say. Neither did he mention anything about beavers, turtles, or frogs.
It was well after midnight by the time I finished marking his essay, and because I am prone to nocturnal flights of fancy, I sat there for a while at my desk thinking about those ducks. I tried to imagine their journey from beginning to end. I pictured the container falling—splash!—into the sea. I pictured the ducks afloat like yellow pixels on the vast, gray acreage of the waves, or skiing down the glassy slopes of fifty-foot swells, or coasting through the Arctic on floes of ice. I imagined standing on a beach somewhere in Newfoundland or Maine—places I had never visited or given much thought. I imagined looking out and seeing a thousand tiny nodding yellow faces, white triangles glinting in their cartoon eyes, insipid smiles molded into the orange rubber of their clownish bills. I imagined a bobbing armada so huge it stretched to the horizon, and possibly beyond. I imagined them washing ashore, littering the sand, a yellow tide of ducks.
Getting ready for bed that night, I noticed anew the rubber ducks roosting on our bathroom shelf. For years they’d perched there, between a jar of cotton balls and a bottle of facial cleanser, two yellow ducks of the classic variety and one red duck with horns. I couldn’t remember when or why we’d acquired them. I picked one of the yellow ones up and gave it a squeeze. Air hissed from an abdominal hole. “Quack,” I said, and returned it to its shelf.
At work the next day, I noticed as if for the first time the several yellow ducks of diminishing sizes processing single file across a colleague’s desk—gifts from students, she explained when I asked. I began seeing them everywhere. In the course of a single afternoon, I came upon a great, neon rubber duck aglow in the window of an Old Navy store and a mother-duckling pair afloat in the margins of a brochure on vaccinations that our health insurance provider sent. My wife and I that spring were, as the euphemism has it, “expecting,” and the baby outfitter where we’d registered for shower gifts—across the blue awning of which yet another duck swam, a pacifier abob like a fishing float beside it—appeared to be the epicenter of this avian plague. In addition to rubber ducks themselves, the store sold yellow towels and sweatshirts with orange bills for hoods, yellow rubber rain boots with beaks for toes, yellow pajamas with orange, webbed feet. There was the Diaper Duck, a duck-shaped dispenser of odor-proof trash bags, as well as numerous other implements—brushes, soap dishes, etc.—that incorporated the likeness and the yellowness of the duck.
Elsewhere, in drugstores and catalogs and the bathrooms of friends, I spotted exotic varieties in which strange, often ironical mutations had occurred—momma ducks with ducklings nested on their backs; black ducks, sparkly ducks, ducks with the face of Moses or Allen Iverson or Betty Boop; ducks sporting sunglasses or eyelashes or lipstick or black leather; ducks playing golf. Every powerful icon invites both idolatry and iconoclasm, and in the bestiary of American childhood, there is now no creature more iconic than the rubber duck. The more I thought about its golden, graven image, the more it seemed to me a kind of animistic god—but of what? Of happiness? Of nostalgia? Of innocence never lost?
THE MAP
“So,” I asked the retired oceanographer when I reached him at his Seattle home, “did any of the toys make it through the Arctic?” I had by then read every article about the incredible journey I could find. As of October 2003, according to the news archives, not one of the 28,800 castaway toys had been discovered on the Atlantic Seaboard, not one savings bond had been handed out. Bounty-hunting beachcombers had found plenty of toy ducks, just not of the right species. After October 2003 the news archives fell silent.
Oh, yes, Curtis Ebbesmeyer assured me, yes, they’d made it. Right on schedule, in the summer of 2003, he’d received a highly credible eyewitness report from an anthropologist in Maine, which he’d published in his quarterly newsletter, Beachcombers’ Alert! He promised to send me a copy. But before we hung up he dangled before my ears a