tantalizing lure: if I really wanted to learn about things that float, then I should join him in Sitka that July. “You can’t go beachcombing by phone,” he said. “You have to get out there and look.”
Since the summer of 2001, Sitka had played host to an annual Beachcombers’ Fair, over which Ebbesmeyer—part guru, part impresario—presided. Beachcombers would bring him things they’d scavenged from the sand, and Ebbesmeyer, like some scientific psychic, would illuminate these discoveries as best he could. “Everything has a story,” he likes to say. When a beachcomber presented Ebbesmeyer with flotsam of mysterious provenance, he’d investigate. At that year’s fair in Sitka, a local fisherman named Larry Calvin would be ferrying a select group of beachcombers to the wild shores of Kruzof Island, where some of the toys had washed up. Ebbesmeyer, who would be leading the expedition, offered me a spot aboard Calvin’s boat, the Morning Mist.
Alaska—snowcapped mountains, icebergs, breaching whales, wild beaches strewn with yellow ducks. How could I say no? There was only one problem. The Beachcombers’ Fair ended July 24, and Beth’s due date was August 1, which was cutting it pretty close. I told Ebbesmeyer I’d get back to him.
Soon thereafter an envelope with a Seattle postmark arrived. Inside, printed on blue paper, were a half-dozen issues of Ebbesmeyer’s newsletter, Beachcombers’ Alert! Thumbing through this digest of the miscellaneous and arcane was a bit like beachcombing amid the wreckage of a storm. Alongside stories about derelict vessels and messages in bottles, the oceanographer had arrayed a photographic scrapbook of strange, sea-battered oddities, natural and man-made—Japanese birch-bark fishing floats, the heart-shaped seed of a baobab tree, land mines, televisions, a torn wet suit, a 350-pound safe. Many of these artifacts had accumulated colonies of gooseneck barnacles. Some were so encrusted they seemed to be made of the creatures: a derelict skiff of barnacles, a hockey glove of barnacles.
At the end of an article titled “Where the Toys Are,” Ebbesmeyer had published the letter from that anthropologist in Maine. Bethe Hagens was her name. “You won’t believe this,” she’d written after hearing about the castaway toys on NPR, “but two weeks ago, I found one of your ducks.” In fact, Ebbesmeyer had believed her, or wanted to. She hadn’t kept the evidence, so there was, she’d written, “no science, no proof. But they’re here!” Was there proof or wasn’t there? Were they here or weren’t they? Accompanying the article was a world map indicating where and when the toys had been recovered by beachcombers. Off the coast of Kennebunkport, Ebbesmeyer had printed a pair of question marks the size of barrier reefs.
From a dusty bookshelf I fetched down our Atlas of the World, a neglected wedding gift, opened it to the Atlantic, and found Kennebunkport. Then I traced my finger out across the Gulf of Maine, around Newfoundland and Labrador and—flipping to the map of the Arctic—across Baffin Bay, westward past the pole, all the while pronouncing the unfamiliar syllables (Point Hope, Spitsbergen Bank) as if the names of these places could conjure up visions of their shores. What does the air smell like in the Arctic? I wondered. Can you hear the creeping progress of the ice?
“The loss of fantasy is the price we have paid for precision,” I’d read late one night in an outdated Ocean Almanac, “and today we have navigation maps based on an accurate 1:1,000,000 scale of the entire world.” Surveying the colorful, oversize landscape of my atlas, a cartographic wonder made—its dust jacket boasted—from high-resolution satellite photographs and “sophisticated computer algorithms,” I was unconvinced; fantasy did not strike me as extinct, or remotely endangered. The ocean was far less fathomable to my generation of Americans than it was when Melville explored that “watery wilderness” a century and a half ago. Most of us were better acquainted with cloud tops than with waves. What our migrant ancestors thought of as the winds, we thought of as turbulence, and fastened our seat belts when the orange light came on. Gale force, hurricane force—encountering such terms we comprehended only that the weather was really, really bad, and in our minds replayed the special-effects sequences of disaster films or news footage of palm trees blown inside out like cheap umbrellas. In growing more precise, humanity’s knowledge had also grown more specialized, and more imaginary: unlike that of my unborn child, the seas of my consciousness teemed with images and symbols and half-remembered trivia as fabulous as those chimerical beasts cavorting at