Moby-Duck (10 page)

In all three versions of the fable, the human beneficiaries sacrifice their magically profitable waterfowl on the altar of their greed. The farmer kills the goose, cuts it open, and finds no eggs. Dreaming of rupees, a Kashmiri woodcutter accidentally asphyxiates the Lucky Bird Huma while carrying him to market in a sack. A family of Brahmin women decide to pluck out all of the Bodhisattva's golden feathers at once; they turn into the worthless feathers of a crane. Unlike the others, the Buddhist version tells the fable from the bird's point of view, and for that reason it is peculiarly affecting. Both Aesop's fable and the Kashmiri one show us the folly of human desire, and it is satisfying, reading them, to watch our wicked, bumbling protagonists endure dramatically ironic reversals of fortune. The Buddhist fable shows us the folly of human desire, but it also makes us experience that folly's cost, the debt of suffering our appetites can incur. The tone of the final sentences is more sorrowful than ironic. Trying to escape, the once golden mallard stretches his plucked wings but, featherless, finds he cannot fly. His captors throw him into a barrel. With time, his feathers grow back, but they are plain white ones now. He flies home, never to return.

 

Not all the passengers aboard the
Malaspina
are transported, or even entertained, by the Alaskan scenery. There is, for instance, a teenager vacationing with his parents—vacationing, I'm inclined to guess, against his wishes. He is almost always alone, wandering or sitting around, lost in adolescent thought. He wears the same outfit every day, jeans and a black T-shirt on which appears the cryptic, presumably ironical phrase IRON CHEFS ARISE.

When the rain lets up, which it rarely does, he adjourns to the outer deck to practice martial arts. On the last night of my passage to Sitka, I watch him one deck below striking poses of graceful ferocity in the shadowy deck light. He kicks his leg out high and holds it there an impressively long time. He stiff-arms an imaginary foe. The clouds have blotted out the stars and moon. No lamps burn onshore. Beyond the
Malaspina'
s rails, the only light is the shine the ferry casts on the black water—that and the green and red twinkling of the buoys.

More than the sublime scenery we've passed through, more than the charismatic megafauna we've seen both on-screen in the recliner lounge and live, this is the scene I will remember best from my ferry ride, I feel certain—this karate kid with his black ponytail and his ironical shirt, out there shadow dancing in the deck light as we thread our way brightly and noisily among green and red beacons, past quiet islands we sense but cannot see.

On the morning I disembark, Tyler and Dean Orbison are just returning from a two-week, three-hundred-mile beachcombing expedition to Lituya Bay and back. They go on such expeditions every summer, traveling farther and farther afield every year, poking around in bunkers abandoned at the end of World War II, walking beaches where the only footprints in the sand are animal tracks. They have a cabin cruiser big enough to sleep in and an aluminum skiff for going ashore. From the cruiser, they look for V-shaped coastlines that funnel the tides, and they look for “jackstraw”—driftwood logs jumbled like a pile of pick-up sticks—and, most important of all, like prospectors panning in the tailings, they look for “good color,” their term for plastic debris visible from afar. Where there's some color, there's sure to be more. Their style of beachcombing is by necessity a tag-team affair. One person has to stay in the skiff to keep it from foundering on the rocks while the other person wades in and combs. They take turns. Dean prefers to hunt high up, in the purple fireweed, where storms will throw objects out of the reach of tides. Tyler, Dean's son, is “a digger.” Like a human metal detector, he's learned to divine the location of buried objects by reading the terrain.

This year for the first time Tyler and Dean started combing in seaside caves where tangled driftwood will form a kind of flotsam trap. It's dark in the caves. You have to beachcomb with a flashlight. It's also cold, but the labor of log-lifting keeps you warm. The effort's worth it. Every cave the Orbisons search contains a farrago of wrack—a Dawn dish detergent bottle, glass fishing floats, Floatees. Half a water pistol turned up in one cave, the other half in another. By far the most common objects the Orbisons find are polyethylene water bottles. They have begun keeping the screw tops, cataloging the varieties. On this last trip they identified seventy-five brands, many of them foreign in origin. Up in Lituya Bay they saw a live black wolf and the bones of a whale, and they picked wild strawberries, and when their cooler ran out of ice they floated alongside a glacier and broke off a chunk.

Now, at the end of my first day ashore, they've fetched me from my hotel. “Growing up here, I mean, there's nothing,” Tyler tells me from the backseat of his father's truck while we're waiting for his parents to emerge from Sitka's only supermarket. “I mean we don't even have a mall. So I took to the outdoors pretty hard.”

It is clear that Tyler has never given much thought to the marginalization of animals. You wouldn't either if you'd grown up in Southeast Alaska, where bears make off with household pets, and ravens alighting on transformers cause power outages, and bald eagles sometimes come crashing through dining room windows. If anything, it's the people who occupy the margins here. Just look at a map: Sitka perches on the coastal brink of Baranof Island, wedged between mountainous wilderness to the east and watery wilderness to the west. Sitkans share their island with an estimated 1,200 grizzly bears—more than are found in all the lower forty-eight states combined. In May and June, eagles and ravens—the supreme deities in the pantheon of the native Tlingit—wheel overhead. In July and August, the creeks grow dark with spawning sockeye and chum. In November, the whales and the whale watchers arrive. People like me may feel sorry for the 1.2 million sea otters that the Russian American Company parted from their pelts in the early 1800s, but since the Endangered Species Act protected them in the early seventies, otters have repopulated Sitka Sound with such procreative gusto that local fishermen now regard them as pests—crop-thieving, net-wrecking vermin of the sea.

Tyler's arms and face are partly tanned, partly sunburned, and like the karate kid of the M/V
Malaspina
, he is wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, only his T-shirt is not in the least cryptic or ironic. Decorated with bicycles and boats, it commemorates Sitka's annual triathlon. Twenty-three years old, he is currently earning his teaching credentials at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, a city of fifty thousand. More than five times the size of Sitka, Fairbanks is too urban and too populous for Tyler's taste. “I don't do cities very well,” he says. As soon as classes let out, he hurries home. This summer, he's been working part-time on commercial fishing boats and part-time teaching a summer school class on mammals to middle schoolers. With what time remains, he goes hunting and beachcombing with his father, whom he calls by his first name.

Dean used to be an engineer at the pulp mill. After it shut down, he started working for the power company, running the hydroelectric plants that electrify all Sitka. He's semiretired now, which means he has plenty of time to play outside with his son. They are, by all appearances, best friends. They are also two of Curtis Ebbesmeyer's most devoted disciples.

When Tyler's parents finish their grocery shopping, we drive off to have a look at the salvaged flotsam piled on their front porch. Tyler rummages around, pulling out item after item and keeping up a running curatorial commentary. There are plastic buoys; a tightly sealed tin can of air; something that looks like the lid of a blender; a plastic housing with Russian characters on it. About one object on their porch Tyler and his father disagree. Tyler thinks it's a boat muffler. Dean thinks it's the cover off an underwater cable. “We're not sure what that is,” Tyler concludes, “but it's pretty skookum.” The haul also includes a message in a plastic bottle.

Even the most skeptical of travelers, upon discovering a message in a bottle, must experience a frisson of wonder. Fishing the scrolled parchment out, you can't help but hope that the words scrawled across it will spell something disastrous or mysterious, like, “Of my country and of my family I have little to say. Ill usage and length of years have driven me from the one, and estranged me from the other” (the opening sentences of Poe's “Ms. Found in a Bottle”
³
).

These days messages in bottles seem to be sent mainly by schoolchildren or by drunken tourists, which would explain their characteristic style—more like seaborne graffiti than poetry. Among drunken tourists, the shopworn SOS-from-a-deserted-island-or-sinking-ship conceit is a perennial favorite. Schoolchildren tend to be more matter-of-fact. In 2003 an octogenarian beachcomber in Australia found a bottle. “My name is Harmony,” the message inside read. “It's my birthday. I am nine years old today. If anyone finds this, please ring me.” From a bottle they dug up on a New Zealand beach in 2002, two boys withdrew the following memorial, dated December 2, 1912: “This note is to commemorate the enjoyable experience by two Nelson College boys, and also in memorance of our notable land-mark.” When his ship, the USS
Beatty
, was torpedoed off Gibraltar in 1943, all a sailor—who actually was gazing into the mortal abyss—could think to say was, “Our ship is hit and sinking. Maybe this message will reach the U.S. someday.” In a sense, mortality is the theme of all messages in bottles, which are addressed to distant times as well as distant shores. They are little time capsules, escape pods, sea beans of memory, loosed on the waters of oblivion.

Like most beachcombers of the Pacific Rim, the Orbisons started out collecting Japanese fishing floats, the glass balls that you sometimes see hanging in nets from the ceilings of seafood restaurants, or decorating the window displays of maritime boutiques. The popularity of glass floats owes partly to their delicate, soap-bubble beauty, partly to the Kuroshio Current that sweeps them across the Pacific and bowls them up the beaches of the American West Coast, and partly to Amos L. Wood, an aeronautics engineer and beachcombing enthusiast whose books
Beachcombing for Japanese Floats
and
Beachcombing the Pacific
have become to beachcombers what Audubon guides are to bird-watchers.

A century and a half ago, beachcombers tended to be transcendental weirdos like Ellery Channing and Henry Thoreau. Back then, much of New England's shoreline was as wild as Alaska's is today and more treacherous to passing ships. Just before Thoreau arrived at Province-town in 1849, a ship carrying Irish immigrants sank off Cohasset. The bodies of the drowned lay strewn along the beach, torn asunder by the surf and fish. “The Gulf Stream may return some to their native shores,” Thoreau later wrote, “or drop them in some out of the way cave of Ocean, where time and the elements will write new riddles with their bones.” Even where no shipwrecks had occurred, a Cape Cod beach in 1849 was “a wild rank place” littered “with crabs, horse-shoes and razor clams, and whatever the sea casts up—a vast
morgue
, where famished dogs may range in packs, and crows come daily to glean the pittance which the tide leaves them.”

Still a recent coinage, the word
beachcomber
in 1849 meant approximately what we mean by “beach bum”: it evoked a character like the narrator of Melville's
Omoo
, a transient ne'er-do-well who had fled from civilization hoping to sample tropical women and tropical fruits and loaf around beneath the blowsy palms. “Idle, drunken, vagabond,” one Australian author wrote in 1845, “he wanders about without any fixed object, cannot get employed by a whaler or anyone else, as it is out of his power to do a day's work; and he is universally known as ‘the beach-comber.' ” The local Cape Codders whom Thoreau met on his seaside rambles usually took him for a traveling salesman. What other explanation could there be for a vagabond with a walking stick and a knapsack full of books?

By the 1980s, when Amos Wood published his how-to manuals, American beaches had become seaside playgrounds frequented not by dogs or crows but by the sun-worshipping masses. As for our vagrant beachcomber, he had become, in Wood's definition, “any person who derives pleasure, recreation, or livelihood by searching ocean, lake, and river shores for useful or artful objects.” Inclusive as that definition sounds, Wood's books are intended not for “the casual visitor to the beach” strolling barefoot along the shore plucking up pretty pebbles and seashells as keepsakes, but for “the serious beachcomber,” a mercenary, methodical prospector of the sands. The casual visitor to the beach “flits about” without any “specific purpose,” Wood writes, whereas a “serious searcher plans his hike, selects the tide and wind conditions that are favorable, prepares for an extended trip, and has a particular objective in mind.”

Thoreau's rambling style of beachcombing—
extravagant sauntering
he would call it—appeals to me far more than Wood's forensic treasure hunting does. If I tried to follow Wood's advice, I wouldn't last a weekend before retiring my metal detector to that cabinet of fleeting enthusiasms which also contains various musical instruments, a teach-yourself-Russian CD-ROM, and a guide to bicycle repair.

The Orbisons have read Wood's books and have followed some of his advice, though much of what he says about beachcombing in California and Washington does not pertain to the shores of Alaska, where glass fishing floats tend to shatter on the rocks. Although they probably know more about beachcombing in Alaska than anyone, I doubt that either Tyler or Dean would consider himself a serious searcher. They are outdoorsmen. Their beachcombing grew out of their hunting. They hunt animals and in the intervals between hunting seasons they hunt shipwrecked junk, and the way they talk about spotting a plastic duck and killing a bear makes it seem like there's no great difference between the two. “When I was younger, Dean would find a glass ball before me,” Tyler says, “and I would get so mad. And when you're mad you walk right over them. To me it's a lot like hunting: You'll do a lot better if you're chilling and hanging out.”