Moby-Duck (13 page)

At the time Pallister extended his invitation, I was in no condition to go beachcombing on any Pacific beach, accessible or otherwise. I was, in fact, recovering from back surgery—minor, routine, noninvasive back surgery, but back surgery nonetheless; a microdiscectomy to be exact, necessitated by an acutely herniated disc that had impinged agonizingly on my sciatic nerve, and even more agonizingly on my not-so-well-laid plans. Happenstance, it turns out, is a terrible travel agent. The previous spring, after many months of preparation, I'd quit my teaching job in order to continue the journey I'd begun. I'd asked the Orbisons to take me with them on their annual beachcombing trip, and they'd agreed. But on the eve of their departure, I found myself in a Manhattan hospital, back-wrecked on a gurney, listening to an anesthesiologist explain to my wife that he had no idea whether or not his specialized services were covered by my insurance plan, then adding, under his breath, while searching for a vein, that he could really use a drink. The surgery had nevertheless gone well. For the previous ten days, the pain shooting from my spine to the tips of my toes had been so great, I'd been unable to walk or stand or sit. When the anesthesia wore off, aside from the aching suture, my pain was gone. I could walk. I could stand. I could beachcomb.

After a week of postoperative convalescence, while the Orbisons were scavenging in sea caves, I'd begun making calls in hopes of finding some other Alaskan willing to give me a free ride. I wasn't inclined to be picky. My frantic queries eventually led me to Marilyn Sigman, director of the Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies in Homer, a fishing village on Cook Inlet. Sigman led me to GoAK and Chris Pallister. It is no doubt ill-advised to volunteer as a deckhand while recovering from back surgery, even routine, noninvasive back surgery. But I was desperate. Pallister was embarking for Gore Point that weekend with or without me. I'd already gone adrift. There was no turning back. Like it or not, I was a professional duckie hunter now. I wasn't about to spend the summer convalescing in Manhattan, not when there were Floatees to be found.

At my postoperative examination, I told my surgeon that I had some “urgent business” in Anchorage, leaving out the part about a voyage to inaccessible coasts. Inspecting his handiwork, which was healing nicely, my surgeon said he guessed it would be okay for me to travel, so long as I didn't lift anything heavier than ten pounds, doctor's orders. No bending from the waist. No sitting for prolonged periods of time. For the next six weeks, there was an elevated risk of reherniation, he said.

“Promise me you'll ask for help with your luggage,” he said. I promised. “Promise me you'll get up and walk around during the flight to Anchorage. Book an aisle seat.” I promised. He wrote me a new scrip for Vicodin and another for anti-inflammatory steroids, just in case. The following morning I stuffed a pair of brand-new Sitka sneakers into a brand-new ergonomic backpack with wheels, asked the cabdriver if he'd mind loading said backpack into the trunk, kissed Beth and our almost-two-year-old son Bruno good-bye, and flew, hell-bent, to Anchorage.

South of Gore Point, where tide rips collide, the rolling swells rear up and sharpen into whitecaps. A moment ago, Chris Pallister was rhapsodizing about the miraculous anatomy of dolphins, which he'd read about in
Discover
. “The metabolic calculus wasn't enough to account for their speed in the water!” he hollered. “They've got all kinds of physical traits and adaptations for diving at depths! They've got a cortex that's kind of like a sponge!” Then we slammed into a steep ten-foot wave that sent Pallister's toilet kit flying from the dash, a tube of toothpaste and a disposable razor scuttling across the cockpit floor. I scurried to retrieve them. Now the second ten-foot wave hits. I stumble back to my station in the copilot's seat, port side, behind the busted windshield wiper, and ransack my shoulder bag for yet another one of the ginger candies I've brought along as an over-the-counter remedy for seasickness. Quiet with concentration, Pallister decelerates from fifteen miles per hour to eight, strains to peer through a windshield blurry with spray, tightens his grip on the wheel, and like a skier negotiating moguls coaxes his little home-built boat, the
Opus
, through the chaos of waves. Our progress becomes a series of concussions punctuated by troughs of anxious calm. In this, I have begun to gather, it resembles the rest of Pallister's life.

 

 

Speaking with him on the phone from Manhattan, I'd pictured Pallister as the sort of all-American nature guy you see in advertisements for energy bars or camping equipment, clad in Gore-Tex or a flannel shirt, portaging a mountain bike or kayak through rugged terrain, or mesmerizing with his border collie beside a campfire while a gazillion digitally enhanced stars twinkle overhead. Instead, eleven hours after kissing my wife and kid good-bye, I was met in baggage claim at Anchorage International by a small fifty-five-year-old self-employed insurance attorney in khaki Adventure pants and a grass-green windbreaker emblazoned, where the breast pocket would go, with the yellow logo of the University of Alaska-Anchorage. His dark brown hair was cut, monkishly, in a straight line across his forehead as if with the aid of a carpenter's level. He had a crooked smile, the left corner of his mouth sagging so that he seemed to be scowling even when he wasn't. The chrome frames of his glasses looked difficult to break. Through them he squinted up at me and, in reference to the self-portrait I'd e-mailed him, said, “Yeah, I guess that says
FS
.”

To make myself easy to identify, I'd worn a red ball cap bearing the initials of the high school where I had until recently taught, initials that were artfully but somewhat illegibly entangled, like those on a Yankees cap. “Yeah, I guess you're pretty tall,” Pallister added, still squinting, his right eye squinting more than his left so that he reminded me of Popeye. “And yeah, you do look kind of young for your age.”

This is an understatement. In my twenties, I was mistaken for a teenager; now, in my midthirties, for a college undergraduate. In coat and tie I bring to mind a parochial schoolboy. My condition—
chronic juvenilia
, it should be called—owes mainly to a congenital shortage of facial hair and a congenital excess of cheek. I have the face of a schoolboy and the back of a middle-aged man.

I'd forewarned Pallister about my recent surgery, and my doctor's orders. He'd promised to do all the heavy lifting. He was well-acquainted with back trouble, he told me, loading my ergonomic backpack into the backseat of his estranged wife's Toyota. He'd had spinal surgery seven times—for sciatica, stenosis, and injuries he'd suffered in a traffic accident. The surgery had left a white scar that wormed out of his shirt collar up the back of his neck and disappeared, at the base of his skull, into his hair. “I'm five-foot-eight but I used to be five-foot-nine,” he'd later tell me. “All that surgery chopped me down an inch.”

It was almost 1 A.M. in New York. Here at the northerly latitudes of Anchorage it felt like late afternoon. Peering up through the windshield as we drove south along a six-lane boulevard, past strip malls and office parks, I watched a single floatplane fly north toward the mountainous horizon, its pontoons printing an equal sign on the bright, papery, overcast sky.

Sciatica and stenosis weren't Pallister's only troubles, I soon learned. Several years prior, while recovering from that traffic accident, he'd had to give up his law office and start working from home. Then, a year before I met him, he'd lost the lease on the house in which he and his wife, Jane, had raised three sons. The following winter, six months before I met him, after three decades of marriage, Jane left him for reasons he didn't understand. Dispossessed, deserted, he was living like a castaway in a duplex condominium. He'd offered to put me up there so that we could get an early start fitting out.
⁶

Aside from the kitchen, the only room in Pallister's condo that seemed recently inhabited was the home office, which served as the headquarters of both GoAK and his struggling law practice. Here, the bookcases sagged with law volumes and three-ring binders. “Navigability,” the spine of one of the binders read. More law volumes were stacked in precarious towers on the floor, and drifts of papers covered almost every flat surface. Post-it notes like yellow petals circled a computer monitor on which, in screen-saver mode, a slideshow of nature photography played. Pallister had taken the photographs himself on his many hunts and hikes: mountains, tundra, sunsets, streams, more mountains, more tundra, more streams. The wall above the desk was papered in maps and charts of Alaska's outer coast.

“Okay, so we're here,” Pallister said, pointing out Anchorage on one of the charts. “Gore Point's way out here.” He moved his finger to the southern tip of the Kenai Peninsula, a wing of land the size of Connecticut that extends 160 miles from the south-central coast of the Alaskan mainland into the Gulf. On the northwestern, leeward side of the Kenai Peninsula is Cook Inlet, a long shallow tidal channel. On the eastern side of the peninsula is Resurrection Bay. Between the inlet and the bay are several hundred thousand acres of wilderness, some federally protected, some protected by the State of Alaska, and on the outer coast of the state-protected wilderness, at the southernmost tip of the peninsula, is Gore Point.

“There's this big, high peak,” Pallister said. All that connects the peak to the mainland is a narrow crescent-shaped isthmus—“a witch's finger of land,” he called it—that gets in the way of the prevailing winds and currents. The Alaska Coastal Current, I'd learned, flows north along the Alaska Panhandle, past Kruzof Island, past the sea caves the Orbisons like to go foraging in, past Juneau. Colliding with barrier islands, the current makes a sharp left, following and hugging the coastline west until it reaches the Kenai Peninsula, where, ricocheting off Gore Point, it bears south by southwest and continues on toward the Aleutians, becoming the Alaskan Stream. “The isthmus is barely above sea level,” Pallister said. “On the west side of it the forest is pristine, but on the east side all the lower branches are stripped off. You can tell that hellacious winter storms have pounded the crap out of it.”

The windward shore of that isthmus is what's known to beachcombers and oceanographers as “a collector beach.” According to the
Anchorage Daily News
, of the 10.8 million gallons of oil that spilled from the
Exxon Valdez
in 1989, more ended up on the windward shore of Gore Point than on any other beach in Alaska. In a single month workers there had filled six thousand plastic bags with toxic goulash—“oily sand and gravel, patties of emulsified crude, tar coated flotsam and jetsam, and the oil coated carcasses of birds and sea otters,” the
Daily News
reported at the time. These bags the workers loaded onto a landing craft, which carted them off to the nearest landfill, eighty nautical miles away, in Homer. The same currents and winds that brought the oil bring flotsam, both man-made and natural. Wave action and strong flood tides have built up a berm of pebbles and driftwood ten feet high. Those hellacious storms throw flotsam up over the berm and into the forest beyond, where it remains. Unlike the oil spill, the incoming flotsam never ends. Every tide brings more. Over the course of the last several decades, ever since the dawn of the plastics era, a kind of postmodern midden heap has accumulated there. When Pallister first set foot on Gore Point, the floor of that forest was “covered in every conceivable type of plastic,” he said. There was colorful debris a hundred yards back into the trees.

The single bag of trash Ebbesmeyer and I had collected during our day trip to Kruzof Island was nothing, Pallister assured me. All along Alaska's convoluted outer coast were shores littered with debris. Most of that debris was plastic, and much of it—the Asian, Cyrillic, and Scandinavian characters printed on bottles and fishing floats suggested—was crossing the Gulf of Alaska to get there. “Go out to Kodiak Island, or Kayak Island, or Montague, those first barrier islands,” Pallister said. “They have an unbelievable amount of plastic trash.” Thomas Royer, the oceanographer I'd met aboard the
Morning Mist,
had done research on the windward side of those barrier islands, and he later confirmed for me Pallister's description.

Before founding GoAK, Pallister and a charter boat operator named Ted Raynor, now GoAK's field manager, helped organize an annual volunteer beach cleanup in Prince William Sound. Over the course of four summers, working their way east from Whittier, the volunteers managed to scour approximately seventy miles of rugged shoreline. At that rate, Pallister and Raynor calculated, it would take two hundred years to clean Prince William Sound just once. The annual cleanup began to seem like a symbolic gesture at best, at worst a Sisyphean exercise in futility. It would take far more than three days a year of volunteerism to clean up Prince William Sound. It would take months. It would take “professional remediation contractors,” as well as volunteers. It would take logistics of an almost military complexity. And it would take money. In 2005, Pallister, Raynor, and a NOAA oceanographer named John Whitney chartered GoAK as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and started soliciting donations.

According to its grandiose mission statement, GoAK's purpose is to “protect, preserve, enhance, and restore the ecological integrity, wilderness quality, and productivity of Prince William Sound and the North Gulf Coast of Alaska.” In practice, the group has done little else besides clean up trash from beaches. In the lower forty-eight, beach cleanups like those organized by the Ocean Conservancy tend to involve schoolchildren scouring the shore for candy wrappers and cigarette butts left by recreational beachgoers. GoAK's cleanups, by contrast, are costly expeditions into the wild. The group's volunteers must be eighteen or older, and everyone, myself included, must sign a frightening waiver in which they agree not to hold the organization liable for such perils as “dangerous storms; hypothermia; sun or heat exposure; drowning; vehicle transportation and transfer; rocky, slippery, and dangerous shorelines; tool and trash related injuries; bears; and”—in case that list left anything out—“other unforeseen events.” Pallister, damaged as he was, seemed almost astrologically condemned to endure such events.