Moby-Duck (59 page)

“Back then they were pretty strong, eh?” Puglik said. “My favorite animal to have would be a musk ox.”

“As a friend?” Freeland-Ballantyne asked.

“No, to eat. No, to hunt it down and then eat it. It's starting to melt earlier and earlier, and it's changing and changing. We used to go to Kugluktuk by Ski-Doo and sled.”

“Duck!” Freeland-Ballantyne shouted, pointing out at the shallow river across the soggy tundra.

“Where?” Puglik asked. “Might have eggs. Ducks are the last eggs of the year. Best thing about the North is being on the land. It's nice and quiet up here. You can see all the animals. Pretty peaceful.”

It was too cold for any of us now, and we were all sleepy, at least we three grown-ups were. On the walk back in we discovered that the Annie we'd interviewed today was Puglik's mom, from an earlier common-law marriage. He didn't always sleep at her house. Sometimes he slept with his other family—wherever there was the most room. “Did they say anything about me?” Puglik asked Freeland-Ballantyne and me, and if he was sad to learn that they hadn't, he didn't show it. “The video game I want to get is
Kung Fu Panda.
Have you guys ever played
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
?”

None of us had.

“Good rainbow,” Puglik said.

Cambridge Bay, when we reentered its outskirts, seemed deserted. No grown-ups. No police. No one. The place might as well have been a ghost town. Then, in an industrial area near the docks, we passed cones of piled gravel, and from behind them popped two urchin faces, a boy and a girl. Seeing Puglik, they leapt to their dirt bikes and followed us. Her handlebars had pink grips, and a pink plastic tassel on one side, but not on the other. “That's Brenda,” Puglik said. “That's Angus.” They pedaled around us, circling, ogling us, ogling Freeland-Ballantyne especially. Brenda wanted to know whether Puglik was staying with us in the big house, one of the nicest in town, and he said no, but now I thought I detected a hint of hopefulness in his voice.

When we reached the entrance of our borrowed house, Puglik lingered at the doorstep, waiting, expectantly, still warming his hands in his overlong sleeves. Was he hoping for an invitation to come in? Something more? Griebel offered him a slice of the pizza we'd made for dinner, and Puglik happily accepted it. While the archaeologist and the Rhodes scholar ascended to the kitchen, I stayed with Puglik in the damp warmth of the mudroom, among the many muddy boots.

Sitting on the carpeted steps, I began to unlace my boots. The boy kept his big white sneakers on, but as he was standing there, and I was sitting there, he untied his hood and revealed himself to be totally bald. I suspect he anticipated my surprise, which I tried hard not to show. He wasn't merely bald; he possessed, I noticed now, no eyebrows. No wonder he'd seemed neither young nor old. Puglik wasn't a leukemia patient or anything like that, Griebel later told me; his hairlessness was the symptom of a rare condition, alopecia universalis.

Freeland-Ballantyne appeared, descending the carpeted stairs behind me, bearing a slice of pizza on a plate, which she handed to me, which I handed to Puglik, then she ascended the stairs to help Griebel with the dishes, and once again, Puglik and I were alone. He ate hungrily, and happily. It was only then that I thought to ask him the question that had been bothering me: What were he and Brenda and Angus and the other children of Cambridge Bay all doing up so late, alone?

“In the summer, when there's no school, parents sleep at night, kids stay up till seven”—A.M., he meant—“and sleep in the day so the parents can work. I like to look after the little kids. Kids need looking after, eh?” Then he handed me the now empty plate, sprinkled with crumbs, cinched his hood over his moony skull, and disappeared into the midnight sun. With misgivings, I bolted the door shut.

—A. A. Milne, “In Which Pooh Invents a New Game and Eeyore Joins In”

“The great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago,” Melville famously writes at the catastrophic end of the voyage of the
Pequod
. It's a beautiful, hauntingly apocalyptic sentence, its rhythms and sounds—all those long vowels, the repetition of “rolled”—enacting the eternal rolling of the sea. And five thousand years here is no arbitrary number, but one that harks back to the old Christian estimates of the age of Creation. Poetically satisfying as it is, I now know that the sentence is, scientifically speaking, illusory. The oceans have never been immutable, eternal.

In 1951, Rachel Carson wrote in
The Sea Around Us
that man “cannot control or change the ocean as, in his brief tenancy on earth, he has subdued and plundered the continents.” A mere ten years later, she'd revised her opinion. In a preface to the 1961 edition of that same book
,
Carson wrote, “Although man's record as a steward of the natural resources of the earth has been a discouraging one, there has long been a certain comfort in the belief that the sea, at least, was inviolate, beyond man's ability to change and to despoil. But this belief, unfortunately, has proved to be naïve.” What had happened in the interval between those two editions? Nuclear waste, placed in barrels lined with concrete and dumped offshore, was leaking radioactive elements. A year after writing that preface
,
with the publication of
Silent Spring
, Carson would bring to the attention of the world a much longer list of man-made marine pollutants, forcing her readers to imagine the ocean anew. I know now that it is upon Rachel Carson's ocean, not Melville's, that I've sailed.

No one ever replied to my WANTED posters and I doubt they ever will. Nevertheless, I suspect I know what happened to the toys. Stored for several months in my freezer, the photodegraded duck I'd salvaged on Gore Point, brittle to the touch, was crumbling into pieces. The legend of the ducks that drifted around the world, however, has proved more durable. In the summer of 2007, thousands of yellow ducks swam into the minds of newspaper readers in England. The
Times
of London notified readers that “an armada of rubber ducks” would soon appear over the horizon. “Drake's Other Armada,” the
Daily Mail
's punning headline read. By July 13, the anticipated invasion had begun—or so it seemed. Penny Harris, a retired schoolteacher in Devon, had found a convincingly weather-beaten specimen. “It's covered in brown algae and has got barnacles on it,” she reportedly said. The
Times
was convinced. “First of the Plastic Duck Invasion Fleet Makes Landfall on the Devon Coast,” it announced on July 14. The tabloid
Sun
appeared to be a bit more cautious—“First of the Duck Armada?” its headline asked—but the accompanying graphic was unequivocal: a speech bubble superimposed onto a photo of Harris's duck read, “I've been at sea for 15 yrs, swum 17,000 miles . . . Drake would be proud of me.” That same day, the local Devon paper, the
Western Morning News,
bothered to investigate, determining, correctly, that “it was not the right duck.” Neither the
Times
nor the
Sun
took note of the correction, and a day after the
Western Morning News
delivered its disappointing verdict, the
Sunday Mail
published yet another story about Harris's discovery, under the alliterative headline “Found: The First ‘Friendly Floatee' Rubber Duck in Britain”—getting the brand name of the Floatees wrong as well as the facts. Five days later the Toronto
Globe and Mail
published a time line of the rubber duck saga. It began in January 1992 with the spill and ended in July 2007 with Harris and her barnacle-encrusted counterfeit. Meanwhile, on the coast of Cornwall, beachcombers are still searching. Maybe it was enough that the ducks had in fact fallen overboard. Enough to know that they had crossed the Pacific. That messages in bottles were traveling the Arctic currents.

 

 

Moby-Dick
begins as Ishmael's story. The opening chapters suggest a bildungsroman in which a green youth will, in the conventional Victorian manner, undergo an adventurous rite of passage into manhood. But in the middle of the novel, as many readers have noticed, Ishmael recedes into the background, less an actor in the action than an omniscient narrator, and interpreter, and at times even an author of the drama in which Ahab and the Whale now take center stage. Some readers suggest that the grandeur of Ahab's tragic character almost usurps Ishmael's role as protagonist. I'm not so sure.

Not long after becoming a father, I read in Andrew Delbanco's biography that Melville's firstborn son, Malcolm, was born midway through the novel's composition. Rereading the novel with that fact in mind, I couldn't help noticing the emergence of paternity as a major theme. It's almost as if, over the course of the novel, we voyage not only from Manhattan to the South Pacific but from the mercenary and possibly bisexual freedoms of bachelorhood to the sorrows and fidelities—and toward but not quite to the heart-straining joys—of fatherhood.

The theme first appears early in the novel, in Nantucket. When Ishmael shares his misgivings about sailing under the command of a captain named Ahab (in the Bible, Ahab is a wicked king), Peleg, one of the
Pequod
's owners, offers the young bachelor this reassurance: “my boy, he has a wife—not three voyages wedded—a sweet resigned girl. Think of that: by that sweet girl that old man has a child: hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless harm in Ahab?” Later, in one curious parenthetical aside, Ishmael uses the phrase “we fathers.” We? Has Ishmael become a family man since returning from his look at the watery part of the world? Is Melville speaking autobiographically? The farther the
Pequod
sails, the more numerous the allusions to parenthood become. When Queequeg rescues his fellow harpooneer Tashtego—who in a mishap, while harvesting spermaceti, has tumbled into the cavernous forehead of a dead sperm whale—Ishmael describes the deliverance in satirically obstetric terms: “[Queequeg] averred, that upon first thrusting in for him, a leg was presented.” Following the delivery, the mother, “the great head itself” (now sinking into the deep), Ishmael tells us, was “doing as well as could be expected.”

If this is not enough, look again. Here, at the heart of a “grand armada” of whales, the oarsman Ishmael is peering down—into what? The inscrutable deep? His own reflection? Not this time. No, he's peering into an underwater, cetological nursery. An umbilical cord—antithesis of the harpoon line—still connects one cow to her newborn calf, a newborn calf whose fins and flukes “still freshly retai[n] the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby's ears newly arrived from foreign parts.” Here, other calves, cordless, are nursing, slurping down milk that is, says Ishmael—speaking from experience—so “very sweet and rich... it might do well with strawberries”; milk that, though sweet and rich, in the whaling grounds nevertheless sometimes pours forth so gushingly that “milk and blood rivallingly discolor the sea.”

After many chapters spent in the murderous, manly battlefield of the whaling grounds, the glimpse into the nursery of whales is both enchanting and jarring, and is made all the more enchanting and jarring by Ishmael's well-informed, fatherly eye. The nursing calves, he compares to “human infants” who “while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence.”

Fatherhood even helps us understand the apostasy that underlies Ahab's monomaniacal quest. “Where is the foundling's father hidden?” Ahab, feeling like a fatherless child, asks both the heavens and himself as he nears his doom. “Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.” Several chapters later, when St. Elmo's fire lights up the
Pequod
, Ahab thinks he's found the secret of his paternity. “Oh, thou clear spirit,” clutching the nautical lightning rod, he shouts at the blue pyrotechnics playing about the sheets, “of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire I breathe it back to thee.”

As
Moby-Dick
nears its end, the
Pequod
first encounters a ship called the
Bachelor
, on the quarterdeck of which “the mates and harpooneers” are “dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped with them from the Polynesian Isles.” The very next ship the
Pequod
encounters? The
Rachel
, named, allegorically, for the biblical Rachel, figurative mother of that generation of Israelites doomed to exile and wandering. Why does Melville give this ship that name? Because, thanks to the interventions of Moby Dick, the
Rachel
's captain has lost a boatload of sailors. And among those sailors? “My boy, my own boy is among them,” the
Rachel's
captain tells Ahab, begging him to join in the search.