Moby-Duck (18 page)

Most vehemently, Ted Raynor rants against Sarah Palin and all the blind indifference that she in his mind has come to represent: “You'd think that since this is a state wilderness marine park, the only one we have, the state would take some responsibility, but we got our funding cut by the state, by our governor.” A few hundred yards south of the bocce court, just past a big color wheel that one of the volunteers has assembled out of fishing floats on the gravelly sand, we turn single file through the surfgrass onto a narrow trail. “If state land is not a state responsibility, then is it the Indonesian government who's responsible?” Raynor asks. He is clearly fond of this line about the Indonesian government. Over the next few days, I will hear him deliver it multiple times. I don't yet have an answer to Raynor's question, but Sarah Palin did, an answer both simple and simplistic: since much of the debris comes from elsewhere, it is neither Alaska's fault, nor Alaska's responsibility.

By the end of that summer, I will get to know Raynor pretty well. In addition to delivering screeds, he likes to imagine that his actions are divinely ordained, but his preferred deities, unlike Palin's, are Mother Nature and his dead pit bull Codi—Saint Codi, Raynor calls him now. For good luck, he keeps a gold-plated locket of Saint Codi's ashes on the dashboard of his eighteen-foot tin fishing boat, the
Cape Chacon
, anchored across the lagoon from the
Johnita II
. “Mother Nature likes us,” I will hear him say once. “We call what we do ‘wiping Mother Nature's ass.'”

Raynor also likes to put on authoritative airs, as if he were in charge of an actual military operation. Instead of answering yes-or-no questions “yes” or “no,” for instance, he'll say, “affirmative” or “negative,” as when, after a volunteer mentions that Japanese fishermen no longer use glass balls as floats, Raynor replies, correctly: “Negative. They still use them.” Formerly a charter boat captain like Cliff Chambers, a couple of years ago he got sick of chartering. Now being field manager for GoAK's summer beach cleanups is his only job. Last year he worked six weeks. This year he is going to work ten. “Hey, I'm improving,” he says. The rest of the year he trains for marathons by running up mountains. According to Pallister, Raynor has run eight hundred miles in the past nine months.

A favorite topic of conversation is which actresses he would and wouldn't “do.” He finds it amusing to pretend that the actress Jessica Alba is his girlfriend. Sarcastically, he's given to using what he thinks is fashionable slang—“I'm down with that,” or “You the man.” He's also given to rhapsodizing, with heartfelt sincerity, about the beauty of the Alaskan wilderness in general and of Gore Point in particular. It is, he feels, one of the most beautiful places on earth. The Alaskan wilderness and his pit bull—the living one—are the two things he cares most about in this world. He tried settling down once, with a kayaking guide. Then one morning she woke up and said, “I thought you might be the one. But you're not.”

The trail dips and meanders along the boundary between a spruce forest and a meadow where wildflowers are in bloom. Raynor identifies them for me by name: purple fireweed, lupine, wild geranium, chocolate lily. “Know why they call it a chocolate lily? 'Cause it smells like chocolate. Take a sniff.” I bend the somewhat purple, vaguely chocolate-colored flower to my nostrils. It doesn't smell like chocolate. It smells like a flower. “Gotcha,” Raynor says, with a big self-satisfied grin that makes it easy to imagine what he was like as a teenager.

The trail curves into the forest. We pass an Unegkurmiut house pit, and a culturally modified tree. I begin to notice the branches Pallister had mentioned, the ones sheered off by the winter storms. They're furry with moss. On the forest floor beneath them grows a dense understory of salmonberry and devil's club, the latter of which Pallister warns me not to touch. Pinching the edge of one of the big flat leaves, he gingerly lifts it up. The underside bristles with thorns that are, he says, “damn hard to get out.”

Ravens caw in the treetops, and Bryn, AWOL in the understory, barks in reply. Here and there shafts of sunlight penetrate the canopy, gilding the trunks of some of the trees but not others, dropping pretty pools of shine that make the devil's club fairly glow. As clouds pass overhead, the pools dim and brighten, brighten and dim. In the distance, trash bags, some yellow, others white, flash between the trees. “We used to be walking by garbage already,” Raynor says. We are at present exactly four hundred feet from the ocean. Raynor knows. Michael Armstrong, the reporter for the
Homer News
, “GPS'd it.” If you listen closely, you can barely hear the faint huzzah of the surf crashing on the windward shore. The huzzah grows steadily louder as we walk.

“Holy crap,” Pallister says. Our file comes to a halt. Snaking across the forest floor is what appears to be a black plastic anaconda but what is in fact some sort of PVC duct, at least a dozen feet long, pumped full of Styrofoam. “Haven't seen anything like that before,” says Pallister. “Foam must be to keep it from crushing at depth probably. Christ almighty.” A little farther he spots a hollow stalk of bamboo and shouts, “Hey! Bamboo!” Bamboo, of course, is not native to Alaska. The stalk of it lying there in the devil's club almost certainly traveled here from Hawaii or Asia. My hopes rise. This second beachcombing expedition promises to be far more fruitful than my day trip to Kruzof Island. I am nearing, I feel certain, the terminus of one thread in my tangled trail.

I hoped that in following my trail I'd attain some variety of enlightenment, but here, on this wild isthmus, approaching this trail's end, I am if anything increasingly confused, increasingly, well, bewildered. Maybe Alaskan travelers like John Muir and Rockwell Kent have spoiled me to Gore Point's wild beauty, leading me to expect too much.
⁹
The wild beauty—and “purity” and “sublimity”—of such Alaskan places have been remarked on so often that Gore Point's wild, pure, sublime beauty seems to me unremarkable. The usual words and thoughts and metaphors, the comparisons between a forest and a cathedral, or between the wilderness and the Louvre, have been worn out from overuse, the Alaskan scenery wrung dry of its power to astonish or exhilarate or enrapture. I can't help wondering whether we need to reimagine the meanings of
wilderness
yet again, or perhaps abandon the word altogether. Perhaps its contradictory associations have worn the word out. Perhaps it signifies so much, it signifies nothing. Perhaps the more we worship it, preserve it, memorialize it, manage it, the more humanized, the more man-made, the more iconic, the more synthetic the wilderness becomes. Gore Point isn't simply an isthmus in the wilderness, after all; it's an isthmus in a state-protected wilderness park. Can a park be wild?
¹⁰

The trail bends 90 degrees as it nears the shore, and then we are there, before a great cairn of trash bags, pilgrims before a shrine. Among the bags are spherical fishing floats strung like beads the size of melons onto loops of rope. Pallister is dumbstruck, rapt with admiration. “I'm amazed you guys got this cleaned up this fast,” he finally says. “I'm completely amazed.” Surveying the scene, we can see other heaps of bags, distributed every few dozen yards along the length of the beach near the forest's edge. There are more bags piled about back in the forest. Here and there, clustered in the grass, are loose objects too big or heavy for bags—the wheel of a car, a microwave oven, a television screen that, shorn of its cabinet, looks naked somehow, like a brain without a skull. Crusty sucker rings left by gooseneck barnacles dot its glossy screen. The barnacles themselves are long gone, scraped away in the surf, perhaps, or plucked off by scavenging birds.

A hundred yards farther we leave the trail and wade through the devil's club, thorns catching at our pants, to the last acre yet to be cleaned up. Behind the moldering trunk of a fallen spruce, a great drift of flotsam has collected, like water behind a dam. As we approach, the mossy earth begins to crackle and crunch underfoot. How strange! What is that sound? And then I recognize it, a sound one does not expect to hear in an old-growth forest: that of crumpling plastic bottles, a whole stratum of them, buried under humus and moss. This is what the entire shore was like two weeks before, Raynor says, and given the bagged evidence, I believe him.

I climb down into the remaining drift and rummage around. At the surface, drift-net floats of the sort Ebbesmeyer showed me on his patio are the most abundant item; polyethylene water bottles, the second-most, many of them embossed with Asian characters.

“An amazing amount of crap, isn't it?” Pallister says.

It is. Lost in a crap-inspired reverie, the three of us marvel for a moment in silence. Off in the understory Bryn is still barking at the ravens. Somewhere nearby a creek is flowing over rocks. The sunlit leaves of the devil's club brighten and dim. Along with the wind in the branches, you can hear the unseen waves. And I'm sitting atop plastic. I unearth a flip-flop, and then, a few moments later, an empty container of Downy, the fabric softener. Surely, somewhere in this great drift there is yet to be found a Floatee.

 

 

Pallister had answers to some of my doubtful questions about the value of a pristine wilderness. He thought the Gore Point midden heap was unsightly, but he objected to it on ecological as well as aesthetic grounds. This waste, he believed, was genuinely hazardous. “They're pulling plastic out of that gyre and analyzing what's on the surface of it,” he told me back in Anchorage, “and they're finding concentrations of persistent organic pollutants a million times higher than in the surrounding seawater.” By “they” Pallister mainly meant the legendary Charlie Moore and his crew of sailors and researchers.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not merely a cosmetic problem, Moore like Pallister contends, nor is it, he believes, merely a symbolic one. No one knows exactly how many marine mammals and sea turtles and seabirds die when they entangle themselves in debris or ingest it. One widely cited if dubiously round estimate puts the toll of casualties at 100,000 animals a year. “Entanglement and ingestion, however, are not the worst problems caused by the ubiquitous plastic pollution,” Moore wrote in his
Natural History
article. Plastic polymers, as any toxicologist can tell you, have the peculiar propensity to adsorb chemicals colloquially known as POPs—those “persistent organic pollutants” Pallister was talking about.

Such substances are “hydrophobic,” meaning that water molecules repel them. In the ocean, they collect at the surface, much as olive oil collects atop vinegar. POPs are also lipophilic, which means that oily substances attract them—or “adsorb” them, to use the term of art. In chemistry, when one substance is
ab
sorbed by another it permeates it. An
ad
sorbed substance merely coats the surface, which is what POPs do to oily solids such as petrochemical plastics. The propensity of plastics to adsorb such substances is so well-known, in fact, that in the lab, toxicologists will sometimes dip a wand of sterilized plastic into a water sample to see what it collects. POPs also happen to include many of the villainous poisons made famous by Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring
—PCBs, dioxin, DDT. Now controlled in most developed nations but less so elswhere, such toxins are surprisingly abundant at the ocean's surface. Even in the U.S., where they've been banned, PCBs continue to leach from dumps—on coastlines, on abandoned military bases in the Aleutians—into the watershed. By concentrating these free-floating contaminants, Moore worries, even microscopic particles of plastic could become “poison pills.”

Such fears are not new. In 1972, long before Moore went trawling in the Subtropical Convergence Zone, Edward J. Carpenter of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found between one and twenty plastic particles in every cubic yard of Long Island Sound. A few years later, he found elevated levels of plastic and tar at the heart of the Sargasso Sea. Other oceanographers followed Carpenter's lead. If you're awake enough, and have a long enough attention span, you can read dozens of scientific papers published in the 1970s on, for instance, plastic containers discarded on the beaches of Kent, on the “evidence from seabirds of plastic particle pollution off Central California,” on concentrations of DDT and PCBs in the western Baltic. The list goes on and on. Over the course of the 1980s, the bibliography of scientific studies on the impact of plastic pollution grew to encyclopedic lengths.

Carpenter, like many of the scientists who followed him, also worried about plastic's environmental impact. Particles could encourage bacterial growth, he speculated, or block the intestines of fish, and like Moore he worried about toxicity. It wasn't the contaminants the particles had adsorbed that troubled Carpenter most. It was the toxins in the plastics themselves, a concern Moore, like many of the scientists who came before him, shares. Once fish or plankton ingest those poison pills, Moore speculates, the poisons both in and on the plastic may enter the food web. And since lipophilic toxins concentrate, or “bioaccumulate,” in fatty tissues as they move up the chain of predation—so that the “contaminant burden” of a swordfish is greater than a mackerel's and a mackerel's greater than a shrimp's—these poison pills could be poisoning people too.

Far-fetched as the theory sounds, the bioaccumulations of mercury in seafood provide a well-established precedent for the plastic-poisoning hypothesis. According to the “National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals” put out in 2007 by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), all sorts of synthetic substances with scary, polysyllabic names are getting into the average American's bloodstream, including both POPs and ingredients in plastic—ingredients like the endocrine-disrupting, gender-bending phthalates that resin manufacturers add to PVC to make it more pliable. As early as 1978, a paper published in the prestigious journal
Science
identified “phthalate ester plasticizers” as “a new class of marine pollutant.”