Moby-Duck (24 page)

Since the afternoon I'd spent on Kruzof Island, I'd reread Stevens's “Anecdote of the Jar.” It was more ambiguous than I remembered. When the speaker places the jar in Tennessee, the wilderness is no longer wild, he tells us. Why not? After all, this isn't ajar of dioxin or DDT. It is, the speaker makes emphatically clear, empty, like “a port in air.” The jar does not exterminate the birds and bushes of Tennessee.

Literary historians have speculated that Stevens had in mind a particular brand of jar, now obsolete, then common, with which a Tennessean could lay up fruits of the harvest. The brand name?
Dominion
, a word now fraught with contentious environmental connotations thanks to the King James translation of Genesis 1, verse 26: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have
dominion
over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” The most mysterious thing about the poem to my mind is this personification of the jar. You'd think that the speaker, in placing it there, had taken dominion. How can a mere jar, even one embossed with the brand name
Dominion
, take dominion?

Here's what I think. It only takes dominion in the mind of the speaker, by changing the look of the scenery—not the ecology of the scenery, or the chemistry of the scenery, mind you, but the look of it. What the jar exterminates is the appearance of wilderness, the
idea
of wilderness. The wilderness is “slovenly,” whereas the jar is anything but. It's gray, bare, round, inanimate, man-made. It is, above all, a symbol of human order imposed on nature's entropy. It creates a kind of round center that the previously centerless wilderness seems to surround, but only when viewed by the godlike speaker does this center hold. Perceived by a bird, the jar would be, what? An inedible bit of kiln-fired clay? A nice place to build a nest?

Stevens's orderly poem, organized into shapely quatrains, with its irregular but nevertheless discernible iambic meter and its internal rhymes, is itself a jar of sorts, and so for that matter is a wilderness park. Much as Stevens's jar takes “dominion everywhere,” the State of Alaska had taken dominion over the Kachemak Bay Wilderness. We might conclude, given the contrast Stevens draws between the sterility of the gray jar and the vitality of the slovenly wilderness, that the poem favors the latter. This is hard to say. The poem itself isn't wild, after all. And in other poems about the natural world, “The Snow Man” for instance, Stevens's speakers gaze into natural landscapes but fail to detect the mind of God, or the evidence of design, or of harmony, and they see the beauty of such places as a human creation, a projection of the imagination onto a kind of blankness.

A hairline crack ran around the duck Bryan Leiser gave me, and I could see the shadow of seawater sloshing around inside its translucent body. I shook as much seawater out as I could without beheading the thing completely, and zipped it into the pocket of my raincoat. Back in New York, I stashed it in my freezer, subjecting it to Arctic temperatures, performing an experiment. The beaver I'd found I sent to an environmental toxicologist, Lorena Rios, at the University of the Pacific, who'd agreed to analyze it, pro bono, with her mass spectrometer, a machine that, by measuring the mass of molecules, thereby distinguishing among them, can see chemicals invisible to the human eye. Months later Rios would send me the results: her tests would accurately identify the polymer—polyethylene. They would also detect twelve different polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that my beaver had adsorbed on its journey to Gore Point
¹⁵
.

Did Pallister feel a sense of satisfaction, the blond anchorwoman wanted to know.

“It's satisfying,” Pallister said, squinting into the camera on its tripod, his rubber boots planted on the gravel beach, a microphone clipped to his fleece collar. Visible behind him was the
Constructor
, thousands of white bags piled high above the bulwarks, and beyond them the dark lagoon, and beyond that the snowcapped peaks of the Kenai Mountains—a dramatic backdrop that would no doubt do wonders for GoAK's fund-raising efforts. “Satisfying, but it sure was a grind,” Pallister said. “Right now I'm just tired.”

—Garrett Hardin,
The Tragedy of the Commons

—Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick

The southernmost edge of Hawaii is also the southernmost edge of the United States of America and feels like the southernmost edge of the world. Two months after the airlift at Gore Point I traveled there, staying in Na‘ālehu, whose name means “the volcanic ashes.” Na‘ālehu is the southernmost town on the Big Island, and for frugal reasons I took a room at the Shirakawa Motel, the southernmost motel and quite possibly the cheapest one on the entire Hawaiian chain. Just up the road from the southernmost motel is a bar advertised as the southernmost bar, a restaurant advertised as the southernmost restaurant, and a bakery advertised as the southernmost bakery. Geographical extremity seems to me of dubious relevance to baked goods, but the tourists come by the busload to sample a morsel of southernmost bread.

The windward side of the Big Island is not what most of us imagine when, finding ourselves stuck in traffic or a bad job, we dream our Hawaiian dreams. Downtown Hilo, once the capital of a booming sugar trade, reminded me of cities in the American Rust Belt, only with palm trees and rain, lots of rain—a sunbaked, rain-soaked, tropical Sandusky. To get to Na‘ālehu from Hilo, you drive over the Kilauea volcano, which is active but tame, the lava bubbling forth in a steady simmer but never, in recent history, shooting forth a shower of fire and brimstone. You pass through dilapidated towns made derelict by the collapse of Hawaii's sugar industry, past bungalows with corrugated metal roofs, past a barn-size movie theater with a sea turtle painted on its corrugated metal roof and a closed sign hanging in its dark entrance even on Saturday nights (or at least on the particular Saturday night I saw it), past walls of lava rock stacked in the manner of fieldstones in rural New England.
¹⁶

Then you reach the Shirakawa Motel, advertised by a rusty metal sign protruding out of the foliage. The Shirakawa Motel is a dilapidated compound of buildings also roofed in metal and encircled by a jungle of banana trees, and palm trees, and monkey pod trees, and ti plants, which have big droopy leaves and resemble the sort of tropical flora one encounters in the waiting rooms of dentists. The sky here is smoky gray and the rain falls in torrential outbursts lasting, at least on the afternoon I checked in, roughly seven minutes. It is falling now, loud as drumsticks on the canopy of leaves. And now it has stopped. Within moments, butterflies emerge to suck nectar from the flowering bushes, the flowers of which resemble little red starbursts.

My room is monastically spare—no television, no telephone, no clock, only a tattered orange paperback copy of
The Teaching of Buddha,
left out, like the Gideon Bible, as if to entice converts, on the round table between the two saggy queen-size beds. On the cover of
The Teaching of Buddha
is a setting sun. The binding has cracked and pages have come loose. Someone has stuck some of the loose pages randomly back in. The frontmost page is page 166, which begins midparagraph: “Was it a man or a woman? Was it someone of noble birth, or was it a peasant? What was the bow made of? Was it made of fiber, or of gut?” In my present bewildered state of mind, these seem like good questions.

From outside my little room come the sounds of insects—cicadas, perhaps, or crickets, or some tropical variety of noisy insect I've never heard of. A dog is barking. The striated world visible through the slanted jalousies above the queen-size beds is bright and green. Someone is playing Jawaiian reggae. Chickens run wild in southern Hawaii. This is the sort of habitat in which they evolved, after all. We think of chickens as animals indigenous to a Nebraskan farmyard, but they emerged from tropical forests like those encroaching all around the Shirakawa Motel. Every so often I can hear a rooster crow. They crow at dusk and dawn both. The flora and fauna here are as lush as the economy and the architecture are moribund. If the residents left, it wouldn't be long before the motels and movie theaters vanished into the foliage. Yes, this feels very much like the edge of the world. It feels much farther from the tourist-infested boulevards of Waikiki than it is—the boulevards of Waikiki, where, a few days ago, I saw white Christmas lights twinkle in the palm trees and street vendors peddle ukuleles made in China and the eternal flames of gaslit tiki torches burn on the facades of the big hotels.

One morning I drive farther south still, to the stretch of coastline known as South Point. The lush jungle gives way to feral sprays of sugarcane. Then to ranchland. The sun comes out. The road is cracked. Horses and cattle graze on windswept pastures over which loom rows of derelict windmills—an alternative energy plan gone bust. I drive on, until the pavement ends, at which point I park my rental car and continue on foot down a red dirt road that branches and splits among green hills carved by storm surges and rain. Every now again an SUV or pickup will rattle past. At the terminus of the land blue breakers obliterate themselves prettily against gnarled tumors of black igneous rock. I keep walking, searching, combing, stumbling over the crumbled lava rock in my canvas boat shoes, canvas boat shoes now dusted with red dirt. I follow the shoreline, the sun beating down. I wish I'd brought more water.

A week ago, if you had stood on these lava rocks amid the crashing waves and stared out to sea, you would have seen a catamaran under sail. And if you had aimed a telescope at that catamaran you might well have seen, dressed in Adventure pants, unzipped at the knee into Adventure shorts, baring my pale ankles, me, cross-legged atop the catamaran's cabin, on watch, scanning the horizon for obstacles and debris. And if you'd aimed your telescope at the cockpit, a foot or two below me, you would have seen, through the tinted windshield beaded with spray, at the helm, in his big captain's chair, Captain Charles Moore considering a dashboard aflicker with soundings and readings and bearings.

It had taken months of nagging and cajoling and begging to persuade Charles Moore that I was worthy to sail under his command. He'd had bad experiences with other landlubber journalists. A film crew for
Vice
magazine, shooting an online video about the Garbage Patch, had been particularly, almost mutinously, annoying, worried more about getting good shots than about standing watch or hauling in sheets or reefing sails or washing dishes. When I first reached Moore, by cell phone, from my classroom, back before I'd given up schoolteaching for seafaring, he'd said, gruffly, “There are no passengers aboard the
Alguita
; only crew.”

Fine by me, I'd told him, thinking of Melville's Ishmael, who whenever he goes to sea always goes as a sailor, before the mast, on the forecastle deck, never as a passenger. It was early spring, that afternoon, and on my chalkboard was a stanza of Dickinson's “There's a certain slant of light,” between the lines of which I'd marked out the stresses of Dickinson's irregular hymn meter, and in the pockets of my corduroy blazer were chalk nubbins and red pencils, and outside my classroom windows, on Manhattan's East 16th Street, the fruitless pear trees were in bloom, and on the sidewalk below, schoolchildren, just dismissed, were purchasing colorful balls of Italian ice from a cart, and in my mind the tropics of the North Pacific were a vague, blue dream.