Moby-Duck (57 page)

In the end Captain Rothwell and the engineers improvised an ingenious remedy, pumping ballast water back and forth from starboard to port, making the ship shimmy and shake, all the while running the props in reverse, until, to a round of cheers, the
Louis
slid free. It had taken forty-five minutes—nothing compared with the
Jeannette'
s twenty months, of course, but then it happened again, and then again. We kept stopping, sticking. No one aboard had experienced anything like it. I asked Erin Clark, the ice pick, if she could explain it. The problem, she said, was that the ice here had begun to thaw but hadn't yet thawed enough. “It's not hard, and it's not soft,” she said. “It's sticky.” Hard ice is brittle. Soft ice is slushy. This ice was rubbery. Beneath the weight of the ship, it didn't break; it bent. Our average speed fell to just four knots, or less than five miles per hour. We might as well have snowshoed to Cambridge Bay.

Even now, a day later, as Carmack was delivering his lecture in the main lounge, Captain Rothwell was considering giving up. If conditions didn't improve soon, we'd have no choice but to turn around and follow the slushy channel of our wake irresolutely back to Resolute. So much for the record-breaking transit of the Northwest Passage.

 

 

Now Carmack clicked the button on his remote control, and onto the screen and across his fleece vest there flashed an incongruous photograph of open water, taken the previous summer not far from the North Pole. “That's a lot of open water that far north,” Carmack said. Then onto his screen there flashed a satellite image from 2005. “Everyone was shocked,” Carmack said, “when the ice cover collapsed to this position.” Then Carmack played the same animation he'd played for me back at the Institute of Ocean Sciences, the stop-motion one depicting the great melt of 2007. Said Carmack: “All the multiyear ice is streaming out, and as the Arctic refreezes, it just refreezes as first-year ice.” The meaning for the planet was ominous: the subtropical gyres were expanding, the subpolar fronts were moving north, along with invasive species. The meaning for me was ambiguous.

Ebbesmeyer had based his prediction that the toys would reach New England in the summer of 2003 on a dozen-odd transarctic drifts, intentional and accidental, that he'd found in the historical data record—drifts including those of the
Fram
and the
Jeannette,
but also studies conducted by NOAA in the 1970s. From these precedents, he'd calculated that the icy currents flow at an average pace of around 0.6 miles per day, sometimes much faster, sometimes much slower. That's about how fast—about 0.6 miles per day—that Carmack had expected his bottles to travel when he began his Drift Bottle Project; at most he'd expected them to travel at an average pace of a mile per day. Instead they appeared to be traveling “twice as fast,” he'd told me that afternoon in his office—not one mile per day, but two. In short, I was right to question Ebbesmeyer's 2003 prediction. “Any predictions based on old data would no longer be as likely,” Carmack said.

There was, however, one other miscalculation that in Carmack's opinion Ebbesmeyer had made. He'd assumed that like the
Fram
and the
Jeannette
the toys, upon passing through Bering Strait, would have caught the current now known as the Transpolar Drift. Catching the Transpolar Drift is like catching the express. Between the coast of Siberia and the North Pole, it flows directly, or as directly as any Arctic current flows, from the Bering Strait to Fram Strait, the latter of which was named for Nansen's famous ship. The data from Carmack's Drift Bottle Project suggested a different route. Carmack's drift bottles tended to hug the coastline, caught in coastal currents by the Coriolis force. The coastal currents that flow through the Bering Strait would have carried the toys around Alaska and into the Northwest Passage, which is why I'm here. Carmack now put up a slide titled “The Northern Drift Hypothesis,” an animated slide that showed animated bottles zipping around the northern coast of Canada.

Did Carmack's data prove Ebbesmeyer's drift hypothesis wrong? Not necessarily. But it did prove it to be fallible. Ducks, frogs, beavers, and turtles could have made it to New England by 2003, Carmack said, depending on what unforeseen and unforeseeable events transpired during their transarctic voyage. But they also could have made it sooner, given the acceleration of the currents. Or perhaps they'd never made it at all. At the time Carmack and I traveled together aboard the
Louis
, he'd begun collaborating with Ebbesmeyer on a scientific paper analyzing data from the Drift Bottle Project. One conclusion they would eventually draw: “Our data . . . show the boundary between the subarctic and subtropical waters to be a near-impenetrable wall.” Out of 1,184 bottles launched in the eastern Arctic and recovered elsewhere, only one had headed south, to Puerto Rico. The rest the Gulf Stream and its branches had swept east, toward Europe. It was, in other words, statistically likely that the duck allegedly glimpsed in Maine was a counterfeit, an impostor, a figment, a will-o'-the-wisp, and that the advert created by that British cell phone company was as fantastical as any advert, as childlike as
Ten Little Ducks
, more childlike than
Make Way for Ducklings
, far more childlike than
Paddle to the Sea
, and that my errand, from the outset, was indeed that of a fool.

In helicopter 363. Once again in the backseat. Once again in a jumpsuit. Once again a headset clapped onto my ears. Just because the ducks never made it to Maine doesn't mean, as per Carmack's Northern Drift hypothesis, that they never made it here, into the Northwest Passage. I've got four days left to search. And I mean to. In fact, I've printed up WANTED posters, illustrated with the blue, green, yellow, and red likenesses of the toys. They're pretty snazzy, I think. I even put the word WANTED in an old-timey, Wild West font
,
and at the bottom I cut a little fringe of tear-away tags bearing my e-mail address. I've already posted some in Nuuk, on my way home from the Labrador Sea (so far, no replies), and some more in Resolute, and I'm ready to post more on every bulletin board I encounter before flying home for good. Granted, here, in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, there's a hell of a lot of shoreline—87,000 miles of it—and a hell of a lot of sticky, rubbery ice, and a dearth of bulletin boards.

With me and pilot Chris Swannell in helicopter 363 are a pair of men who, like me, seem to have been arrested by their childish imaginations, men who boarded the
Louis
in Resolute dressed as if for an expedition to the planet Hoth, in white snow pants and white parkas with furry hoods, parkas decorated with a cryptically Hellenistic logo of the sort one might encounter on the facade of a college fraternity. Even in the main mess, at breakfast, these strangers have been striding around in black knee-high jackboots of the sort favored by Napoleonic cavalrymen. This duo belongs to an outfit called the Phaeton Group, named, curiously, for the doomed son of the Greek god, the one who steals his father's solar chariot as if it were a Buick and takes it for a reckless spin, a whimsical crime for which Zeus, like some celestial traffic cop, executes Phaeton with a lightning bolt. The Phaeton Group, according to their literature, is “a science and consulting organization that carries out research and provides communications services to media and educational clients.” They offer “public outreach” and “media savvy” and both “enlightenment and excitement.” Publicists with the Canadian Coast Guard have hired them to produce educational posters about icebreakers. We're flying out now so that they can collect footage of an icebreaker in action. I'm here because Chris Swannell refuses to be photographed or filmed and they need a human figure to stand in the foreground, on the ice, providing a sense of scale.

In their getups, the duo from Phaeton look—to me, to the crew of the
Louis,
or at least to those members of the crew I overheard gossiping yesterday in the computer lounge—ridiculous, and they don't seem to know it, but who, while looking or being ridiculous, ever does?

Up we go. Helicopter 363 circles the
Louis
at two hundred feet, collecting footage to aft, astern, abeam. The back door is wide open and the Phaeton cameraman, buckled into a harness, the wind ruffling his hood's furry ruff, is leaning out. I hope his glasses don't fall off. I hope he doesn't drop his fancy camera. At his direction, we ascend, Phaetonlike, to a thousand feet. At this height, except for the plume of yellowy exhaust rising from its stack, the
Louis
very much resembles a red toy boat in an icy bathtub. Now we fly miles ahead, over the ice, the hummocks and bummocks flickering below us.
³⁹
The
Louis
disappears, and Swannell looks for a solid floe on which to set us down. If I were Ishmael—Melville's Ishmael, not the Bible's—I'd probably at this point in my narration say something allegorical, about how we are all precariously aloft, about how the door of the helicopter is always thrown open and we are all always leaning out, dressed in ridiculous costumes, imagining ourselves to be something or someone that we aren't: Phaeton, or John Muir or Rachel Carson or Doc from
Cannery Row
, or Ishmael, who, come to think of it, imagines himself to be the biblical Ishmael's second coming; how, buffeted by winds actual and imaginary, held in place by harnesses that we can only hope will hold, we're dangling above a planet too big for one mind to encompass, a planet that in large part thanks to our imaginings and desires and restlessness and ingenuity is changing more quickly than we can comprehend; how we're all flying over hummocks and bummocks and milky-blue pools of slush that make patterns both beautiful and perilous, at once orderly and chaotic; how our cameras, fancy as they are, will never be fancy enough; how we're all searching for colorful objects and meanings that we'll never find and looking for solid ice that maybe just maybe we might.

Swannell picks his floe and sets us down, bouncing three times to test the thickness, and we all unbuckle ourselves and step out, cryonauts, onto the frozen sea, boots crunching on the lunar snow. The hummock Swannell chose, like those he did not choose, is shaped like a sand trap, or an amoeba. Around us ten thousand other hummocks shine and ten thousand pools of melt sparkle. They look delicious, these pools. I'd like to kneel down beside them and drink my fill, but I'm scared I might slip in, and besides I have a role to play, the role of a human in an inhuman landscape. Chocolate-covered cliffs, streaked with snow, rise up to the east and west of us, but we're in the middle of the ocean—the ocean! Most inhuman of all is the silence. There are no sounds besides the crunching of our boots and the rustling of our outerwear. Not even the melt pools lap.

Near the edge of the hummock the Phaeton cinematographer sets up his camera on a tripod and aims it north, the direction from which we expect the
Louis
to approach. “What do we do if a crack does open up?” he asks of our floe.

“I have no idea,” says Swannell. “Try to get out. What you really don't want is for the ice to close back in on you. I've seen that happen to seals. They just go
sppppt”
—he pinches two fingers together—“like a pimple.”

The
Louis
appears. The red smudge of the ship grows into the red triangle of the looming bow and the faint murmur crescendos. As it breaks the ice, water and snow shoot up around the bow in feathery plumes, and with it comes the sound of ice buckling—the creak as it stretches, the crack as it gives way, a low grumble as big blue-white blocks of ice heave upward, spilling over each other, into ridges that paw along the hull. What the breaking of ice sounds most like out here is fireworks heard from afar.

The cameraman finally gives me my cue, and I stand before the camera, as close to the edge of our hummock as I dare to go, the big red ship passing behind me. When the shoot ends I search my pocket for the yellow duck Ebbesmeyer gave me three years ago. I'd meant to leave it here, Marpol Annex V and environmental impacts and my promise to return it to Ebbesmeyer be damned. I meant to leave it here as a kind of wish. But grapnelling my pocket, I come up empty. Evidently I left the thing back in my cabin.

While the film crew pack up their equipment, I scan the hummocks for bears, having learned from Barry Lopez that the specially adapted fur on a polar bear's paws makes its tread almost silent. Their coats, of course, make them nearly invisible. For all I know there is a bear nearby, but here in Peel Sound, there's no sign of them, nor of any other life. As Swannell and the two cinematographers climb back aboard helicopter 363, I linger a little, making the moment last, trying to imagine what it would feel like to find myself marooned out here alone and wishing again that I'd brought my yellow duck. As consolation I kneel down and scoop up a handful of snow. And eat it. It tastes good, a teensy bit salty, but good. Then I take in one last drink of the scenery. At the edges of some of the melt pools, I notice, a breeze is kicking up capillary waves. And there, on the snow, are our boot prints.

The
Louis
by now has steamed far ahead. The blue-white blocks chopped up by its propellers flow back into its wake, and you can hear them flowing, a slushy river whose currents gradually slow until once again, nothing is moving and nothing besides us makes any sound.

We didn't turn back in the end. Captain Rothwell, after a suspenseful conference call with “all the powers that be” at Coast Guard headquarters, had decided to press on, breaking, bubbling, backing and filling, whatever the risks. Expensive, nonrefundable plane tickets hung in the balance, including my own. By the following day the ice conditions had improved—for us if not for the polar bears. Leads opened. The ice parted. Parted because it had melted enough. And would continue to melt. The melt of 2008 would be among the worst on record, coming in second only to that of 2007. It's possible, maybe even probable, that in my lifetime toys from China will be arriving via the Northwest Passage.