Moby-Duck (60 page)

Now keep in mind that between the appearance of the
Bachelor
and the
Rachel
another fatherly event has occurred: Ahab has adopted the castaway, tambourine-playing cabin boy Pip as a kind of spiritual son. “Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy,” Ahab tells his new ward; “thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings.” And Pip, in reply, wishes that his black hand and Ahab's white one might be riveted together. You'd think, given the fatherly warp and woof of his heartstrings, that Ahab would be sympathetic to the appeals of the
Rachel
's bereft captain. But no. Ahab's reply is terrible, terrible for the bereft father, but also—because of what it implies about his lonely, fatherless, unfatherly fate—terrible for Ahab: “God bless ye, man,” the doomed captain says to the bereft one, “and may I forgive myself, but I must go.”

One last time. In
Moby-Dick,
Starbuck, first mate, is the consummate father, and as the novel ends his fatherly voice grows loud. On the eve of destruction, Starbuck reminds his captain of his captain's wife and child: “Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are Starbuck's—wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow youth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, longing, paternal old age! Away! let us away!”

For a moment Ahab seems to be persuaded: “By the green land; by the bright hearth stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye.” For a moment, but only for a moment. Of course, Ahab, the foundling son of a fatherless universe, possessed by his chase, making of his own son a foundling, renounces that homecoming, though he does tell Starbuck not to renounce it—to stay on the
Pequod
rather than chase the white whale, choosing for his second-in-command a happier fate than the one he chooses for himself. Cruelly, Melville drowns Starbuck, too. And Ishmael? Abob on the life buoy of Queequeg's coffin, he's rescued by the
Rachel,
“the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.”

 

 

Two days after my walk on the tundra, after a long series of connecting flights and a ride from JFK on the A train, I turned the key in the lock of my front door and lugged my ergonomic suitcase up three flights of stairs. On this my final return, at least my final one for a good long while, Beth and Bruno had made, with crayons and butcher paper, a big sign that read WELCOME HOME, PAPA. Now almost three, my son had entered an A. A. Milne phase. In the following days I read to him such classics as “In Which Piglet Is Entirely Surrounded by Water” and “In Which Christopher Robin Leads an Expotition to the North Pole.”

Of a Sabbath afternoon, not long after my return, I take Bruno down to the park along the Hudson River. We gather pinecones from beneath the pine trees there, Bruno foraging, me watching for dog turds and syringes and fragments of broken glass, of which there are surprisingly few. Parents, like their children, are at the mercy of their nightmares and dreams. Unlike children, they're also at the mercy of memories—and I remember well the pleasure of exploring those secret, shadowy grottoes beneath branches and behind bushes. When Bruno's arms and my hands are full of pinecones, we carry them—dropping a few, among the sunbathers, along the way—to the river's edge. There we divide them into equal piles and take turns throwing them, as if launching a pinecone assault on the condominiums of New Jersey, or on the ferryboats, behind which the sun has begun to set. To throw his, Bruno has to reach through the railings of the balustrade, a significant handicap. His barely make it into the water. I hurl mine as far as I can, trying to impress him.

Bruno can play this game for hours on end, never tiring of it. So can I. When all the pinecones are adrift, we follow them, hurrying among the joggers and strollers, stopping to peer down. Finally, we let them go, and I tell Bruno where the currents will take them—out of the harbor, onto the Atlantic, into the Gulf Stream, which will sweep them toward northern Europe, odds are, and then, if they chance to remain adrift, perhaps to the Arctic or else into the Sargasso Sea. Perhaps they will end up on some European or Brazilian or African or Asian coast and take sprout—these seeds of Manhattan pines.

This was pure fancy, of course. Pinecones aren't sea beans, after all. They evolved to germinate on a forest floor, not ride the currents. Still, it was fun to imagine.

I've been lucky, before setting out to write this book and since, to have worked with and learned from a number of superlative editors: at
Agni,
Askold Melnyczuk; at
Harper's,
Lewis Lapham, Ben Metcalf, Colin Harrison, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Ellen Rosenbush, Jen Szalai, and Bill Wasik, among others; at
The New York Times Magazine
, Alex Star; at
Outside
, Will Palmer; and at Viking, Joshua Kendall, who faithfully and skillfully piloted this book through calms and storms, even when—especially when—it seemed to have sprung a leak.

But the editor to whom I'm most indebted is Lewis Lapham's successor at the helm of
Harper's
, Roger Hodge. It was Roger who, when I called him from my classroom one afternoon in the spring of 2005 and recounted what little I then knew about the legend of the rubber ducks lost at sea, saw what I saw: the germ of a story, the makings of a quest. At the time I was already under commission to write a piece about the elephants of the Detroit Zoo. “Have you heard about this?” I said to Roger. “In 1992, a bunch of rubber ducks fell off a container ship.” Roger's response: the elephants of the Detroit Zoo could wait. Throughout the past five years, he's offered unceasing support, reading many drafts in progress, offering counsel and encouragement.

I'm similarly indebted to many of the people—scientists, beachcombers, naval architects, supernumeraries, toymakers—I met during the course of my travels. Eddy Carmack, Amy Bower, Robie Macdonald, Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Thomas Royer, John Toole, and Willa France were especially generous with their time. I'm also grateful to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where I underwent a weeklong crash course in oceanography.

I never would have made it home from the Arctic, book in hand, or at least in mind, were it not for the generous support of the Whiting Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. I wouldn't have made it from idea to book without the guidance of my agent, Heather Schroder at ICM. Or from rough draft to final draft without the help of Emily Votruba, copy editor, and my intrepid research assistants, Joseph Bernstein and Justin Stone. Matt Fishbane, Lia Miller, and Ted Ross also helped check many facts. Alice Karekezi, Claire Jeffers, and Matt Flegenheimer spent long, tedious hours transcribing recordings. I've tried hard to get the facts right, but any errors are mine alone.

In Seattle, Pat, John, and Clare O'Connor repeatedly provided me with a safe harbor, fetching me from the airport and from the docks, feeding me, listening to me carry on about seafaring and childhood and currents. In Ann Arbor, Jeremiah Chamberlin and Natalie Bakopoulos let me use their home as a writer's retreat. In Manhattan, John and Angela Chimera provided a heroic amount of grandparenting while their son-in-law was off having a look at the watery part of the world. My own father helped in innumerable ways, not least of all by believing in this possibly foolish errand of mine.

To anyone who thinks that those who can't do, teach, I say, teaching
is
doing; and furthermore, many of those who “do,” can't teach; and furthermore, many of those who can teach, also “do.” The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from sailor to schoolmaster. I've been waiting decades to acknowledge some of the teachers who taught me: Mrs. Peskin (thanks for
The Little Prince
!); Mr. Rees (for everything); Mr. Tacke; Mr. Wright; Ms. Lyons; David Walker (also for everything); David Young (forgive me); Ralph Lombreglia; Charles Baxter; Eileen Pollack. Then there are the teachers at Friends Seminary with whom I taught—Maria Fahey and Sarah Spieldenner, especially. Then there are the students whom I taught, and from whom I learned—too many to name here, but I will mention one student in particular, the one who, by introducing me to the legend of the rubber ducks lost at sea, changed my life: Evan “Big Poppa” Drellich, no longer pudgy, now a journalist. Evan, may Luck Duck continue to bring you luck.

Finally, to my wife, I say: Beth, it was a long and at times arduous journey, but we made it.

—Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick

—H. M. Tomlinson,
The Sea and the Jungle

 

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