Moby-Duck (9 page)

If anything divides the ferry's passengers, it's age. Tent city has the feel of a floating youth hostel, or even a floating campground—hence the stenciled sign that prohibits campfires and cookouts (but not, alas, folksy sing-alongs). The retirees tend to congregate on the boat deck in the observation lounge, a sightseeing theater overlooking the bow. Sitting there in the anchored, amply cushioned chairs, it's hard not to feel as though the wraparound windows are movie screens on which footage of the passing scenery plays, though every now and then a passenger outside will walk through the foreground and break the spell. Often as not the passenger in the foreground is a dude in orange-tinted sunglasses and a cowboy hat who seems to be intent on walking a marathon before we make Sitka.

The main source of onboard entertainment is Ed White, a bespectacled “interpreter” employed by the National Forest Service. “Interpreter” is what the Forest Service calls a ranger who is also a tour guide, and I love what the title implies: that a place is like a language. In this case, though, I can't help feeling that something has been lost in translation. Once or twice a day, in the observation lounge, White delivers presentations on topics such as commercial fishing and local wildlife. He informs his audience, for instance, that there are 300,000 hairs on every square inch of a sea otter's pelt. Then he puts his charts and markers away, and the spectators go back to looking at the mountains and the trees, or reading their Carl Hiaasen novels.

For the kiddies, there are daily screenings of family-friendly films on the senescent television in the recliner lounge. My favorite is
Alaska's Coolest Animals
, which features video footage of Alaska's “coolest flyers,” “coolest walkers,” and “coolest swimmers,” accompanied by the voices of children reading from a script. All their lines seem to end in exclamation points. “If a moose doesn't get enough food, it might get starved and covered in snow!” one child says. “Hey, that's a big bear!” says another. Sometimes the narrators use the first person. “I'm sleepy,” one says when a bear puts its head on its paws. “I want to go to bed. Bed!”

During the middle of the first night, off the eastern shore of Vancouver Island, the temperature drops, a fog shuts down, and my cell phone loses reception. So much for daily phone calls home. A plastic deck chair, it turns out, makes for a miserable mattress. Cold air seeps between the slats. The government-issue cotton blanket I rented from the ship's purser for a dollar is far too thin. Some of my neighbors in the solarium move inside to sleep like refugees on the carpeted floor of the recliner lounge. I rent a second blanket for the second night, but it hardly makes a difference. The space heaters, too, have little sensible effect. Shivering in a fetal position, I think about that rock climber dangling from the Antarctic ice shelf in a hammock and feel faintly ridiculous. After two nights in the solarium of a cruise ship—a state-operated, poor man's cruise ship, but a cruise ship nonetheless—I have already had my fill of adventuring.

 

 

The Alaskan stretch of the Inside Passage snakes through the Alexander Archipelago, a chain of one thousand or so thickly forested islands, some small as tablecloths, some large as Hawaii. These are, in fact, the tops of underwater mountains, part of the same snowcapped range visible on the mainland to the east. Most rise steeply from the water and soar to cloudy heights. Before going there I expected Southeast Alaska to feel like a giant outdoor theme park—Frontierland—and the shopping districts of the resort towns where the gargantuan cruise ships dock confirm my worst expectations. Cruise ship companies now own many of the businesses in those districts and may soon be able to “imagineer” (as the folks at Disney call it) every aspect of your vacation experience. But the backwaters of the Inside Passage, too narrow and shallow for the superliners to enter, are something else. They contain lost worlds.

In the narrowest of the narrows, it feels as though we are motoring down an inland river—some Amazon of the north—rather than along the ocean's edge. Although this is the Pacific, the water doesn't look, smell, or sound like the sea. Neither waves nor flotsam gets past the outer islands to the placid interior. In the summer, the rain and the streams of glacial melt together make the channels so brackish they seem fresh enough to drink, and in places the minerals those streams carry turn the channels a strangely luminous shade of jade. The forested banks sometimes loom so close you could play Frisbee with a person standing on shore. Hours go by when we see no other ships, or any sign of civilization besides the buoys that mark the way among the shoals.

Early in the morning, fog rises here and there from the forests of hemlock, cedar, and spruce. It is as if certain stands are burning, except that the fog moves much more slowly than smoke. In some places it forms tall, ghostly figures, and in others, it spreads out horizontally like wings. On the far side of one mountain, a dense white column billows forth like a slow-motion geyser that levels off into an airborne river that flows into a sea of clouds. I've begun to notice currents everywhere, a universe of eddies and gyres. Phytoplankton ride the same ocean currents that carried the Floatees to Sitka. Zooplankton follow the phytoplankton. Fish follow the zooplankton. Sea lions, whales, and people follow the fish. When, at the end of their upriver journey, salmon spawn and die en masse, their carcasses—distributed by bears, eagles, and other scavengers—fertilize the forests that make the fog, which falls as rain, which changes the ocean's salinity. All deep water travels along what oceanographers, when speaking to laymen, call the “conveyor belt,” which begins in the North Atlantic, where surface currents, warmed by the tropical sun, made salty by evaporation, carried north by the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift, upon arriving in these cold latitudes, chill enough to sink below the comparatively fresh water spilling from the Arctic.

There, off both the east and west coasts of Greenland, the sunken Atlantic water creeps slowly south, through the abyss, beneath the Gulf Stream, over the equator, into the Antarctic Circumpolar current, which carries it to the South Pacific, where it begins creeping north. After a thousand years—a millennium!—some of that deep water conveyed by the conveyor ends here, in the North Pacific, where the ancient, life-giving element wells up, carrying nutrients with it, nutrients that fertilize the Alaskan fisheries. Much of what oceanographers know about where deep water goes they learned studying radioactive isotopes released into the sea as fallout from nuclear tests. I'm becoming a devout driftologist. The only essential difference between rock, water, air, life, galaxies, economies, civilizations, plastics—I decide, standing on the
Malaspina
's deck, totally sober, watching the fog make pretty shapes above the trees—is the rate of flow.

 

 

We round a bend, and an inlet comes into view. Protruding from the forested banks beside a waterfall is an abandoned sawmill. The windows are shattered and one corner of the building has collapsed. Any second the whole structure might tumble into the sea. The trees on these islands are part of the seventeen-million-acre Tongass National Forest. Fifty years ago, the timber industry was booming here, but in the last twenty years nearly all the sawmills and pulp mills have shut down.

There are ghost towns and ruins all over the islands of the Inside Passage, vestiges of its long history of extractive industries gone bust. In the 1800s the Russian fur trade made Sitka, then the capital of Russian Alaska, the largest city on the entire west coast until San Francisco eclipsed it in 1849—the Paris of the Pacific, some hyperbolist dubbed it. Then sea otters and fur seals grew unprofitably scarce. In the 1870s, after the Russians had sold off their exhausted North American hunting grounds, the world acquired a taste for canned Alaskan salmon, which in the age of refrigeration it has largely lost, though there are a few canneries left.

Today the only thriving industry here besides fishing is tourism. In towns that the cruise ship lines have not yet tarted up, you can sense what the local economy would be like if the cruise ships left. By the docks at the gold rush town of Wrangell, for instance, one wall of a wooden fishing shack has been shingled with old drift-net floats, and three school-age girls sit at card tables in a parking lot selling garnets chiseled from nearby Garnet Ledge. They appear to be competitors, not friends, each sitting stoically behind her outspread wares, the prices handwritten on tags of masking tape. They go to sleep, perhaps, reading Milton Friedman's
Free to Choose
under their covers with flashlights. I buy a five-dollar rock from a girl named Tiffany, who has punctuated her xeroxed sales brochure with smiley faces and illustrated it with a hand-drawn geological diagram of strata, beginning at ground level (there's a little house) and descending sixty feet to a lopsided circle labeled “Earths core.” Dots at ten feet represent garnets. Tiffany has also drawn a maze, at the entrance to which stand two stick figures with lanterns on their heads, rays of light emanating like tentacles. “Help the Miners find Their way to Garnet Ledge,” her instructions read.

Fifteen minutes from the ferry dock are Wrangell's most famous treasures, a collection of petroglyphs depicting birds, fish, and sea mammals carved in the same geometric style as the Tlingit and Haida totem poles, thickets of which can be found all along this coast. The petroglyphs are only visible at low tides and in certain casts of light. I want badly to go see them, but the
Malaspina
is making a brief stop. Late passengers will be left behind.

 

 

Everywhere they look, archaeologists find them—buffalo sprayed with pigments onto the walls of caves, killer whales cut from cedar or stone, horses molded from gutta-percha or plaited out of straw. Our primal fear of predators and our hunger for prey cannot alone account for this menagerie. Three thousand years ago in Persia, someone carved a porcupine out of limestone and attached it to a little chassis on wheels. Four thousand years ago in Egypt, someone sculpted a mouse and glazed it blue. Why blue? Who ever heard of a blue mouse? Is this the forebear of the red beaver and the yellow duck?

In fact, many of the figurines that look to us like toys turn out to have been totemic gods or demigods, used in religious ceremonies or funerary rites. To make the archaeological record all the blurrier, some totems in some cultures were given to children as playthings once the festivities had ended. One thing in the archaeological record is clear: animals held an exalted position in the lives of both children and adults. Even after the missionaries came and cleansed them from the temples, the animistic gods survived, adapting to the altered cultural landscape. In Europe of the Middle Ages, the most popular book after the Bible was the bestiary, a kind of illustrated field guide to the medieval imagination, wherein the animals of fable and myth were reborn as vehicles of Christian allegory. From the bestiary came the idea that after three days a pelican could resurrect a dead hatchling with her blood, and from the bestiary we learned that only a virgin girl can tame a unicorn. Even Aesop, that pagan, remained a favorite with old and young alike well into the seventeenth century.

Gradually, as allegory gave way to zoology, we decided that animals—as the children in the old Trix commercial inform the envious, sugar-addicted rabbit—were for kids. “Children in the industrialised world are surrounded by animal imagery,” John Berger notes in his essay “Why Look at Animals?” Despite the antiquity of zoomorphic toys and the “apparently spontaneous interest that children have in animals,” it was not until the nineteenth century that “reproductions of animals became a regular part of the decor of middle class childhoods—and then, in [the twentieth] century, with the advent of vast display and selling systems like Disney's—of all childhoods.” Berger traces this phenomenon to the marginalization of animals, which the age of industrialism incarcerated as living spectacles at the public zoo, treated as raw material to be exploited, processed as commodities on factory farms, or domesticated as family pets. Meanwhile, “animals of the mind”—which since the dawn of human consciousness had been central to our cosmologies—were sent without supper to the nursery. Animals both living and imaginary no longer seemed like mysterious gods. They seemed like toys.

Go bird-watching in the preindustrial libraries of literature and myth and you will find few ducks, which is puzzling, considering how popular with the authors of children's books ducks have since become. Search, for instance, the fields and forests of Aesop, whose talking beasts are the ancestors of both Chanticleer the Rooster and Walter the Farting Dog, and you will meet ten cocks, a cote of doves, several partridges, a caged songbird, ten crows, two ravens (one portentous, the other self-loathing), a dozen or so eagles, four jackdaws (one of whom wishes he were an eagle), many kites, flocks of cranes, two storks, three hawks, a cote of pigeons, three hens, a sparrow with a bad case of schadenfreude, four swallows, many peacocks, a jay who wishes he were a peacock, many swans, two nightingales, two larks, an owl, a glutinous seagull, a thrush ensnared in birdlime, and nary a single duck.

Aesop's fables exhibit considerable ornithological knowledge, but their primary aim is to transmute animal behavior into human meaning—to burden them, as Thoreau would say, with some portion of our thought. The closest thing to a duck in Aesop's fables is the famous goose, the one who lays the golden egg and then succumbs to the carving knife. In a Kashmiri version of the same tale, Aesop's barnyard-variety waterfowl becomes the Lucky Bird Huma, a visitor from the magical avian kingdom of Koh-i-Qaf. A Buddhist version of the tale replaces the egg-laying goose with one of the only mythical ducks I have found, a mallard plumed in gold, which turns out to be a reincarnation of the Bodhisattva. (The birds of myth, as Leda learned, are often divinity in disguise.)