Moby-Duck Read Free

disagreement. If white, the duck Hagens and Welton saw could well have been one of the 7,200 let loose on the North Pacific. If yellow, it was nothing but a figment, a phantom, a will-o’-thewisp. To complicate matters, The First Years had by then discontinued the Floatees, replacing them with a single yellow Floaty Ducky that also bore the company’s logo. Yellow or white, the thing did look as though it had crossed the ocean; on that Hagens and Welton agreed. It was fun to imagine: a lone duck, drifting across the Atlantic, like something out of a fairy tale or a children’s book—fun but also preposterous. “There were still kids playing on the beach,” Welton remembered. “I thought, okay, some kid lost his toy and would come back for it.” Sensibly, he and Hagens left the toy where they found it and walked on.

METAMORPHOSIS
    The classified ads in the July 14, 1993, edition of the Daily Sitka Sentinel do not make for exciting reading, though they do convey something of what summertime in Alaska’s maritime provinces is like. That week, the Tenakee Tavern, “in Tenakee,” was accepting applications “for cheerful bartenders.” The Baranof Berry Patch was buying berries—“huckleberries, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries.” The National Marine Fisheries Service hereby gave notice that the winners of the 1992 Sablefish Tag Recovery Drawing, an annual event held to encourage the reporting of tagged sablefish, would be selected at 1 P.M. on July 19 at the Auke Bay Laboratory. “Tired of shaving, tweezing, waxing?!” asked Jolene Gerard, R.N., R.E., enticing the hirsute citizens of the Alaska Panhandle (a region known to the people who live there as “Southeast”) with the promise of “Permanent hair removel [ sic ].” Then, under the catchall heading of “Announcements,” between “Business Services” and “Boats for Sale,” an unusual listing appeared.
    ANYONE WHO has found plastic toy animals on beaches in Southeast please call the Sentinel at 747-3219.
    The author of the ad was Eben Punderson, then a high school English teacher who moonlighted as a journalist, now a lawyer in rural Vermont. On Thanksgiving Day 1992, a party of beachcombers strolling along Chichagof Island had discovered several dozen hollow plastic animals amid the usual wrack of bottle caps, fishing tackle, and driftwood deposited at the tide line by a recent storm. After ten months at sea, the ducks had whitened, and the beavers had yellowed, but the frogs were still green as ever, and the turtles, still blue.
    Now that summer had returned, the beachcombers were out in force, and on the windward side of Chichagof, as on other islands in the vicinity of Sitka, they found toys, hundreds of them—frogs half-buried under pebbles, beavers poised atop driftwood, turtles tangled in derelict fishing nets, ducks blown past the tide line into the purple fireweed. Beachcombing in the Alaskan wilderness had suddenly come to resemble an Easter egg hunt. A party game for children. Four animals, each one a different color, delivered as if supernaturally by the waves: collect them all!
    Laurie Lee of South Baranof Island filled an unused skiff with the hoard of toys she scavenged. Signe Wilson filled a hot tub. Betsy Knudson had so many to spare she started giving them to her dog. It appeared that even the wild animals of Sitka Sound were collecting them: one toy had been plucked from a river otter’s nest. On a single beachcombing excursion with friends, Mary Stensvold, a botanist with the Tongass National Forest who normally spent her days hunting rare specimens of liverwort, gathered forty of the animals. Word of the invasion spread. Dozens of correspondents answered the Sentinel’ s ad. Toys had been found as far north as Kayak Island, as far south as Coronation Island, a range extending hundreds of miles. Where had they come from?
    Eben