Moby-Duck Read Free Page A

Punderson was pretty sure he knew. Three years earlier, in May of 1990, an eastbound freighter, the Hansa Carrier , had collided with a storm five hundred miles south of the Alaskan Peninsula. Several containers had gone overboard, including a shipment of eighty thousand Nikes. Five months later, sneakers began washing up along Vancouver Island. The story had received national attention after a pair of oceanographers in Seattle—James Ingraham of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a scientist with a private consulting firm that assessed the environmental risks and impacts of engineering projects (sewage outflows, oil rigs)—turned the sneaker spill into an accidental oceanographic experiment. By feeding coordinates collected from beachcombers into NOAA’s Ocean Surface Current Simulator, or OSCURS, a computer modeling system built from a century’s worth of U.S. Navy weather data, Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham had reconstructed the drift routes of some two hundred shoes. In the process, the basement of Ebbesmeyer’s bungalow had become the central intelligence agency of what would eventually grow into a global network of coastal informants. If anyone knew anything about the plague of plastic animals, it would be Ebbesmeyer, but when the Sentinel ’s moonlighting reporter contacted him in the summer of 1993, it was the first the oceanographer had heard of the toys.
    Punderson still had another lead. The ducks—and for some reason only the ducks—had been embossed with the logo of their manufacturer, The First Years. A local toy store was unable to find the logo in its merchandise catalogs, but the director of the Sheldon Jackson College library traced the brand back to its parent company, Kiddie Products, based in Avon, Massachusetts. Punderson spoke to the company’s marketing manager, who somewhat reluctantly confirmed the reporter’s speculations. Yes, indeed, a shipment of Floatees had been lost at sea. “Solved: Mystery of the Wandering Bathtub Toys,” ran the lead headline in the Sentinel ’s Weekend section a month after Punderson’s ad first appeared. And that is where the story should have ended—as an entertaining anecdote in the back pages of a provincial newspaper. Mystery solved. Case closed. But then something else unexpected happened. The story kept going.
    The story kept going in part because Ebbesmeyer and his beachcombers joined the hunt, in part because the toys themselves kept going. Years later, new specimens and new mysteries were still turning up. In the autumn of 1993, Floatees suddenly began sprinkling the shores of Shemya, a tiny Aleutian island that lies about 1,500 miles closer to Siberia than to Sitka, not far from the site of the spill. In 1995, beachcombers in Washington State found a blue turtle and a sun-bleached duck. Dean and Tyler Orbison, a father-son beachcombing team who annually scour uninhabited islands along the Alaskan coast, added more toys to their growing collection every summer—dozens in 1992, three in 1993, twenty-five in 1994, until, in 1995, they found none. The slump continued in 1996, and the Orbisons assumed they’d seen the last of the plastic animals. Then, in 1997, the toys suddenly returned in large numbers.
    Thousands more were yet to be accounted for. Where had they gone? Into the Arctic? Around the globe? Were they still out there, traveling the currents of the North Pacific? Or did they lie buried under wrack and sand along Alaska’s wild, sparsely populated shores? Or, succumbing to the elements—freezing temperatures, the endless battering of the waves, prolonged exposure to the sun—had they cracked, filled with water, gone under? All 28,800 toys had emerged from that sinking container into the same acre of water. Each member of the four species was all but identical to the others—each duck was just as light as the other ducks, each