Moby-Duck Read Free Page B

frog as thick as the other frogs, each beaver as aerodynamic as the next. And yet one turtle had ended up in Signe Wilson’s hot tub, another in the jaws of Betsy Knudson’s Labrador, another in an otter’s nest, while a fourth had floated almost all the way to Russia, and a fifth traveled south of Puget Sound. Why? What tangled calculus of causes and effects could explain—or predict—such disparate fates?
    There were still other reasons why the story of the toys kept going, reasons that had nothing to do with oceanography and everything to do with the human imagination, which can be as powerful and as inscrutable as the sea. In making sense of chaotic data, in following a slightly tangled thread of narrative to its source, Eben Punderson had set the plastic animals adrift all over again—not upon the waters of the North Pacific, but upon currents of information. The Associated Press picked up the Daily Sitka Sentinel ’s story and far more swiftly than the ocean currents carried the castaway toys around the globe.
    The Floatees made brief appearances in the Guardian and the New York Times Magazine , and a considerably longer appearance in the Smithsonian . Like migrating salmon, they returned almost seasonally to the pages of Scholastic News , the magazine for kids, which has reported on the story seven times. They were spotted in the shallows of People and MSNBC, and in the tide pools of All Things Considered. They swirled through the sewers of the Internet and bobbed up in such exotic lagoons as a newsletter for the collectors of duck-themed stamps, an oceanography textbook for undergraduates, and a trade magazine for the builders of swimming pools.
    These travels wrought strange changes. Dishwasher safe the toys may have been, but news-media safe they were not. By the time they drifted into my own imagination late one winter night several years ago, the plastic animals that had fallen into the Pacific in 1992 were scarcely recognizable. For one thing, the plastic had turned into rubber. For another thing, the beavers, frogs, and turtles had all turned into ducks. The day Eben Punderson published an unusual ad in the pages of the Sitka Sentinel a metamorphosis had begun, the metamorphosis of happenstance into narrative and narrative into fable—the Fable of the Rubber Ducks Lost at Sea.
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    Far across the ocean, in a toy factory made of red brick, a pinkly Caucasian woman in a brick-red dress and a racially ambiguous brown man in a sky-blue shirt work side by side at an assembly line. From a gray machine, yellow-billed and lacking irises in the whites of their eyes, rubber ducks emerge, one by one, onto a conveyor belt. Chuckedy-chuckedy-chuck goes the rubber duck machine. As the ducks roll past, the woman in the brick-red dress paints their bills brick red with a little brush. The man in the sky-blue shirt paints their irises sky blue. It is beautiful, this unnamed country across the sea. Green grass grows around the factory. A grass-green truck carries the ducks to a waiting ship named the Bobbie. Away the Bobbie chugs, carrying five cardboard boxes across a blue-green sea, a white streamer of smoke trailing behind it. Smiling overhead is an enormous sun the color of a rubber duck. Then a storm blows up. Waves leap. The Bobbie tosses about. The white-bearded captain cries and throws his hands out a porthole. Down goes a cardboard box. Ducks spill like candy from a piñata. Slowly, they drift apart. One frolics with a spotted dolphin. A second receives a come-hither look from a blueberry seal in a lime-green sea. A polar bear standing on an ice floe ogles a third. And so their journeys go, each duck encountering a different picturesque animal—a flamingo, a pelican, a sea turtle, an octopus, a gull, a whale. Finally, who should the tenth rubber duck meet but a brood of real ducks. “Quack!” says the mother duck. “Quack! Quack! Quack!” say the ducklings.