Moby Duck

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Nonfiction
If it floats like a duck

MOBY-DUCK:
The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers,
Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them
By Donovan Hohn
416 pp. Viking

Reviewed by Sarah Morgan

It’s 1992. A container ship from China steams toward the United States and along the route encounters gale-force winds. Tossed about in “the six degrees of freedom… what naval architects call the six different motions floating vessels make,” the ship with its towering stack of containers begins to pitch like an inverted pendulum. Eventually, some of the containers break free and tumble to the watery depths of the North Pacific, releasing some 28,800 plastic floater toys — 7,200 each of red beavers, green frogs, blue turtles, and yellow ducks — bound for the bathtubs of American children.

For a couple of years these toys came ashore in Alaska. Then they stopped. A year or two went by, and they began reappearing. The idea of these cheerful, colorful toys on the open seas caught the fancy of Donovan Hohn, science writer, former English teacher and senior editor of Harper’s magazine, but he became hooked when a sighting of one of these suspected floaters (a duck) turned up on a beach in Maine eleven years after the original “hatch.” Had it floated through the Northwest Passage?

In 2005, like a modern-day Ishmael, Hohn embarked on what became a three-year hunt for the elusive toys. The outcome is a totally charming, entertaining and informative book, Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them, which, at 29 words, has to be one of the longer titles in publishing history.

Hohn admits up front:

At the outset, I felt no need to acquaint myself with the six degrees of freedom. I’d never heard of the Great North Pacific Garbage Patch. I liked my job and loved my wife and was inclined to agree with Emerson that travel is a fool’s paradise. I just wanted to learn what had really happened, where the toys had drifted and why. I loved the part about containers falling off a ship, the part about the oceanographers tracking the castaways with the help of far-flung beachcombers. I especially loved the part about the rubber duckies crossing the Arctic, going cheerfully where explorers had gone boldly and disastrously before… I had no intention of doing what I eventually did: quit my job, kiss my wife farewell, and ramble about the Northern Hemisphere aboard all manner of watercraft. I certainly never expected to join the crew of a fifty-one-foot catamaran captained by a charismatic environmentalist, the Ahab of plastic hunters, who had the charming habit of exterminating the fruit flies clouding around his stash of organic fruit by hoovering them out of the air with a vacuum cleaner.

In fact, Hohn crisscrossed the globe, traveling to among other places, Alaska, Hawaii, the Arctic, and China, where he visited a toy factory. “We are not meant to know where our possessions come from, we American consumers, or from what ingredients and by what mysterious processes they were spun and by whom,” Hohn says after touring a factory in Guangdong Province where low-wage factory workers create toys made from “blow-molded or injection blow-molded or extruded plastic resin.”

Where all that plastic ends up is largely the subject of the book, but underlying the narrative Hohn contemplates Moby-Dick and Melville, Ulysses and Homer, Silent Spring and Rachel Carson, science and oceanography, innumerable poets, and his own reasons for his mission. He ruminates on hunts and searches both physical and philosophical; drift and its meaning as far as oceans and jettisoned trinkets are concerned, but also about men who search for rubber ducks.

Traveling with Hohn to his various destinations, we discover the ocean is far more complex than we can imagine, complete with gyres that circumnavigate the globe — some slow, others faster — and underwater storms more violent than any visible hurricane. All this with the surface calm enough to put a sailor adrift. We meet trash collectors, Inuits, factory owners, and, as the title promises, beachcombers, oceanographers, and environmentalists along the way. We also come to know Hohn as a fellow traveler of life, and identify with him when he writes:

If I were Ishmael — Melville’s Ishmael, not the Bible’s — I’d probably at this point in my narration say something allegorical, about how we are all precariously aloft, about how the door of the helicopter is always thrown open and we are all always leaning out, dressed in ridiculous costumes, imagining ourselves to be something or someone that we aren’t: Phaeton, or John Muir or Rachel Carson or Doc from Cannery Row, or Ishmael, who, come to think of it, imagines himself to be the biblical Ishmael’s second coming; how, buffeted by winds actual and imaginary, held in place by harnesses that we can only hope will hold, we’re dangling above a planet too big for one mind to encompass, a planet that in large part thanks to our imaginings and desires and restlessness and ingenuity is changing more quickly than we can comprehend…

Creative nonfiction, according to some experts, should both entertain and inform. This book meets these criteria and then some. The author is humble and endearing, his writing superlative, and his research exhaustive. Science writing meets travelogue in this engaging and inspiring read.