I Want to Go There: Keppler22b

When I read about and saw this picture of Keppler22b, the possibly terraqueous planet recently spotted in "the habitable zone" of a solar system 600 light years away, the first thought that leapt to mind was, "I want to go there." It's a perverse and dangerous thought I often have. It's the same thought I had when I saw, on The Atlantic's In Focus blog, this photo taken in an abandoned Chinese amusement park.

I don't really want to go to Keppler22b. I mean the flight alone would be miserable, never mind what the planet is actually like. Here on our own terraqueous globe, scientists recently announced the discovery of a species of "deep-sea carnivorous sponge" with "the jaws of a great white shark." Talk about strange shapes of the unwarped primal world! Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the benthic zone. Lord knows what sharkish critters are lurking in the depths of Keppler22b.

Wait. This just in. The first images of Kepplerians, after the jump.

D'Agata: "Those With Faith in Withheld Meanings"

And while I wasn't born there, and have since then moved away, during the summer I lived in Vegas I began to feel those claims, appealing in their hopefulness the way parades appeal, the way a list appeals to those with faith in withheld meanings: the dream that if we linger long enough with anything, the truth of its significance is bound to be revealed. 

 —John D'Agata, About a Mountain

Una Odisea: Moby Duck in Peru

The Peruvian magazine Etiqueta Negra—Lima's answer to The New Yorker and by one estimate "the most exciting literary magazine to come out of South America"—has just published an excerpt of Moby-Duck  in their special green issue, titled Etiqueta Verde.  Their intro to the story (their "dek," in magazine speak):

Un profesor de secundaria leyó en la tarea de un alumno la noticia de un naufragio de miles de patos de goma en el océano Pacífico. Mientras esperaba la llegada de su primer hijo fue a buscar la fábrica de donde salieron, el barco en el que viajaban, el sitio donde cayeron y las playas del mundo a las que llegaron. ¿Son más de veinticinco mil juguetes tan peligrosos como un derrame de petróleo en el mar? Una odisea de Donovan Hohn con ilustraciones de Sheila Alvarado.

I don't have enough Spanish to appreciate their translation, but I love the selection they chose, and I also love Sheila Alvarado's illustrations. The entire book will be published in Spain next year.

The LA River: Stimulus $$ at Work

Municipalities in the basin of the Los Angeles River have now installed steel screens in storm drains that will keep an estimated 840,000 pounds of debris from going to sea every year, the LA Times reports. The project was made possible by $10 million in federal stimulus money--one example among many of the hidden costs that the prices of consumer plastics do not reflect.

The Disappointing Case of the Castaway Lego Men: NO REAL/THAN/YOU ARE

Stories about marvelous flotsam tend to drift into my in-box, which can make reading email resemble a sedentary form of beachcombing--not as pleasurable as the extravagant, outdoorsy kind, but fun nonetheless. This morning brings a doozie. According to BoingBoing, an 8-foot tall castaway Lego man recently washed up in Florida. When exactly, the blog post doesn't say. It turns out this is, at least, the second such sighting. An earlier specimen--same size, different color shirt--washed up on a Dutch beach at Zandvoort.

Florida's specimen is marked No. 9, so one wonders if there are 7 other Lego men out there, drifting on the waves. Did a shipload of these dudes tumble overboard? 

Appears not.  The castaways also bear a maker's mark identifying them as the work of a Dutch artists' collective called Ego Leonard. Why do I find this disappointing? What seemed a fabulous accident suddenly has the feel of a guerrilla marketing campaign. 

It is with disappointment that I share the greeting, presumably in the voice of a giant Lego man, posted on the Ego Leonard web site:

I would like to introduce myself:

My name is Ego Leonard and according to you I come from the virtual world. A world that for me represents happiness, solidarity, all green and blossoming, with no rules or limitations. 

Lately however, my world has been flooded with fortune-hunters and people drunk with power. And many new encounters in the virtual world have triggered my curiosity about your way of life.

I am here to discover and learn about your world and thoughts. 

Show me all the beautiful things that are there to admire and experience in your world. Let’s become friends, share your story with me, take me with you on a journey through beautiful meadows, words, sounds and gestures.

Lethem, Dyer: "Absurdly Long Books on One Small Thing"

In BOMB, Jonathan Lethem interviews Geoff Dyer about his essayistic narratives, or novelistic essays, whichever they are, with special attention paid to The Missing of the Somme, newly released in the U.S., high on my wish list. And in passing they touch on Marclay's The Clock, Dickens, Wordsworth's The Prelude, laziness, "deep plumbing of consciousness." Lots of good stuff, but I'll highlight this:

DYER: . . . I like books that are about other books in some way. In terms of well-being or psychological health, certainly I’m extremely happy when I set out, either for an article or a book, to read and learn everything I can about a given person or subject, to completely immerse myself in it. I feel, at that point, that I have a purpose. When it comes to actually writing a book, that excitement and well-being would soon turn to boredom if it didn’t proceed in tandem with the creative challenge of coming up with some kind of form or structure that seems especially appropriate to that subject.

And this:

DYER: . . . I operate at a far lower level of energy and inspiration, but a higher pitch of desperation! Generally, I like the idea of short books on one particular cultural artifact as long as they don’t conform to some kind of series idea or editorial template. The madder the better, in my view. I like the idea of an absurdly long book on one small thing. I think we’d agree that the choice of artifact is sort of irrelevant in terms of its cultural standing: all that matters is what it means to you, the author. 

Captain Tsubasa

Michael Paterniti's account of "The Man Who Sailed His House," which I recommended in an earlier post, is now up online. A favorite passage:

The roof is perhaps twelve feet by six, of corrugated metal nailed to wood beams, your raft at sea. Last night, you and Yuko slept beneath it, and now you perch atop it on the sea, above the goblin sharks and whatever else lurks below. Saltwater laps up the sides, and any sudden movement immediately sets it seesawing. Sit still, in the middle—and as time passes, let the contrite sea bring gifts from the dead. This makes you giddy, the gifts. First it brings a red marker. Then the torn pages of a comic book, a manga, its hero, Captain Tsubasa, kicking a soccer ball with superhuman force. It brings some sort of red container that used to hold paint. It brings a tatami mat woven together with string, a broken radio, and a white hard hat. All of which you fish out of the murk. The hat (To whom did it belong?) immediately goes on your head, the marker in your hand. You imagine the dead offering you these things from underneath the sea. Hunched over the ripped comic, you test the marker on the damp page and write the following words in the margin: On March 11, I was with my wife, Yuko. My name is Hiromitsu. Then you tear the paper, fold it, place it in the red canister, seal it, and with the string from the mat, bandolier it to your body. Resume your pose.

Avi Steinberg, In Search of Lost Worlds

On the web site of The Paris Review, Avi Steinberg has a smart and hauntingly illustrated little essay on the strangeness of the world according to Google Street Views. I especially like his closing thoughts:

One night, you locate a distant childhood intersection. You leave the street map and enter the scene, passing seamlessly from map to territory. But there are no goofy hijinks or bloody corpses there. No sublime horses. Just a bright, sunny street with uneven sidewalks, lined with parked cars—a place that once contained everything that you knew and needed to know, which once held the entire range of possible truths. Then you take a Google-step back, and suddenly it’s a bit less sunny and a bit more populated. You swing around to your left, and now the sky is overcast and foreboding. A step forward and a neighborhood man you once knew, who was pictured sitting on his porch a frame ago, has vanished. Now the sun is out again, but setting. This private territory, with its radically shifting light, its dreamlike angles, and its specters popping in and out of view—that odd combination of detailed recollection and ever-thickening fog—resembles the structure of memory itself. It’s like visiting a lost place. It’s not the grandest idea but, at certain moments in life, it’s the best we’ve got.

The Man Who Sailed His House

In the October issue of GQ, on newsstands now, Michael Paterniti tells the story of Hiromitsu Shinkowa, who drifted into the news last March. Two days after the Japanese tsunami, Shinkowa was discovered nine miles out to sea, alone, on the roof of his house.

Castaway narratives are a venerable sub-genre of nonfiction, even now, in the 21st century, when shipwrecks are far less common than they used to be. What distinguishes Paterniti's story from more conventional disaster narratives is its interiority. He gives us the sublime nightmare of the tsunami, but only to prepare us for the solitary trial—the guilt and regret and heartbreak and fear—that Shinkowa experiences during the two days he spends alone and adrift.

From the sea, Shinkowa fishes what he thinks of as "gifts"—a futon, a tatami mat, a marker, a comic book about superhuman soccer players. With the marker, on paper torn from the comic book, he writes messages to the living, which he scrolls into plastic canisters, also fished from the sea, and lashes to himself with string. Here in the order he wrote them are the words he thought would be his last.

On March 11, I was with my wife, Yuko. My name is Hiromitsu.

I just want to report that I am still alive on the twelfth and was with my wife, Yuko, yesterday. She was born January 12 of Showa 26.

SOS

I am sorry for being unfilial.

I'm in a lot of trouble. Sorry for dying before you. Please forgive me.  

Cushman Time Machine to Old New York

The Daily Mail this week posted a slideshow of color photos of lower Manhattan taken in the early 1940s by Charles Cushman. Cushman's camera was state of art for the time, and the result is a peculiar kind of anachronism: The images look much more recent than they are; what most obviously dates them are the abundance of hats, the abundance of boats in the river, and the abundance of wood (wooden baskets, wooden pushcarts with wooden wagon wheels). Those ephemeral artifacts measure time precisely. Rich material for archeology of the ordinary. (via Brain Pickings)

Julian Barnes's "Shipwreck": Disaster & Art

Last week in Ann Arbor and again today, home in New York, I thought of "Shipwreck," a chapter in Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. I was first introduced to the chapter and the book seven years ago by the writer Eileen Pollack, and I've taught it in nonfiction classes a few times since. Tonight I went back and read "Shipwreck" for the first time in a while.

Barnes published it  in The New Yorker in 1989 as a short story, but it could easily have been called an essay--or a history. Let's call it a story in two parts. The first part artfully but dispassionately narrates the wreck of a French ship, the Medusa, in 1816. A taste:

By misfortune, they had struck the reef at high tide, and, the seas becoming violent, attempts to free the ship failed. The frigate was assuredly lost. Since the boats it carried were not capacious enough to contain the whole personnel, it was decided to build a raft and embark upon it those who could not be put into boats. The raft would then be towed to the shore and all would be saved. This plan was perfectly well laid; but, as two of the company were later to affirm, it was traced upon loose sand, which was dispersed by the breath of egotism.

Before those "two of the company" are rescued from their hellish raft,  a great deal of dying and a fair portion of cannibalism has taken place. It's a masterful, suspenseful bit of narrative history, this first part, but what keeps me returning to "Shipwreck" is the second part of Barnes's story, a sort of making-of documentary about the famous painting, by Géricault, that the wreck of the Medusa inspired.

Nostalgia, Progress, and Michigan

Headed to Ann Arbor tomorrow to spend three days at the University of Michigan, where I spent two unusually fruitful years almost a decade ago. During those two years I wrote my first long piece of narrative nonfiction, an essay about traveling around the rust belt with a botanist turned tool collector named Tom Friedlander, whom I hope to see later this week. An adapted and abridged version of that essay appeared last spring in the Work issue of Lapham's Quarterly. Because I'm in a Michigan state of mind, here's an excerpt from the long version, "A Romance of Rust: Nostalgia, Progress, and the Meaning of Tools," which originally appeared in Harper's:

Southeast Michigan can be beautiful in leaf or under snow, but that winter it had hardly snowed at all, and the Friedlanders' nature sanctuary was a desiccated, khaki-colored wasteland. The silver blimp of a propane tank glowed between the bare branches of bushes planted to obscure it. Behind the house, where corn once grew, an ocean of goldenrod—still brown and dormant—stretched to the woodlot on the horizon. On the way to the tool barn, we passed the greenhouse Tom and Martha had built out of corrugated fiberglass. Two plastic barrels full of frozen rain stood sentry beside the entrance. Inside I could discern the shadowy forms of succulents (one of Tom's previous taxonomical obsessions) weathering the hostile biome in balmy serenity.

Although there was a barn-sized barn on the property—a dilapidated cavern full of owl shit, darkness, and mildewy hay where Tom kept the antique tractor he used to mow paths through the goldenrod in the summer and plow the driveway in winter—the prefabricated steel structure in which he stored his tools was scarcely bigger than a two-car garage. We entered through a side door, stepping awkwardly over three metal spheres huge as medicine balls while fluorescent tubes flickered on overhead.

Teju Cole on the Insular City of the Manhattoes

"This strangest of islands, I thought, as I looked out to the sea, this island that turned in on itself, and from which water had been banished. The shore was a carapace, permeable only at certain selected points. Where in this riverine city could one fully sense a riverbank? Everything was built up, in concrete and stone, and the millions who lived on the tiny interior had a scant sense about what flowed around them. The water was a kind of embarrassing secret, the unloved daughter, neglected, while the parks were doted on, fussed over, overused. I stood on the promenade and looked out across the water into the unresponsive night. All was quiet and lights called from the Jersey Shore across. A pair of joggers sailed softly toward me, and past me. Along South End, facing the water, there were rows of townhouses, small shops, and a little, round gazebo choked with vines and bushes. Out, ahead of me, in the Hudson, there was just the faintest echo of the old whaling ships, the whales, and the generations of New Yorkers who had come here to the promenade to watch the wealth and sorrow flow into the city or simply to see the light play on the water. Each one of those past moments was present now as a trace."

—Open City

The Ruthless Imagination of a Child

As a few of my twitter buddies pointed out, this review of Steven Millhauser's new and selected stories by Salvatore Scibona is exemplary, an essay as much as a review, which is what the best reviews are. And it contains this exquisite little meditation on childhood:

Many of the stories are set amid the 19th century passion for sophisticated mechanical inventions that were revolutionizing daily life at the time. But for all the formal and historical erudition here, the stories maintain a saving innocence. They are immigrants from the country of childhood, where the imagination, seeing a thing repeated, wonders what would happen if it were repeated again, and another time, and again forever? What if the rain never stopped and it flooded the whole world?

They more or less beg you to ask them what they are about. They seem to follow an inverted motto: A story should not be, but mean. As to the aboutness, here's a stab: These are stories about the adult's experience of the life his childhood self continues to lead after he has grown up. The adult mind doesn't destroy the child's mind, but only subsumes it. The clockwork automatons in this book, and the ladders of light up which a character can climb into the sky, and the sometimes asphyxiating lack of adult passion - all draw the reader toward the ruthless imagination of a child. Everything moves very slowly. The future will never come. The speed of growing up, from the adult's vantage, is dizzying; from the child's it is glacial.

So while these stories don't aspire to the pleasures and agonies of a dramatic narrative - the tales of change within a comprehensible world that children ask adults to repeat for the same reason it comforts babies to be swaddled - they do aspire to that other moment of childhood: You were alone in the dark, your imagination demanding, What if ... and then what if ... and then what if?

Scibona was one of the fiction writers The New Yorker anointed in its 20 under 40 series last year. Read his story "The Kid"--available online to subscribers--and you'll see why he made the list.

Excerpt: Metamorphosis of Happenstance into Fable

The Australian has an excerpt from the first chapter of Moby-Duck.

Headed home to Zone C to inflate my Zodiac.

Cole on Sebald: "Why shouldn't an essay be a novel?"

Teju Cole, author of Open City, which I'm presently reading, compiled for the Guardian a list of ten novels "of solitude." Here he is on Sebald's Rings of Saturn:

A novel of ideas with a difference: it is nothing but ideas. Framed around the narrator's long walks in East Anglia, Sebald shows how one man looks aslant at historical atrocity. Formally dexterous, fearlessly written (why shouldn't an essay be a novel?), and unremittingly arcane; by the end I was in tears.

I like that last sentence especially, though I'd quibble a little with the emphasis he places on "nothing but ideas." There are also in Rings vignettes, facts, a potted history of the silk-industry, a potted biography of Joseph Conrad. The ideas are the threads with which Sebald weaves together the factual debris he finds on his walking tour. They create patterns out of the entropy of history.

At some point I want to consider Sebald as a nature writer--a European nature writer. The contrast with American nature writing would be revealing, I think. As with John Berger (whose essay "Why Look at Animals?" was a crucial point of departure for many of my own thoughts on the bestiary of the imagination), the categories of natural history and human history are not in Rings of Saturn discrete. There's no hint of nature as timeless, apart.

Seaside Gothic: Wreckers and Robert Louis Stevenson

In England, the term for flotsam hunting is wrecking, a word that retains a trace of its piratical history. In The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas, False Lights and Plundered Shipwrecks, Bella Bathurst reports that British shipowners of the age of sail lost 10 to 20 percent of their revenues to shipwrecks. That's a lot of wrecks, and on more dangerous stretches of coastline, villagers happily welcomed the booty that washed ashore with the cadavers of the drowned. In some cases wreckers were known to lure ships onto the rocks. Bathurst begins The Wreckers with a spooky bit of family history recorded by Robert Louis Stevenson, son of a lighthouse engineer:

The Best Beachcombing in Manhattan

There is one decent beachcombing spot in Manhattan, if you like your flotsam local: a 100-foot-long wedge of sand beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. You can only walk the beach if you’re willing to trespass, squeezing through a narrow opening in the balustrade. It’s not the sort of beach most people dream about. You wouldn’t want to sunbathe there, or walk barefoot. But I like it. It’s one of those accidental places that make the city feel a little wild.

A dozen years ago, I gather, this beach didn’t exist, making it the perfect beach for New York, capital of change and chance. It came into being when tides began depositing sediment behind a little pier built not long ago as a kind of scenic underlook, a good place to take snapshots guaranteed to resemble postcards, the great bridge looming in the background. At the northern end of the beach are the remains of a derelict pier, concrete posts topped by tentacles of twisted rebar. The sand at the southern end of the beach is silty. At the northern end it’s gravelly. A trellis supporting FDR Drive rises out of the gravel, and on the steel of the trellis some latter-day Hart Crane has spray-painted a couplet: 

DN UNDER THE BRIDGE

BIG CITY OF DREAMS.

In the Northeast U.S., Fewer Riddles on the Sand

In the vicinity of the insular city where I live, there aren't really any good beaches for beachcombing. In general, so far as beachcombing goes, the Atlantic Northeast compares poorly to the the Pacific Northwest. The Gulf Stream is largely to blame. Just look at it.

It firehoses up the eastern seaboard and then, right around Cape Hatteras, turns east and goes shooting across the Atlantic carrying long-haul flotsam with it (the beachcombing in Cornwall, England, is supposedly superb).  Here in the Northeast, except for the rare donation from the southbound Labrador Current (which originates in the Arctic) or from an errant eddy, the wrack on our shores tends to be local. Here in the Northeast beachcombing tends to be practiced by amateur naturalists on the lookout for seashells, pebbles, and the like, whereas in regions with plentiful flotsam and jetsam, beachcombing is more like amateur archeology. There is no Atlantic counterpart to Amos Wood's Beachcombing the Pacific.

Allegorical Readings of Kids Books: Very Hungry Caterpillar

I never imagined I'd have much competition when it came to allegorical readings of Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar, but I do, over at Bark. A contributor named jason, averse to capital letters, has a post up under the tag "unnecessary reviews":

these collages were lovingly created, layered, and labored over.  this was the work of an artist passionate about his vision.  the second thing i noticed about this book was that it was a striking metaphor and symbol for america, and a poignant foretelling not only of our excesses as a nation, but also our insistence on fairytale delusion when confronted with the cold hard fact of our sad gluttony.  i love this book.   

Funny. In Moby-Duck, in a section discussing Eric Carle's Ten Little Rubber Ducks and the tradition of "it-narratives" (about inanimate objects) in children's lit, I write the following:

Carle has always preferred allegory to realism. Think of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, his best-known book, the protagonist of which, a gluttonous larva with eyes like lemon-lime lollipops, is an entomological embodiment of childish appetites. He's born on a Sunday, binges for a week, and then the following Sunday nibbles contritely on a leaf, in reward for which penance, he pupates, abracadabra, into a butterfly, an angelic butterfly. It's a Christian allegory with which any American child can identify, an allegory about conspicuous consumption: The Prodigal Caterpillar, Carle might have called that book, or The Caterpillar's Progress.  

In his Ten Little Ducks, on the other hand, there are no choices, no consequences. There is only chance...Carried along by ocean currents, rather than by the lineaments of desire, [the toy ducks] drift passively about, facial expressions never changing. (Moby-Duck, 18)

Micro-Excerpt, Dangerous Job Edition: On Fowling

Many of the earliest and bravest Arctic explorers were fortune-seeking prospectors who went in search not of silver and gold but of ducks. Fowlers, these feather-hunters were called. Female eider ducks line their nests with breast feathers--known to those shopping for an excellent parka or comforter as eiderdown. Eider ducks are by nature docile and defenseless birds. Hence their preference for cliffs.

To harvest eiderdown, you had to rappel down an Arctic cliff on a braided seal-hide rope, coax the mother duck from her nest, and then, dangling hundreds of feet above the icy, rocky surf, plunder her feathers, pocketing a few of her pale green eggs for tomorrow's breakfast, being sure to leave at least one, so that she would pluck more feathers from her breast, which you could come back to harvest later. Then you'd wad the harvested feathers into balls and lob these down to a boat pitching around in the rocky shallows below.

DJ Spooky & the Book of Ice

On September 22 at McNally Jackson books on Prince Street, I'll be appearing in conversation with Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky the Subliminal Kid. Miller has just released The Book of Ice, a companion volume to his Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica, a 70-minute, multimedia symphony that incorporates and interprets samples of ambient sound Miller collected on an expedition to the icy continent in 2007. Around the same time Miller was traveling south, I was heading north, to the Arctic, and both of us have in our own ways attempted to make sense of the histories, meanings, and data recorded in the ice. Hence the pairing. A taste of Terra Nova, after the jump:

Where will the tsunami wreckage go?

I was recently asked that question at a talk I gave. The University of Hawaii's International Pacific Research Center answered it by animating the likely drift route of the debris carried out to sea by the tsunami that struck Japan last March. You can watch the animation here. Or click on the low-res movie below.

 Here's how the IPRC captions the animation:

The So-Called Garbage Patch, Post 1

I get a lot of questions about the so-called Garbage Patch. Here are some answers. In the summer of 2005, when I began my researches into the castaway toys, I'd never heard of the Garbage Patch. Nor, I suspect, had most people. Since then the phenomenon has gone through the familiar life-cycles of a news story. First came the sensationalism. Then the story began to smell of Old News. Then came the debunking. By now, the Garbage Patch is rumored to be a myth. It isn't, though the name is misleading and a portion of fancy has muddled the facts. That's usually how it goes with storytelling, journalistic or otherwise, especially when it comes to the sea. (Melville: "In maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to.")

Chatwin: "Australia"

"In my childhood I never heard the word 'Australia' without calling to mind the fumes of the eucalyptus inhaler and an incessant red country populated by sheep." --Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines

Babel: Other Adventures

"Because, in order to accomplish the things I must do, I will have to travel a lot in the forthcoming years and face some other adventures. But that can't be helped. I have picked a hellish trade." --Isaac Babel, in a letter to his sister, December 20, 1926

Sailing Alone Around the Room

The year after I finished wandering around the northern hemisphere,  I hardly ever left my room. I went from nomad to shut-in. Either one, extreme vagrancy or extreme solitude, can do weird things to your head.

I'd fitted out my room so efficiently—desk pressed against the bed, mounted book shelves climbing all four walls—that it had a nautical feel. I often found myself thinking of my room as a boat with a desk for a cockpit, a keyboard for a helm. In it, motionless, I went pitching along through mental crests and troughs. To one wall, beneath the plywood shelves, I'd pinned a cheap map of the world on which I charted my own drift routes and those of the castaway toys and by which I sometimes navigated, trying to get the coordinates right.

overboard

Overboard! Photo of an actual container spill, details and photographer unknown, via the Shelter Island Historical society. No one knows exactly how many fall off every year. Estimates range from the hundreds to as many as 10,000. Merchant mariners tell me occurrences like the above are altogether common. Record is the 407 containers the APL China lost on a single night (a few pics here). Anyone with more pics like these, I'd love to see them.

6 True Castaway Tales, via Longform.org

6 True Castaway Tales, via Longform.org
In 1992, a Chinese freighter tipped violently during a storm and dumped a load of plastic bath toys—7,200 red beavers, 7,200 green frogs, 7,200 blue turtles, and 7,200 yellow ducks—into the open sea:

"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 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 the nest of a sea otter, 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?"