Micro-Excerpt: 20th Anniversary of the Great Toy Spill

Detail of map from Moby-Duck.

It was twenty years ago today that the castaway bath toys went adrift. In honor of the occasion, here with bonus pictures is the opening section of the first chapter of Moby-Duck:


We know where the spill occurred: 44.7°N, 178.1°E, south of the Aleutians, near the international date line, in the stormy latitudes renowned in the age of sail as the Graveyard of the Pacific, just north of what oceanographers, who are, on the whole, less poetic than mariners of the age of sail, call the subarctic front. We know the date—January 10, 1992—but not the hour.

The Ever Laurel

For years the identity of the ship was a well-kept secret, but by consulting old shipping schedules published in the Journal of Commerce and preserved on scratched spools of microfiche in a library basement, I, by process of elimination, solved this particular riddle: the ship was the Evergreen Ever Laurel, owned by a Greek company called Technomar Shipping and operated by the Taiwanese Evergreen Marine Corporation, whose fir-green containers, with the company's curiously sylvan name emblazoned across them in white block letters, can be seen around harbors all over the world. No spools of microfiche have preserved the identities of the officers and crew, however, let alone their memories of what happened that stormy day or night, and if the logbook from the voyage still exists, it has been secreted away to some corporate archive, consigned, for all intents and purposes, to oblivion.

A container spill. Photographer unknown.

We know that the ship departed Hong Kong on January 6, that it arrived in the Port of Tacoma on January 16, a day behind schedule, and that the likely cause for this delay was rough weather. How rough exactly remains unclear. Although it did so on other days, on January 10, the Ever Laurel did not fax a weather report to the National Weather Service in Washington, D.C., but the following day a ship in its vicinity did, describing hurricane-force winds and waves thirty-six feet high. If the Ever Laurel had encountered similarly tempestuous conditions, we can imagine, if only vaguely, what might have transpired: despite its grandeur, rocked by waves as tall as brownstones, the colossal vessel—a floating warehouse weighing 28,904 deadweight tons and powered by a diesel engine the size of a barn—would have rolled and pitched and yawed about like a toy in a Jacuzzi.

Naked Children Wandering Around on the Dinner Table

"Life is full of doomed quests—and then it tosses up the weird happy ending, with naked children wandering around on the dinner table. See for instance Wyatt Mason’s amazing profile of Ai Weiwei, now an e-book from GQ."  —Lorin Stein, The Paris Review

It is an amazing profile, one of the best in recent memory, and the weird happy ending is perhaps the most amazing of its many amazements. Here's how Mason's amazing profile begins:

In late July, I flew to China not knowing what to expect, with one exception: I was sure, regrettably sure, that I wouldn't be able to speak with the person I needed to speak with, a man named Ai Weiwei. Who he is—and there's no shame in your not knowing; I was among the unenlightened until recently, too—it was my ambition to comprehend. And if I failed to meet the man himself, I hoped, at least, to see enough of the world he called his own to make sense of a matter of no small interest: why it is that not a few people of discernment now consider him to be one of the most significant artists working today; and why it is that the People's Republic of China considers Ai Weiwei to be, without question, a very dangerous man. . . .

More for free here. E-book here.

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.