In my sleep, I heard the call. All hands. Someone had shouted it into our cabin. All hands to strike sail. We fell out of our bunks, struggled into our rain gear, and went above half-awake.
The deck was a starless uproar of wind and sound. “The Navy’s running an exercise nearby,” said the first mate. “They’ve ordered us to head north. I asked them to let us run downwind, but they just repeated the order.” The ship, under engine power, was running directly into the wind, the sails flapping powerless and wild. They would be torn to shreds.
We wrestled the foresails in the dark. The air filled with spray, with thick rope jerking and snapping in chaos. There were six of us in the bow. Four were out on the bowsprit—the long spar extending forward over the water—and two on the most forward part of the deck, where the bowsprit joined the ship.
I was on the deck, feeling with my hands in the dark, trying to find the downhaul lines and gaskets that would draw down and fasten the sails. After weeks at sea, I knew what I was looking for, but that didn’t mean I could find it.
The ship crested a large wave. We felt the bow rise higher and higher into the night. It seemed to pause at the top. For a moment we floated in the salty air.
Then we fell. The ship buried its prow in the oncoming wave, deeper than ever before. The four on the bowsprit—my friends—disappeared below the surface, foam churning over their heads. Were they clipped in? The deck went under with them. The water surged to my waist, tugging at me, sliding me aft. Robin grabbed my arm and I grabbed the rail, and we kept ourselves from tumbling backward down the deck. I looked at the bowsprit and thought, All I see is foam.
A second more and the ship came through, rising out of the swell, and I saw them. They were still there, still clutching the bowsprit, all four of them. I counted them again. Four. Had there been more?
“Is everybody there?” I shouted. “Is everyone still on board?”
But they were already working again, grappling the sails, water streaming from their jackets, shrieking like bull riders.
Robin let go and we returned to the tangle of lines at our feet. But my head was swimming with the afterimage of the water rising up to us, of the sea invading the deck. I still felt it, how it pulled at my body, an overwhelming force that swirled around and through us, the alien gravity of another universe, the black remorseless ocean.
You will have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: an island of trash, formed by a giant vortex of currents that gathers all the eternal, floating plastic in the northern half of the Pacific Ocean into an endless, swirling purgatory, a self-assembling plastic continent twice the size of Texas.
Let’s nip this in the bud: It’s not an island.
I’d like to say that again. It’s not. An island.
There is no solid mass, no floating carpet of trash, no landfill. But it is real. It was first discovered in 1997 by the yachtsman and environmentalist Charles Moore, who made it the focus of his nonprofit, the Algalita Marine Research Foundation. It is thanks to Moore’s observations that the Pacific Garbage Patch entered the popular consciousness, sometime in the mid-2000s. As for who’s responsible for the irresistible image of a plastic island, I don’t know. But someone should run them down and give them a nice, quick smack. Furthermore, an exorbitant fine should be levied on anyone—anyone—who describes this non-island as being “the size of Texas” or “twice the size of Texas.” When I was doing my preliminary research, it seemed impossible to find a piece of media about the garbage patch that didn’t mention Texas.
Why Texas? Is there no other territory that could serve as a reader-friendly reference point? Has hack journalism become so impoverished an art form that its practitioners can’t even be troubled with the five googling seconds it would take to craft an entirely original gem like “three times the size of California,” or “two Nevadas and an Arizona,” or “nearly as big as Alaska, if you leave out the Aleutians”?
The real problem is that, although two Texases clear a trim half-million square miles, nobody knows how large the Garbage Patch actually is. Unlike Texas and, critically, unlike an island, it has no defined boundary, only a general area. So let’s just call it big, and be done with it.
A more appropriate analogy would be that of an ecosystem. System is the key here, implying something much more complex than a simple floating object. From tuna-size hunks of Styrofoam and discarded fishing nets that lurk like massive jellyfish, down to microscopic pellets that hang in the water like artificial plankton, it is a vast, plastic simulacrum of the living ocean that is its host. And precisely because it is so complex, and so far from land, its nature is poorly understood.
Nobody can say for sure exactly where all the stuff comes from, but there is broad agreement that its sources are disproportionately land-based. A surprising amount of trash manages to avoid the landfill, and when it does, it often makes its way to the sea, whether by way of storm drains, rivers, or other avenues.
Since plastic objects don’t degrade easily, if ever, they have plenty of time to work their way out from land and find the ocean’s currents. A plastic bottle taken by the currents off San Francisco will travel south as it heads out into the Pacific, passing through the latitudes of Mexico and even Guatemala before heading west in earnest, caught by the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. This vast counterclockwise vortex will take the bottle clear across to the Philippines before shooting it north toward Taiwan, close by Japan, and then spitting it back past Alaska, toward the rest of North America.
Around and around the Gyre goes, and the plastic bottles and hard hats of the North Pacific go with it, we assume, until at last they drift into the becalmed zones spinning at the eastern and western ends of this oceanic conveyor belt. These are the Eastern and Western Garbage Patches. (The Eastern gets all the attention because it’s closer to the United States and was the first to be discovered.) Here, our plastic bottle finds its friends: all the other bits and pieces of plastic that have made it into the ocean in the previous who-knows-how-long. And here they wait, year upon year, breaking into fragments from the action of the waves, and strangling hapless turtles, choking overzealous albatross that mistake plastic for food, and being eaten by fish.
Eventually, the scientists and the activists and the adventurers come. Whatever part of our plastic history that floats, the Garbage Patch is the place for them to find it: our bottles, our plastic tarps, our popped bubble wrap, the tiny plastic “scrubbing beads” of our exfoliating face soap. It’s all here for the hunting.
Or so I hoped. But without a single cruise line running through, how was I to know for sure? Which brings us to another interesting thing about the Garbage Patch: hardly anyone has actually seen it. It takes serious oceangoing chops to get out there. And there’s almost no reason anyone with a boat would bother. Most people with yachts and things are more interested in going to places like Hawaii, or the Bahamas, or anywhere. But the Garbage Patch, inherent to its formation, is in the middle of the biggest nowhere on the planet.
The Gyre had seen several expeditions from researchers and activists the previous summer, in 2009, so I took to the phones, beginning a campaign of sustained pestering that I hoped would be my ticket onto one of this year’s voyages. And that’s how I met Project Kaisei.
I found the Kaisei docked in Point Richmond, across the bay from San Francisco. A steel-hulled, square-rigged, 150-foot-long brigantine, it was a striking sight. Think metal pirate ship and you will have the image. The ship is the namesake and floating linchpin of Project Kaisei, a nonprofit venture dedicated, as its motto reads, to “Capturing the plastic vortex.” I had somehow convinced Mary Crowley, one of its founders, to let me come along on a three-week voyage to that plastic vortex, a thousand miles away, but I had my doubts about capturing it.
Especially if we never left. We had spent more than a week without a clear sense of when we might set out to sea. A departure day would be announced, only to dawn with the new radar unit still absent, or with provisions yet to be delivered, or with a cook not yet hired, and we would not sail.
In the meantime, a subset of the crew would show up each day to help clean the boat, patch its rust holes, touch up the blue paint on the hull, or install an extra life raft, and I had time to develop my mixed feelings about the Kaisei. From the moment I first stepped aboard, I had tasted that flavor of excitement that has a note of terror. She had two great masts, the forward one boasting four spars: the yards, from which majestic square sails would drape, sails that belonged in a biography of Lord Nelson. Dozen upon dozen of cables and ropes—lines, we learned, not ropes but lines—led from wooden pins on the deck to points above; this set of lines to pull a sail down, that to pull it up; lines to orient the yards to starboard or to port; lines to raise and lower the spar of the gaff sail; lines to raise and lower sets of pulleys that were connected to still further lines.
Was I going to be asked to climb those masts, to edge out along those yards, approximately a thousand feet up? Like most sensible people, I don’t really have a fear of heights—only a fear of falling to my death. Which is not a fear at all, but a sensible attitude. On the other hand, what is the point of being on a tall ship if you don’t experience the tallness? I knew that when asked to go aloft, I would overcome or at least bypass my fear and force myself to do it. And so what I really feared was that I wasn’t afraid enough.
This was all neatly analogous to my broader situation: instead of a nice, short jaunt on a press boat or a proper research vessel, I was going to sea for three weeks or more. A thousand miles from land when I wanted to be at home in New York, when I should have been at home, squaring away wedding plans, preparing for the moment of my good fortune, only two months away, when the Doctor and I would get hitched. And the Kaisei would be sailing in total seaborne isolation. There would be no satellite phone for the crew, no data connection, no way to communicate with my family or with the Doctor. No way even to apologize, once I went, for being gone.
The ship itself was charming, if a bit scruffy, with cabins that were cozy but not claustrophobic, and a pair of lounges ample for a small crew, and decks of faded wood. In front of the wheelhouse, with its radio and its radar display, was an outdoor bridge, where the deck rose into a platform facing a large, spoked wheel. It was the kind of wheel I would have expected to see on the wall of a nautical-themed restaurant.
The problem was not the Kaisei. The problem was us. As the days went by, spent in sanding and painting and offloading unneeded scientific equipment from the previous year’s voyage, I met the volunteers who would be the crew. How many people did it take to sail a 150-foot brigantine? I wasn’t sure we yet had ten. And as we got to know one another, it emerged that very few of us knew anything that would be useful in the safe operation of said brigantine.
There was Kaniela, for instance, an affable young surfer from Hawaii and one of the hardest workers on the boat. He asked me if I knew much about sailing.
I didn’t, I said. Not a thing. You?
Nah, man. I’m hoping to learn.
Then there were Gabe and Henry, two recently graduated Oberlin hipsters. The morning we met, they were standing on deck huddled against the early chill, hands stuffed in their pockets, wearing their sunglasses. A surly pair, I thought, but they turned out just to be badly hung over, and had brightened up by mid-afternoon. They told me they both had degrees, more or less, in environmental studies, or something. Upon moving back to Marin County from Oberlin, they had gotten internships at the Ocean Voyages Institute, the umbrella organization for Project Kaisei. But three weeks at sea seemed a little extreme for an internship. I asked them why they were coming.
With a straight face, Gabe told me that he was here for the adventure. He wanted to be an adventurer. A rakish rogue, he specified. And this was the first step toward his goal.
The ravings of a contaminated mind. I turned to Henry. I asked him if either of them knew how to sail.
He smiled. It was a thin smile, similar to a wince. They had taken sailing in high school, he said. Little two-person boats.
What was that feeling in my gullet? Desperation? I made my way from volunteer to volunteer, making a mental map of our skill set. We had a deep bench in watersports and the teaching of high school science. Otherwise, it was a mixed bag. There was a boatbuilder, a former journalist, a few students. They were all interesting, thoughtful, hardworking people who didn’t know a damn thing about sailing a tall ship.
I put my hope in the second mate, a calm, confident tall-ship sailor…who quit. After a single afternoon on board, he told the captain he didn’t like the look of things and got the hell out of there.
There it was again. That sinking feeling.
The votes of ill-confidence started to pile up. A team of Coast Guard bluesuits came to inspect the boat’s papers. As they left, chuckling, I heard the Kaisei’s captain say, “They’d never seen anything like this.”
The more I learned about the Kaisei, the more I realized that, from a technical point of view, she was an oddity. One evening I sat on the aft deck with the ship’s engineer, watching Richmond’s tugboats go by and listening to him complain. The engineer was probably the most important person in the crew, if it mattered to us that the ship remain afloat, that we have fresh water, and that the navigational gear function. Night after night, he had been up late, coaxing the ship’s systems into fighting shape. He was grumpy, but that seemed like a good sign. You don’t want a laissez-faire engineer.
The Kaisei, he told me with some exasperation, had been built in Poland, only to be refitted and operated in Japan. Everything was in Polish and Japanese. And the electricity. He shook his head. Multiple standards, in a dazzling range of voltages. The irregularity extended literally to the nuts and bolts of the ship: some were metric, some weren’t, and so multiple sets of tools were required, though none of the multiple sets on board were complete.
The engineer sipped from his mug and let out a great sigh. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m into my cup.”
Within a few days, he, too, had quit.
We now had no second mate, and no engineer, and none of us lowly volunteers—the crew—knew what the hell was going on. Every day of delay was shortening the mission: in barely three weeks, the Kaisei was booked to participate in the San Diego Festival of Sail, where we would blow the minds of all those tall-ship enthusiasts with our adventures in deep ocean plastics. So every day tied up at the dock was a day we didn’t spend in the Gyre. We began to doubt that the boat would ever leave the dock. And with experienced crew members disappearing by the day, the rank and file were wondering if we, too, should step off the boat.
Something held us back, though. Something that counterbalanced all the bad omens. A single factor that kept the entire crew from walking.
It was the Pirate King. His name was Stephen, and his position was first mate, but I thought of him as the Pirate King of the Kaisei, a single person so compulsively knowledgeable about seafaring that he made up for the frightening deficits in the rest of us. A compact man, even short, he was trim and strong, with a close beard and two golden hoops in his left ear, and just in case we weren’t paying attention, he wore a black baseball cap decorated with a skull and crossbones.
The Kaisei had a captain, but we mostly ignored him in deference to the Pirate King, who exemplified that very specific kind of manhood that is built on overwhelming knowledge. He knew how to navigate, how to tie knots, how to rig a sailboat, how to walk along the yards with barely a hand to hold himself in place, and how to slide down the stays, Douglas Fairbanks-like, landing himself back on deck in mere seconds. He never wore a safety harness. He knew how to furrow his brow and raise his voice and tell us that, as first mate, he was responsible for us. He had personally circumnavigated the globe in his own small sailboat at near-racing pace, sailing through every kind of sea imaginable, even surviving a rogue wave. He was equal parts Jack Sparrow and Han Solo, and we would have followed him anywhere—across the Pacific in a rowboat, up Everest in our shorts, suitless through an airlock into deep space—as long as he was there to tell us what to do. You can actually survive in deep space without a space suit, he would have explained. You just need to control your exhalations.
He promised us he would walk off the boat if it wasn’t safe, and that was good enough for us. He became our knot-tying, aggressively all-knowing weathervane. And sure enough, a new engineer was found, and a cook, and everything came together at the last minute, and finally, eventually, suddenly—we sailed.
The crew of a ship about to go out of range becomes diligent with its telephones. I texted my friends and family and posted a picture from the far side of the Golden Gate Bridge. I received one, too: my friend Victoria had gone up on the Marin Headlands to take a picture as we left. On the boat, we looked at it, the picture of ourselves. It showed the mouth of the bay, opening out from the land of the Golden Gate. Our ship was in the center of the picture, our huge steel ship, barely a dozen pixels wide, the merest smudge against the sky-colored sea.
And I talked to the Doctor one last time. She made me promise her something. She made me promise that if I found myself being washed off the ship, I would hang on.
“Promise,” she said. “Promise you’ll hang on with your last fingernail.”
Conversations about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch tend to follow a certain profile. First there is the flash of recognition, embedded with a nugget of misinformation:
Right! The giant plastic island! The one the size of Texas!
It’s not an island, you say.
Well, right, they say, moderating. It’s more of a pile.
You narrow your eyes. Seriously, how do you pile anything on the ocean?
Eventually, with coaxing, they let go of the island imagery, of impractical notions of how things pile, of Texas. Sobriety achieved, there comes the inevitable question:
Can it be cleaned up?
A lot of people have considered this question, and have debated it, and have pondered different strategies and possibilities. From this, a broad consensus has emerged among scientists and environmentalists, which I’m happy to summarize:
Get real.
We’re talking about the ocean here. Even assuming that we could just get a big net—whoever we is—and that it would be worth the massive use of fuel to drag it back and forth for thousands of miles across the Gyre, and that there would be an exit strategy for what to do with a hemisphere-size net full of trash…even granted all these impossibilities, there remains the intractable fact of the confetti.
As a plastic object spends year after year in the water, it becomes brittle from the sun. The waves begin to break it into pieces, and gradually it is delivered into smaller and smaller bits, a plastic confetti that might be the most troublesome thing about the Garbage Patch. Nets and larger objects may strangle marine life, and bottle caps and disposable cutlery may fill the stomachs of baby albatross, but the confetti has a chance of interacting with the ecosystem at a more fundamental level. Since it is consumed just as food would be, it has the potential to introduce toxins at the bottom of the food chain, toxins that may be concentrated by their passage up the chain to large animals like tuna and humans. In 2009, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (on a voyage funded in part by Project Kaisei) found plastic in the stomachs of nearly a tenth of all the fish they sampled in the Garbage Patch, and they estimated that tens of thousands of tons of plastic are consumed by fish there every year.
This is a lot like what happened in Chernobyl, where radionuclides followed the same pathways as nutrients to become incorporated into vegetation, and presumably animals. As the journalist and author Mary Mycio has written, in Chernobyl “radiation is no longer ‘on’ the zone, but ‘of’ the zone.” Perhaps we can already say the same of plastic in the oceans. It is not only a fact of life, but part of it.
How then to clean it up? To remove a billion large and tiny pieces of the ocean from itself? A cosmic coffee filter? And then, how to avoid also straining out every whale and minnow in the sea, every sprite of plankton?
It was no surprise, then, to find that organizations devoted to this issue tended to avoid the idea of cleanup. Charles Moore’s Algalita Marine Research Foundation, a leader in the budding field of Garbage Patch studies, has a bent for “citizen science” that hearkens back to science’s roots as a discipline founded by amateurs. Rather than speculate about cleanup, it produces peer-reviewed research for journals like the Marine Pollution Bulletin. Moore has been openly scornful of the idea of cleaning up marine plastic. Appearing on the Late Show with David Letterman, he swatted down his host’s hopeful questions about cleanup. “Snowball’s chance in hell,” he said. (Letterman told Moore his outlook seemed “bleak” and proposed they get a drink.) Other organizations focus on finding garbage patches in the other ocean gyres of the world or on raising awareness to combat the overuse of plastic on land.
So Project Kaisei is special. “Capturing the plastic vortex” is more than its motto. It’s a succinct mission statement. Not content to tilt at the windmill of keeping plastics out of the ocean in the first place, Kaisei has chosen to go after the biggest windmill of them all: finding some way to clean them up.
The force behind Project Kaisei is Mary Crowley, a toothy woman in late middle age with a warm smile and an unshakable belief in the possibilities of marine debris cleanup. She has gone so far as to envision ocean-borne plastic retrieval as an actual industry. “Fishing for plastics, so to speak, is not that different from fishing for fish,” she told me, leaning on the Kaisei’s starboard rail. “And unfortunately, we’ve so overfished the oceans. I think it would be a wonderful employment for fishermen to be able to get involved in ocean cleanup, and give fish a chance to have a healthier environment and restock.”
We can only hope that one day the fishing industry will be rescued by fishing for plastic instead of actual fish. (Indeed, a proposal to subsidize fishermen for debris pickup has even been floated in the EU.) In any case, let’s state for the record that in the early-twenty-first century, when most people said cleanup was impossible, Project Kaisei kept the dream alive. May they be proven prescient.
This summer’s mission, though, had been shrinking in scope almost since it was conceived. There had originally been plans for two trips, in quick succession, as well as a short press voyage that would depart from Hawaii to rendezvous with the Kaisei in the Garbage Patch. Mary had even spoken to me of tugging a barge out to the Gyre, of recruiting fishing boats to help retrieve mass quantities of refuse.
Those ideas had evaporated, and the scope of the mission had narrowed. The goal of the voyage now, Mary told me, was to use ocean-current models being developed by scientists at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and at the University of Hawaii to pinpoint the areas with the largest plastic accumulation. By comparing our observations with the scientists’ models, it would be possible to devise effective ways of finding the plastic, a critical precondition for future cleanup. Think of it as fisheries research for the seaborne trash collectors of tomorrow.
She said we would also be “working on the most effective ways to use commercial ships—tugs, barges, fishing boats—to do actual collection,” or, as a Project Kaisei press release put it, “further testing collection technologies to remove the variety of plastic debris from the ocean.”
The word further alludes to the Kaisei’s voyage of the previous summer. I heard many references to the technology developed as part of that voyage, specifically “the Beach,” a device designed to answer the intractable problem of the confetti. Passively powered by wave motion, the Beach allowed water to run over its surface, I was told, capturing the plastic confetti without the need for impractical filtering, and without catching marine life as well.
As the Golden Gate Bridge sank into the ocean behind us, Mary explained her position. She said it simply wasn’t enough to talk about stemming the flow of plastic from land. Even if we stopped the influx from the United States, there would still be plastic from the rest of the world getting into the oceans. And she had spent her entire life on and around the ocean, building a successful sail-charter business. The ocean was her life’s work. She felt she had to do something.
“So we have to work very vigorously to stop the flow,” she said. “But we also have to effect cleanup.”
Was that so wrong?
We were elated to have set out, and relieved that the often-rough coastal oceans were forgiving that day. We watched the Farallon Islands go by—a set of remote, rocky outcroppings that, technically, are part of San Francisco. Then we were done with land. As if to announce it, a whale rose out of the depths, not fifteen feet to port. Staring down on its curling spine as it cut the surface and disappeared, we screamed with the exultation of inland people going to sea.
As with all true adventures, though, ours was to be remarkable for its long stretches of boredom. Soon our lives became an endless series of watches and off-watches—three hours on, six hours off, three on, six off, repeated ad infinitum—and I began to learn a bit about the seafaring life.
Our first duty on watch, unsurprisingly, was to watch: to keep an eye to port and to starboard for anything that might threaten to destroy us, other than boredom itself. During nighttime watches, I would stare into the darkness and try to see anything at all. On the second evening, tiny birds danced at the edge of our running lights, and I killed entire hours wondering if they were real.
The next task was the hourly boat check. The Pirate King would instruct one of us to walk the length of the deck, fore and aft, starboard and port; then to scout the belowdecks, to peek into the thundering oven that was the engine room (we remained under engine power even when augmented by sails); and finally to report back to him anything untoward or alarming, with special emphasis on whether the boat was sinking or on fire.
“Thank you,” would come the Pirate King’s approval, and we would turn to the main activities of the watch: the telling of stories and the sharing of bad jokes.
I was assigned to Watch B, which I rechristened Bravo Watch. It was, of course, the best of the three watches that made up the cycle. In addition to an official chronicler (me, self-appointed), we had Kelsey, a recent graduate from UC Berkeley, where she studied marine conservation; and both shipboard hipsters, Gabe and Henry, who were revealed to be old friends, inseparable since toddlerhood; and finally our watch captain, the Pirate King himself.
The Pirate King had turned out to be not only a hard-core example of seafaring masculinity but also something of a camp counselor. He seized every opportunity to teach us sea shanties, to recite poems both nautical and otherwise, to point out the constellations and unfold the mythology behind them, to show us how to splice rope and tie knots, how to braid special twine “Turk’s head” bracelets that would mark us forever as tall-ship sailors. On watch, as at meals, as in the lounge, he would break into story or song at the slightest provocation. I came to hesitate before taking a nap in the lower lounge, for fear that I would be awakened by the Pirate King, hanging upside down, splicing a lanyard with his teeth and singing a napping-shanty in twelve verses.
On our first midnight watch, he told us his life story: he grew up poor in Alabama, left home as a teenager, and remade himself in California. It was the tale of a young man enraged by how the world had treated him. Only through the trials and mortifications of sailing had he come to realize that, misfortunes aside, he could still make the choice to be happy. He had followed that revelation for the rest of his life, creating and controlling his environment, living for sailing. He worked as a captain and sailboat rigger and had lived on a boat since he was a teenager. The Pirate King had chosen his destiny.
Watch was also a time for gossip. Ships run on gossip, and it is the most reliable way to spread information among the crew. Boredom creates such a powerful suction in the mind for anything interesting, anything new, or anything related to your situation—the situation, that is, of being marooned on a small, steel island. Night watches, when the rest of the crew were sleeping, were especially productive. Entire shifts were spent reenacting the captain’s social gaffes and speculating about whether Mary’s goals for the voyage were achievable. We wondered how long the voyage would be, and mused about what, exactly, we were supposed to be doing.
The space between conversations, normally reserved at sea for quiet reverie and communion with the mysteries of the deep, was instead filled by Gabe, who for the duration of the voyage maintained a running series of food fantasies. Night and day, becalmed or in high seas, Gabe would welcome us into his inner restaurant, a sensual wonderland of Thai green curries and simmering stews and more green curries—always with the green curry—and hot liquored drinks to ward off the cold air that chased us almost all the way to the Gyre.
At times it seemed Gabe had no other way to approach the world. Once, during a discussion of the myth of the Garbage Patch as a “plastic island,” I caught him staring into space, licking his lips.
“It’s more like…like a thin minestrone,” he said.
Oh, and then you also have to steer the boat, taking turns at the Kaisei’s tall, spoked wheel. You can pull off such feats of steering as you’ve never imagined: driving without being able to see in front of you (thanks to the masts, and the structure of the upper lounge, and whatnot), driving in the dark without headlights, driving in the dark without headlights while looking backward, with your hands off the wheel, drinking coffee, and telling bad jokes. These maneuvers and more, I personally executed.
All this is made possible by the absence, on the high seas, of anything else but the high seas. There is nothing to steer around, nothing to crash into, indeed no things whatsoever, except for you and your ship. If, within a ten-mile radius, so much as a rain squall or a tall wave threatened to violate our monopoly on thingness, the radar would sound an alarm.
All that mattered when you were steering, then, was the heading, which would be provided by the watch captain, in our case the Pirate King.
“One-eight-five,” he would say.
“One-eight-five, aye,” we would respond, duty-bound to get over the silliness of saying “aye” all the time.
You would then peer at the points of the compass as they wavered in the gimbaled steel housing of the binnacle, just beyond the wheel, and ponder how to make a five-degree course correction to a heading that wandered a good ten degrees back and forth, according to the swell and the wind and the whimsy of Poseidon.
In the afternoon, we saw our first piece of debris. The honor went to Charlie Watch. Art, a retired science teacher both crusty and jovial, said he thought it was a net, although it was too far away to be sure.
Around eight thirty the following morning, I spotted Debris Item No. 2: a large bundle of synthetic yellow rope, to starboard.
After only three days at sea, the mind was already so tuned to the featurelessness of the ocean surface that a bundle of rope was cause for major excitement. Even a fragment of kelp would have been a thrill, and this was actual rope. We went thronging to the rail. I wanted to cry “WHERE AWAY?” but restrained myself, as it would have made no sense. It had been me that spotted the rope, so someone else should have been crying “Where away?” so I could then call, “TWO POINTS ON THE STARBOARD BEAM!”
It was Patrick O’Brian syndrome. I had read too many of his rousing tales of early-nineteenth-century naval adventure. Now, on a large sailing vessel for the first time, I was afflicted by the urge, barely stifled, to scream “WHERE AWAY?!” whenever I had the chance, in rude imitation of the indefatigable Captain Aubrey. (The strange counterpoint to this urge was that I never got used to shouting “LAYING ALOFT!” before climbing into the rigging, as instructed by the Pirate King.)
The bundle of rope slid out of sight. “Where away?” I whispered.
There was more trash that day, small pieces here and there. We had no illusions that we were anywhere near the Gyre, though. We hadn’t traveled far enough, and the weather was still cool and windy, not the warm doldrums we could expect once we reached the Gyre. But it whetted our appetite. It sharpened our eyes. People began scanning the ocean surface for debris whenever they were on deck. Several people went up into the crosstrees to look out from above. The call came down of another rope sighting. (Where away?) Gabe and I went thronging to the rail. You must always throng to the rail, I felt, even if there are only two of you.
There it was: a tattered section of rope, maybe eighteen inches long.
“Oh, shit,” said Gabe. “That is going to fuck up some ecosystem.”
The sightings soon died down and by the following day the water was trash-free. We readied ourselves for its return. A logbook for debris was established—it lived in the wheelhouse, on the desk underneath the GPS/radar display—and a new task was added to our watch duties: debris lookout. Two members of the active watch would sit in the bow, one looking to port, one to starboard, using a walkie-talkie to report anything they saw to a third member of the watch, who would note its latitude and longitude and the time of sighting in the logbook. The fourth watchmate would man the helm, and several times during the three-hour shift, at the word of the Pirate King, we would rotate.
I was underwhelmed by this debris-watch system. Mary had already said that this voyage wouldn’t have the scientific focus of the previous year’s, but if we were doing the work of debris watch anyway, it seemed a waste not to do it in a methodical or standardized way.
But no. There would be no real data collection, no pulling of nets through the water to quantify debris density at different coordinates. There wasn’t even any consistent method for eyeballing it. Should we be looking everywhere and anywhere? Or should we be looking at a defined area, so that the debris count from one watch might be meaningfully compared with that of the next?
And how should different objects count? We would of course radio in large items to the wheelhouse. (I’ve got half of a green plastic bucket. I’ve got a two-foot square of yellow tarp.) But what about a two-inch fragment? A half-inch one? Only through the gradual buildup of a debris-lookout culture, transmitted orally from one watch to the next, did even vaguely standardized practices emerge. Our observations, it seemed, would be of little use to anyone else once we were done.
Soon, a pair of work lights were strapped to the netting underneath the bowsprit, and debris watch extended around the clock. Now we stood at the rails even at night, staring into the pools of light that trickled forward onto the rising, falling, onrushing ocean. In active seas, the prow of the ship became a mesmerizing twilight zone, where I stood watching bow waves crash aside and looked up at the Kaisei’s great square sails, taut against the night.
But when we couldn’t find this reverie, some of us grumbled. What, exactly, was the point?
The point was that our goal was not to measure debris or to record it in any useful way, but simply to find it. We were looking for what Mary referred to as “current lines” of trash, narrow bands of high density. Mary spoke again and again of the current lines, and I saw that if we could bring the Kaisei back to port heavy with trash, it would validate the dream of cleanup. But for that, we would have to find the mother lode.
The impossibility of steering in a straight line is just one expression of the truth that at sea there are no straight lines. Nothing is level, nothing constant. Least of all gravity. You were once so naive as to assume that gravity was a force of uniform strength and direction. Welcome, then, to the Kaisei, where gravity is contingent, erratic, ever-changing. Just try putting down a mug of tea. All the flat surfaces of the world, formerly so useful, are now mere runways for your beverage, which will leap unbidden into the air and onto the floor, scuttling away in search of lower ground. For a mug—a book, a computer—to be left on a table or a shelf, it must first be restrained, like a lunatic strapped to a bed.
All the structures of daily life now find themselves built on quicksand. I go to the bathroom: I pee. The urine describes a sideways arc away from me (strictly speaking, I arc away from it), first left, then right, then left. Compound upon this the natural downward curve of the stream, and a newfound inability to stand upright, and now several integrals of calculus are necessary to ensure that a majority of one’s piss doesn’t end up on the floor.
The bathroom anointed, you make for the lower lounge. The world rotates. You plow against the left wall of the corridor, the right, the left…Soon you will realize that in fact you are walking a straight line, and it is the corridor itself that is driving the lane here, sometimes quite violently. It’s up to you to shoulder off its aggressions.
Finally, you make it to the lower lounge for a quiet sit on the padded benches built against the hull. The lower lounge, like most places belowdecks, throbs with the vibration of the engines and the motion of the ship, with the parting of the ocean water as the Kaisei toils ever forward. Here, merely sitting, watching a movie on someone’s laptop—There Will Be Blood stirring memories of Spindletop—you feel, more purely than anywhere else, precisely because you are trying to sit still, how the Earth’s lines of force, once so parallel, so uniform, now swing and warp, bending the room into a haphazard, freaky place. One moment you are pressed against the cushions of the sofa. Then the pendulum of the world swings and you float half an inch into the air. An hour later, your face has melted and your stomach, having received so much from you over the years, now wants to give something back.
Will it never end? For three weeks, the very welds in the hull yearning upward and sideways?
You need your bunk. You stagger to the end of the glowering, thuggish corridor and back into your cabin, mumble something to the sleeping forms of your cabinmates, and then you are home, hidden away in the wooden womb of your bed, surrounded by clothes and blankets and bags of almonds.
I curled up, oriented so I wouldn’t roll and crash against the walls as I napped, free for a moment from the need always to be bracing and balancing and holding on.
But even in my bunk I could feel the tireless ocean gravity, changeable as the wind. Under its sway, my organs and skin, my face, my mouth, they pulled against my skeleton: left, then right, then left…The thought surfaced that this was not, in fact, a special marine case. The boat and the ocean had not cast some churning and unnatural spell. They had merely revealed how the world really was. Gravity and orientation weren’t reliable, except in the narrow instance of life on land. The worlds that sprang from the laws of nature were wavering and irregular. And so were our bodies—provisional, inconstant, flesh on a frame. And our lives and plans, too, oscillations in a medium, ripples passing up the swell.
That afternoon, while I was at the helm, Mary came and stood on the bridge for a while. We hadn’t spoken much since the beginning of the voyage. It was another odd effect of life on the Kaisei: thanks to the rigorous rotating schedule, you could see surprisingly little of someone who wasn’t on your watch. Aside from meals—and even those were sometimes worth skipping for sleep—I might see the members of Alpha Watch only if I happened to be on deck taking pictures during their shift, or if there was a call for all hands to make sail. But Mary wasn’t assigned to a watch and tended to be in her cabin when she wasn’t visiting the on-duty watch or observing some debris being brought on board. So a certain distance built up.
Maybe I just felt awkward around her.
I shifted the wheel a few spokes to port, keeping course. Mary took a deep breath of ocean air.
“Been doing so much reading,” she said. “Trying to synthesize everything and come up with the right approach.” She told me she had a tall stack of books about ocean debris in her cabin.
How late, I thought. How late to be looking for the right approach.
She sat down on the edge of the bridge, leaning against the railing.
“So what do you think, Andrew?”
“Of what?” I said.
“Of life out here.”
I considered the question. The sailing life is supposed to be the apotheosis of freedom and adventure, but it seemed notable to me mainly for its indignities, and for the endless tasks, both awkward and arcane, on which our safety depended. It was like owning a house, but more likely to get you killed. The idea that sailing was an expression of freedom, I suspected, was merely a tool for self-soothing on the part of all the sailors and yachtsmen of the world. They had to justify why they bothered.
Mary was waiting for my answer, her eyes bright. I laughed. “Well, it’s certainly different, Mary,” I said.
She smiled and handed me a piece of chocolate. I thought of something she had told me back in California, advice for someone who had never been to sea. The trick, she’d said, is not to think of yourself as limited by the confines of your boat. You have to believe that you are limited only by the edges of what you can see from the boat. And the indignities of being at sea had let me realize the truth of this. The solution to every misery was to open your mind toward the horizon. To know that you were not on the ocean, but of it.
On our fifth day—sixth? twelfth?—we got our first real taste. The air warmed, the clouds disappeared, the ocean became settled and smooth—and we caught the propeller on a ghost net.
Ghost nets are fishing nets and tackle that have been cast off or lost by commercial fishermen. As nets and their attached gear wander and float, they find each other, tangling into ungainly masses of net and rope riddled with fishing floats and other debris. They have the largest bodies of any species of nonlife in the Garbage Patch. Synthetic men-of-war, they continue to fish, entangling and killing animals as they roam the ocean for years, perhaps decades. And they’re hell on propellers.
I awoke in my bunk to the sound of—what was that sound? Robin, another retired science teacher and a friend of Art’s, was crouched next to me, nudging my shoulder.
You might want to get on deck, he said. The propeller got fouled on a net.
I realized what the sound was. After five days of constant motoring, the propeller was no longer spinning. “Where away?” I gurgled, tumbling out of bed.
We came on deck to find the Pirate King fresh from the ocean, stripped to the waist, droplets of saltwater glinting in his beard. I want to say he had a knife in his mouth. He had gone over the side to free the propeller. His quarry lay at his feet: a young ghost net, long and narrow, uncomplicated by other nets and ropes, not yet tangled into itself beyond recognition. The excited crew clustered around. We had only just reached the Gyre, and already the Garbage Patch had reached out, striking us a glancing blow!
I had my video camera with me and began recording Robin and his collaborators as they untangled the net. Mary was there, watching it unfold, oddly separate from the crew, as she always seemed to be. She picked up a corner of the net and turned it over in her hand.
“It’s so hard to believe people throw stuff like this in the ocean,” she said. I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or to my camera.
There was debris in the water again. Someone brought out a long pole with a basket of netting at its end, and we started hunting. There was a trick to it. If you left the net in the water, it became difficult to maneuver; instead, you had to stab the water just aft of an object as it passed. In this way, like Vikings spearfishing from the deck of a warship, we brought several scraps of trash aboard.
Meanwhile, Kaniela and Nick took the dinghy out, buzzing around to pick up bits of debris spotted by people aloft. Nick was on board as a representative of the Ocean Conservancy and was the closest thing we had to a professional marine biologist or ocean debris specialist. Every year, the Ocean Conservancy leads a gigantic volunteer effort called the International Coastal Cleanup, and this year Nick’s efforts on the Kaisei would be the cleanup’s symbolic beginning.
Bravo Watch began. I grabbed a walkie-talkie and took bow watch, calling sightings in to Gabe, in the wheelhouse, who would note them in the log. Nick and Kaniela also had a radio in the dinghy. If any of us saw something particularly interesting—a bucket, a large piece of tarp—Kaniela would gun the motor and the dinghy would skip across the ocean in hot pursuit.
I climbed out onto the bowsprit, watching the water stretch past, eyes peeled for plastic crates and buckets. The dinghy zipped forward with Nick in the bow, a figurehead in sunglasses.
Something was bugging me. I keyed my radio.
“Gamma whiskey breaker, this is bow watch alpha bravo comeback, over.”
Bravo Watch liked its radios, and its nonsense.
“Loud and clear, bow watch,” came Gabe’s crackling reply. “This is the bridge. Can I get a two-five on your niner, over.”
“Roger, bridge,” I said. “Bridge, we are cleaning up the Pacific Ocean…by hand. Over.”
Robin came forward to the bow to say hello. People liked to say hello when you were in the bow, not only because it was scenic and quiet but also because it was one of the few places where you could talk without being overheard.
I told him I didn’t think our work was very useful.
“It’s a joke!” he said, making a face. “The one thing is testing the ocean-current models. That’s the one thing that could be real.”
But as far as I could tell, the only thing Mary knew of the ocean-current models was a pair of GPS waypoints—one from NOAA and one from the University of Hawaii. Was that going to be it? Get to a waypoint and take a quick peek around? I had heard Mary say that her NOAA contact had suggested we “call him when we’re out there.” But now even that would be difficult. There was a satellite link on board, reserved for nonpersonal use—but it had stopped working before we even made it out the Golden Gate.
And what of “further testing collection technologies”? So far, we were innocent of any such initiative, except for Robin’s project on the wheelhouse roof. He was working—at Mary’s suggestion, I think—on jury-rigging a wide, rigid net that, were we to drag it through a dense swath of garbage, might snag a share. This was technology development on the Kaisei: a warmhearted, wisecracking retiree gamely slinging a screw gun.
I had noticed something else on the wheelhouse roof. It was the Beach, stored from last year. This was the innovative wave-action device purpose-designed by Project Kaisei to isolate plastic confetti from the ocean water.
It was a slope-topped plywood box. Someone on the ship had built it during the previous summer’s voyage. Now it was tied down just aft of where we stood at the wheel, steering the ship. For a long time I hadn’t noticed it. Because it looked like a plywood box.
The dinghy zipped by on an intercept course for another scrap of debris. Robin reached out with two fingers together, as if he were going to pinch the ocean.
“It’s like you’re standing on the beach and picking up one tiny, tiny bit of sand,” he said.
In the middle of the night, I dream that I am at the wheel of a great ship, sailing the Pacific Ocean. The cold air is thick with moisture. The rigging creaks with the roll of the ship. Water hisses along the lee rail.
In the afternoon, Mary told us that we had passed the NOAA waypoint. It had gone by without fanfare, earlier that day or the previous night. Aside from the debris watch, no measurements were taken that I knew of. We had found no mother lode there, and so had moved on, setting course for the University of Hawaii waypoint.
The water, choppy and gray, was free of trash. We appeared to be having trouble finding not only a good stretch of garbage but also the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre itself. We were sailing on strong winds, which suggested that the high-pressure zone that is associated with the Gyre was farther west than usual. Would we never get to sail the seas of plastic? Mary maintained that there was trash in the water here, but that we couldn’t see it because it had been pushed below the surface of the water by the increased wind and higher waves.
Nikolai Maximenko, the University of Hawaii oceanographer with whom Mary was working, later confirmed for me that this effect exists. But it was also increasingly apparent that day that the Garbage Patch was anything but uniform. It varied from spot to spot, heterogeneous and changing.
But that didn’t matter. What mattered was getting farther west while we still could, and finding more trash.
One week at sea. I spent half my waking hours dreaming of land. Land, which wouldn’t move. A nice sidewalk, with the Doctor walking down it. The other half I spent in witness to the plain wonders of the open ocean and the numberless, fractal layers of its moving surface. Or I spent it out on a yard, wrestling a sail in the shining void.
We now lived for what we had all feared: going aloft. We waited for the call, edging toward the ratlines, ready to scramble upward, to the lower topsail, to the upper topsail, to the topgallant, perhaps a hundred feet above the deck. We edged out along the spars like arthritic monkeys, clinging to the yard with our bellies, as the Pirate King had shown us. I now depended on what I had dreaded would be the worst part of going aloft: the roll and pitch of the ship. I waited for the moments when it seemed to lift me upward in my climb, for the seconds when it glued me to the yard, when I could with confidence use both hands to tie a knot, unconcerned that I might be flung backward into blue nothingness, with only a short stretch of line to connect my waist to the rest of the world.
And I liked my shipmates. We were in that long moment of becoming friends, when the foreign and the familiar become, for a time, the same thing. Robin was revealed as a serial trickster, helpless before the opportunity to tell an off-color joke or to make joyous mockery of himself, of us, of everything. He told us old stories from his job, of being called into the principal’s office—as a teacher—for some mischief inflicted on his students. Art, Robin’s good friend, was a weather-beaten man in his seventies, with the thick brogue of a New England fisherman—yet he was a surfer and science teacher living in Hawaii. He climbed the ratlines and slid down the shrouds like someone much younger, hopping onto the deck, an ancient mariner flashing the hang loose sign. Then there was Adam, the shambling, culinary animal who inhabited the pitching metal box of the galley, fending off sliding pans and trays, deploying his ninja kit of cooking knives with focused abandon.
On Saturday evening we had a party. The concepts of “Saturday” and “evening” had long since lost their meaning in the constant cycling of the watches, but “party” was an idea that still held. It marked our entrance into the heart of the Gyre. At last, the air was warm, subtropical, the ocean glassier, almost smooth, the ship’s deck glowing in the late sun. Joe, the engineer, cut the engine, and the Kaisei bobbed on the lazy swell.
Art climbed onto the roof of the upper lounge and improvised a modified passage from Moby-Dick, in which he evoked a search for the “great white ball of trash.” We had seen a whale earlier that day, cause for some minor thronging. The truth in Art’s joke, though, was that we would have been far more excited by a whale-size clump of trash.
Then Robin led us in a cheer, screaming something in Japanese, to which we responded with screams of Banzai! again and again, filling the ocean air with our cries. Only later did he admit that he had been screaming something, I think, about wanting to sleep with your sister.
Handles of vodka and rum appeared from hiding places belowdecks—it was supposed to be a dry ship—and the grog, a steel pot of fruit punch, was spiked and spiked again. Mary raised a mug, her face uncertain at where all this was headed, and made a few announcements. She reminded us why we were out here. It was about the plastic, about proofing the models, about finding the current lines. The data we were gathering was important, she emphasized.
Nikki, one of the more forcefully dedicated volunteers, chimed in. We needed to get more people on debris watch, she said. In her opinion, two crew members on lookout in the bow was not enough. She thought we should have someone aloft as well. “We need to find a way to maximize our data,” she said, smacking her hands together.
Little empiricist flags shook themselves out all over my brain. Maximize?
Our observations were already of dubious scientific value. For one thing, the haul might vary widely based on how each watch went about its lookout work. Even something as simple as whether they faced forward from the bow, or out to the side, or aft, might suggest modulations in garbage density that didn’t exist. And there were diverse opinions about how small an object could be and still count as an object, as opposed to a bit, or particle. While objects and fragments would be described in the log, and the time and coordinates of their sighting recorded, bits would simply be added to a running tally for the period of the watch. It had taken a good ten watches of debris-watching before consensus on such issues had coalesced. This achieved, our log of debris sightings, though quantitatively suspect, had a chance of some qualitative value, describing the ebb and flow of debris concentrations as we passed through them.
Now it was proposed that we maximize our data with additional lookouts. But this would throw the whole enterprise out of whack, if indeed it had ever been in whack. We would sight more of what was passing by the boat, and the log would show an increase, but the change would have nothing to do with a change in the water—only with how many people were on deck. Already, the log was showing the wounds of previous maximizations, in which Nikki had chosen to provide an extra set of eyes to someone else’s debris watch. From the crosstrees, she had rained zeal and possibly duplicate sightings.
Kelsey, who had done her Berkeley thesis on marine debris, piped up before I did, pointing out that it was consistency that mattered, not a higher number per se. Nikki made an impassioned counterargument, centered on what a rare opportunity it was to be here in the Gyre. Then Art and Henry joined in, and Kaniela, and in this way, aboard the brigantine Kaisei, near latitude 34°36′ North and longitude 143°21′ West, at approximately 1930 hours, the scientific method was reinvented from the waterline up. Had there only been a high school science class present, it would have been one of the purest, most spontaneous moments of experiential education ever to unfold.
Empiric consistency won the day. The two-member debris watch was reratified, and the scientific community resumed its celebrations. By dark, we were sitting on the storage lockers on what Kaniela called the “poop deck,” where we debated the etymology of the term, and whether this actually was one, and whether a non-poop deck could be converted into a poop deck by way of pooping, and so on. Then we were checking the sternlines Kaniela had set in hope of catching fish, and there were clouds of aromatic smoke, and we greeted every unfamiliar footfall with the paranoia of teenagers, even though some of us had not been teenagers for more than forty years.
I went to bed before it got very far. I had learned my lesson in Chernobyl, and was preemptively horrified at the idea of being hung over for our next watch, which started in four hours. So I missed the moment when someone realized that the fishing line had gone unnaturally taut, missed the moment when the monster was heaved on board: a mahimahi, easily three feet long, glistening and prehistoric. I slept through it all, slept through the commotion of Kaniela and George, the young assistant engineer, wrestling the incompletely killed mahimahi down the corridor, past my cabin, to the freezer; slept through the sounds of them mopping down the corridor, which even in their drunken state they realized had become a crime scene spattered with fish blood. I woke only for the watch change, every one of team Bravo late on deck, and one or two of us still badly drunk. At the helm, Kelsey responded to an order for a five-degree course correction with wild spins of the wheel to starboard, then compensated with even wilder spins to port. Walking forward to check the boat, I found George passed out with his fly open, lying on the netting below the bowsprit, his safety harness duly clipped in, a strangely beatific sprawl, the dream-like ocean flying by underneath.
We were in it.
Nick raced back and forth in the dinghy, in full Ocean Conservancy mode, fishing out buckets and detergent bottles and jugs, laundry baskets and the odd hard hat. He filled out reports for the International Coastal Cleanup, typed the debris log into his laptop, and climbed up to the maintop to watch for large objects and current lines. It was infectious. You might feel suddenly alert and purposeful: Nick had entered the room.
The day’s best catch was a large ghost net. George and the captain and I hauled it up the side, an ungodly tangle of net and rope and mesh, maybe three feet in diameter, that must have weighed at least 150 pounds. As it plopped on the deck, dozens of tiny crabs spilled from its recesses, flakes of cobalt blue that scuttled along the planking. They were the color of the Pacific. We threw them back. For all I know, such crabs only survive in the central Pacific if they have the animal of a ghost net to live in; and we, the destroyers, had pulled their host out of the water and consigned the survivors to certain doom in the crushing depths. We paid it no mind. In the future, ghost nets may be protected, just as whales and manatees are. But for now, it’s open season.
I crouched by the ghost to inspect it. What did it look like? A brain? A jellyfish? A great mound of intestines? Ropes of every color and weave and composition and thickness knotted and twisted into one another. Several bright plastic lozenges—floats, or markers—lurked in the jumble, marked with Chinese or Japanese characters. Some of the knots in the ghost’s component nets had clearly been tied by human hands, but others had to be the work of the ocean, tangled flights of topological insanity that bound one piece of junked rope or netting to the next.
Mary was watching. “I do hope we’ll be able to show you something better than that,” she said. She seemed to have little patience for the ghost nets, which were plastic-poor. It was plastic that she wanted, the current lines above all.
The current lines had become the Great White Ball of Trash prophesied by Art. Mary was confident that these strings of concentrated garbage, thrown together by the inner workings of the Gyre, were out here. The previous year’s voyage had encountered them, she told us, and she was sure we could find one now.
I was getting tired of hearing about them. We were in the Garbage Patch—shouldn’t we just be interested in what it was like? Instead, there was the sense that Project Kaisei only wanted the stuff. We needed something to show for our efforts. I wondered if this was symptomatic of a nonprofit bent on impressing its public or its funders. Would they be disappointed if we returned without a towering pile of trophy refuse? So we wanted more plastic, more dramatic densities, concentrations that we could really sink our teeth into. It was a more sophisticated way of believing in the plastic island, that idea that drove us all batty with annoyance. And I felt it kept us from appreciating the Garbage Patch as it was: just as vast and as problematic as we had expected, but deeply unspectacular. It required more than your eyes to grasp it. You had to think.
In this, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a cautionary tale in environmental aesthetics. We seem to require imagery to go with our environmental problems. If we don’t have an image to be horrified by, we can’t approach the problem in our minds. But sometimes the imagery distorts our thinking, or becomes a substitute for approaching the problem in the first place. And when there simply is no adequate image, we substitute others, creating islands where none exist.
No island, no carpet of plastic—yet we had without question entered the Garbage Patch. We had sailed a thousand empty miles into nowhere, finally reaching this place. And what did we find here, so removed from humanity? Far more trash than you see in San Francisco Bay. More than you see in your own back alley. Every minute on the water, every thirty seconds, a bottle, a bucket, a piece of tarp, a sprinkle of confetti, multiplied by the countless square mileage of the Gyre. And yet if you looked across the surface of the ocean, it was unremarkable. Would-be debunkers need not resort to pointing out, as they do, that you can’t find an image of the Garbage Patch on Google Earth. They should point out that you can’t find images of the Garbage Patch anywhere.
This is because it isn’t a visual problem, and this conflict between the reality of the problem and its nonvisual nature is at the root of the plastic island misconception. A metaphor is needed, a compelling image to suggest the scale and mass of the problem.
So let us explode the plastic island once and for all, and call it a galaxy. The Garbage Patch is like the Milky Way, an impossibly massive spiral that, because of its very vastness, is also phenomenally diffuse. Most of our galaxy is empty space. You could pass right through it without ever bumping into a star or a planet. The most massive object in the universe visible to the naked eye is made mostly of nothing.
If you were trying to figure out what a galaxy was, you would be plenty interested in the empty space between the stars, in whether or not it was truly empty, and in how the distribution of stars changed as you passed through the spiral arms. Like this, you might start to get an idea of your galaxy’s shape, structure, and size. (Note: Your galaxy is many times the size of Texas.)
Similarly, if we had been dragging sample nets and taking real data, a stretch of empty Gyre water would have been just as interesting to us as one decorated with plastic, not least because access to the Garbage Patch is so difficult. In all of history, how many research missions had been to the Eastern Garbage Patch to study marine plastic? The folks at Algalita tell me it’s about a dozen. The pool of existing data is therefore so small, and the character and dynamics of the Garbage Patch so poorly understood, that it felt negligent merely to obsess about finding the highest concentrations. But that is what we were doing. And if we were here to test cleanup methods, well, shouldn’t those methods apply even in more diffuse areas? We were missing an opportunity to help inch the science forward.
And the science needed inching. A few hours on bow watch were enough to leave any thoughtful deckhand bursting with questions. Where were the plastic bags, for instance? On land, the Garbage Patch was often linked with plastic shopping bags. But here we saw no plastic bags. Were they below the surface? Had they broken up into small fragments? Were they all in the Western Garbage Patch, toward Japan? Or was it simply a myth that plastic bags make it out to the Gyre?
What about the stuff we were seeing? Where was it from? For most objects, it seemed impossible to tell. But there were more items with Chinese or Japanese words on them than with English, and a few with Russian, too. Anecdotally, this reinforced the idea that the Eastern Garbage Patch might be composed disproportionately of refuse from the western rim of the Pacific. Perhaps the Western Garbage Patch, the evil twin of the one we had now entered, was home base to material from the coast of the United States and Canada. If only we could have sailed another three thousand miles, I might have found all those Capri Sun pouches I went through in sixth grade.
It was also difficult to make even casual judgments about whether the trash we were seeing had come from land or from sea-borne sources. The common wisdom is that three-quarters of ocean plastic comes from consumer sources on land. This is borne out in places like Hawaii’s Kamilo Beach, which catches the southwest edge of the Garbage Patch, and where lighters and toothbrushes and combs dominate. But for much of what we saw on the Kaisei, provenance was hard to determine.
And what factors determined what we could see? How, for instance, did an object’s density and shape affect whether it stayed on the surface and how it traveled through the Gyre? And how old were the objects we saw? And how toxic? And what proportion was large objects versus confetti? And was there a class of sub-confetti particles, an as-yet-unknown kingdom of microscopic polyethylene flora? And most important, what kind of change did this wreak on the ecosystem?
Little of this is yet known to science—and to my nerd mind, it was the chance to help answer even one of those questions that should have been our white whale. It was a whale that swam alongside us for the entire voyage, but that we never noticed. And so the Kaisei sailed the ocean blue, irony on the wind, a mission to raise awareness, but not knowledge.
The Pirate King was a licensed ham-radio operator. Of course he was. He could have built a ham radio from an old soda can and a box of matches, underwater, while strangling MacGyver with his feet. In his circumnavigation of the globe, he had built up a network of land-based radio contacts, colleagues whom he had never met. Through them, he said, he could get a radio transmission patched into the phone system. We could call home.
I wanted to tell the Doctor I was still alive, and when we would return to land. But nobody knew. Although we were supposed to arrive in time for San Diego’s tall-ship festival, Mary had been making indistinct noises about staying out as long as it took to find areas of higher trash-density. (Art’s jokes about Captain Ahab were seeming less joke-like by the day.) The Pirate King, for his part, was bent on heading back. I couldn’t tell if he was impatient with Mary, or tired of what he thought was a wild goose chase, or if perhaps he had a deep personal need to attend the tall-ship festival.
In the wheelhouse, the Pirate King keyed the radio and read the Doctor’s phone number to an impossibly distant ham operator—a hobbyist in Florida, I think. Then he handed me the radio. I waited, while on the other side of the planet, a phone rang.
I never reached her. Several times I left a message, telling her the Kaisei’s latitude and longitude, and that I was alive and well, and that I loved her. She later told me the messages were sometimes garbled and unintelligible, my voice warped and splintered by its passage through the atmosphere. In those moments, she couldn’t understand where I was, or anything I said. Only that it was me.
In the pit of night, the radar alarm sounded. A contact directly in front of us. The Pirate King said it was probably a squall, from how its profile on the radar screen changed and grew. Squalls patrolled this part of the ocean, hunched pillars of storm that could interrupt the night with lashing winds and rain.
In the wheelhouse, with our faces lit by the glow of the radar, we watched the contorted bolus of pixels bear down on us. It passed through the three-mile radius, then the two-mile. Then, slowly, it convulsed, stretched, and crept to port, passing within a mile.
We went outside and stared off the rail into the darkness, straining to see it. Nothing. No sky, no horizon. All night, we had seen nothing but a pair of stars, hesitant in the gloom. The radar said there was something out there, but we couldn’t see it.
Then…something changed in our vision. Its outline came into focus. We could see it, faint and vast in the darkness, a monstrous anvil sliding over the ocean.
The sails hovered in the still air, indifferent. We went to bed.
After ten days at sea, we turned back.
The tension among Mary and the Pirate King and the Kaisei’s captain had been growing for some time. All anyone knew for sure was that Mary wanted to stay out as long as possible, and that the Pirate King thought we needed to turn back, and that the captain liked to stage brief fits of nonsensical rage. The Pirate King stood in the upper lounge and lectured us. He was as hell-bent on San Diego as Mary was on her current lines. As for the crew, we just wanted to know when we would head back, so that we could plan how we might, one day, return to our lives. But it seemed increasingly likely that we might wander the seas forever, a ghost ship in search of plastic. I saw Mary in the lower lounge, studying a distribution map in a textbook called Marine Debris (Coe and Rogers, 1996). “There should still be trash there,” she said, pointing to a spot off Mexico.
In a pair of heated meetings, the argument finally spilled out into the open. The Pirate King insisted that we had to turn around right away. Not only was the tall-ship festival approaching—about which none of us really gave a damn—but Joe, the ship’s engineer, was sick. He had some kind of throat infection, something that looked like it was getting serious. As an argument for speeding back to land, this was dubious; if Joe’s condition was life-threatening, he would need an emergency airlift whether or not we turned the boat around.
But that was the argument that won the day. We wore ship, as sailors say, and headed east. Almost as soon as we had reached the Gyre, we were on our way out. Too many days wasted at the dock in Point Richmond, a little bad luck with the Gyre seeming to have pushed west that summer, and in the end I never got my turn in the dinghy, picking up Garbage Patch garbage with my own hands. And none of us ever went over the side to watch a ghost net swimming in its natural environment, attended by plastic minnows hovering in the spell of the fearsome, blue abyss.
Bravo Watch was quiet that night. There were rumors that Mary was heartbroken to have turned back, that she considered it a major blow to Project Kaisei. It was impossible to know if such gossip was true. None of us volunteers were going to go knock on her door and ask. But it didn’t matter. It was true in broad strokes. It felt like we had turned around as soon as we had gotten to the Garbage Patch. Had we even gotten to the heart of it? If we hadn’t turned around, could we have found the current lines? Could we have found Art’s Great White Ball of Trash?
It’s sad how quickly a beginning turns into an end, with nothing in between. One day you still face an eternity at sea; the next day the voyage is over—though you may be days or weeks from land. It all depends on which way you’re pointed.
We motored through the gloom. I was in the darkened wheelhouse, waiting to log any sightings from the generally fruitless nighttime debris watch.
Mary appeared next to me. We stood together, subdued, staring out at the night, at the murky silhouette of Kelsey at the helm, and listened to the engine drone.
I felt bad for her. The mission had been a great overreach. If our goal had been ecotourism—or pollution tourism—the voyage would have been a triumph. The Pirate King, aggressively self-righteous, never tired of pointing out the irony of us burning so much fuel to get out here. But that didn’t bother me. People burn fuel all the time. They burn it to fly to London. They burn it to take a cruise. We had burned it to try to see something about the world. And though I was critical of Mary’s goals, I could only credit her drive and determination. It was because of her that we were able to be out here, witnessing one of the great phenomena of our time.
I said some optimistic things. It didn’t matter that we hadn’t seen the current lines, I said. We had seen stretch upon stretch of particles. Places where they were too numerous to count. Places that prompted Henry to radio the bridge, “Oh, shit, they’re everywhere.” Weren’t the particles the most intractable part of the problem, anyway? Hadn’t we seen what we came for after all?
She murmured in agreement, unconvinced.
I watched the navigation unit. The radar echoes of nearby rain squalls crept across the display, primordial blobs of orange and yellow pixels that pulsed with a quiet, mysterious life.
“They look like little amoebas,” I said.
Mary stared at the screen. A tear hovered at the edge of her eye.
“I wish they were islands of plastic,” she said.
The bowsprit was a good place for a morose crew member to cheer himself up. I sat on the netting, looking back at the place where the Kaisei’s prow sheared through the water. Looking down, I could see an area of water the size of a living room, undisturbed as yet by our onrushing hull. Hello, human-scale bit of Pacific. Goodbye.
The Kaisei’s mission had been easy fodder for a skeptic. It was the perfect expression of the weird symbiosis between an activist and the cause he or she is fighting against. It had been imperative for Project Kaisei to pinpoint, document, almost celebrate, the issue of marine plastic in its most horrifying instance.
But I wasn’t so different. My mission was to find the world’s most polluted places, as if I knew what that meant. Only if I found those ecosystems of despair would I be able to implement my conceit of contrarian ecotourism and compose my great elegy for the pre-human world. But instead of finding degraded ecosystems that I could treat as though they were beautiful, I was just finding beauty. The Earth had gotten there first. I went looking for a radioactive wasteland and found a radioactive garden. I went looking for the Pacific Garbage Patch and found the Pacific Ocean.
I sat on the bowsprit, leaning my face on one hand, a walkie-talkie slung around my neck, listening to the ocean crash against the ship. Soon, when we came closer to land, dolphins would find us, capering through the water below the bow net. We would lie in the netting, listening to them chatter and squeal. But for now, I was alone.
A plastic bottle ran under the boat.
I keyed the radio to report it to whoever was manning the debris log. But before I could, a sprinkling of confetti appeared on the water, and then another bottle. Then some more confetti, a piece of tarp, some other objects—a crescendo of trash that peaked within a few seconds. I looked out to starboard and saw us bisect what I thought was a stripe of garbage several meters wide that ran toward the horizon.
It wasn’t solid. No carpet of trash. But it was the densest, most localized stretch of debris I had seen all voyage. I called the wheelhouse on the radio and told them we had just crossed over a current line.
We didn’t stop. Nobody even called Where away? Who was in the wheel-house—the Pirate King? The captain? They had eyes only for San Diego. But I had just seen it: the Great White Stripe of Trash. I keyed the radio again, filling with rage. This was fucking stupid, I told them. I think we just crossed right over a current line.
The Kaisei motored on toward San Diego. I think Mary was in her cabin.