Moby-Duck Read Online Free PDF

sporting sunglasses or eyelashes or lipstick or black leather; ducks playing golf. Every powerful icon invites both idolatry and iconoclasm, and in the bestiary of American childhood, there is now no creature more iconic than the rubber duck. The more I thought about its golden, graven image, the more it seemed to me a kind of animistic god—but of what? Of happiness? Of nostalgia? Of innocence never lost?

THE MAP
    â€œSo,” I asked the retired oceanographer when I reached him at his Seattle home, “did any of the toys make it through the Arctic?” I had by then read every article about the incredible journey I could find. As of October 2003, according to the news archives, not one of the 28,800 castaway toys had been discovered on the Atlantic Seaboard, not one savings bond had been handed out. Bounty-hunting beachcombers had found plenty of toy ducks, just not of the right species. After October 2003 the news archives fell silent.
    Oh, yes, Curtis Ebbesmeyer assured me, yes, they’d made it. Right on schedule, in the summer of 2003, he’d received a highly credible eyewitness report from an anthropologist in Maine, which he’d published in his quarterly newsletter, Beachcombers’ Alert! He promised to send me a copy. But before we hung up he dangled before my ears a tantalizing lure: if I really wanted to learn about things that float, then I should join him in Sitka that July. “You can’t go beachcombing by phone,” he said. “You have to get out there and look.”
    Since the summer of 2001, Sitka had played host to an annual Beachcombers’ Fair, over which Ebbesmeyer—part guru, part impresario—presided. Beachcombers would bring him things they’d scavenged from the sand, and Ebbesmeyer, like some scientific psychic, would illuminate these discoveries as best he could. “Everything has a story,” he likes to say. When a beachcomber presented Ebbesmeyer with flotsam of mysterious provenance, he’d investigate. At that year’s fair in Sitka, a local fisherman named Larry Calvin would be ferrying a select group of beachcombers to the wild shores of Kruzof Island, where some of the toys had washed up. Ebbesmeyer, who would be leading the expedition, offered me a spot aboard Calvin’s boat, the Morning Mist .
    Alaska—snowcapped mountains, icebergs, breaching whales, wild beaches strewn with yellow ducks. How could I say no? There was only one problem. The Beachcombers’ Fair ended July 24, and Beth’s due date was August 1, which was cutting it pretty close. I told Ebbesmeyer I’d get back to him.
    Soon thereafter an envelope with a Seattle postmark arrived. Inside, printed on blue paper, were a half-dozen issues of Ebbesmeyer’s newsletter, Beachcombers’ Alert! Thumbing through this digest of the miscellaneous and arcane was a bit like beachcombing amid the wreckage of a storm. Alongside stories about derelict vessels and messages in bottles, the oceanographer had arrayed a photographic scrapbook of strange, sea-battered oddities, natural and man-made—Japanese birch-bark fishing floats, the heart-shaped seed of a baobab tree, land mines, televisions, a torn wet suit, a 350-pound safe. Many of these artifacts had accumulated colonies of gooseneck barnacles. Some were so encrusted they seemed to be made of the creatures: a derelict skiff of barnacles, a hockey glove of barnacles.
    At the end of an article titled “Where the Toys Are,” Ebbesmeyer had published the letter from that anthropologist in Maine. Bethe Hagens was her name. “You won’t believe this,” she’d written after hearing about the castaway toys on NPR, “but two weeks ago, I found one of your ducks.” In fact, Ebbesmeyer had believed her, or wanted to. She hadn’t kept the evidence, so there was, she’d written, “no science, no proof. But they’re here!” Was there proof or wasn’t