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there? Were they here or weren’t they? Accompanying the article was a world map indicating where and when the toys had been recovered by beachcombers. Off the coast of Kennebunkport, Ebbesmeyer had printed a pair of question marks the size of barrier reefs.
    From a dusty bookshelf I fetched down our Atlas of the World , a neglected wedding gift, opened it to the Atlantic, and found Kennebunkport. Then I traced my finger out across the Gulf of Maine, around Newfoundland and Labrador and—flipping to the map of the Arctic—across Baffin Bay, westward past the pole, all the while pronouncing the unfamiliar syllables (Point Hope, Spitsbergen Bank) as if the names of these places could conjure up visions of their shores. What does the air smell like in the Arctic? I wondered. Can you hear the creeping progress of the ice?
    â€œThe loss of fantasy is the price we have paid for precision,” I’d read late one night in an outdated Ocean Almanac , “and today we have navigation maps based on an accurate 1:1,000,000 scale of the entire world.” Surveying the colorful, oversize landscape of my atlas , a cartographic wonder made—its dust jacket boasted—from high-resolution satellite photographs and “sophisticated computer algorithms,” I was unconvinced; fantasy did not strike me as extinct, or remotely endangered. The ocean was far less fathomable to my generation of Americans than it was when Melville explored that “watery wilderness” a century and a half ago. Most of us were better acquainted with cloud tops than with waves. What our migrant ancestors thought of as the winds, we thought of as turbulence, and fastened our seat belts when the orange light came on. Gale force, hurricane force—encountering such terms we comprehended only that the weather was really, really bad, and in our minds replayed the special-effects sequences of disaster films or news footage of palm trees blown inside out like cheap umbrellas. In growing more precise, humanity’s knowledge had also grown more specialized, and more imaginary: unlike that of my unborn child, the seas of my consciousness teemed with images and symbols and half-remembered trivia as fabulous as those chimerical beasts cavorting at the edges of ancient charts. Not even satellite photographs and computer algorithms could burn away the mystifying fogs of ambient information and fantasy through which from birth I had sailed.
    Not long ago on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, the novelist Julia Glass worried that her fellow Americans, “impatient with flights of fancy,” had lost the ability to be carried away by the “illusory adventure” of fiction, preferring the tabloid titillation of the “so-called truth.” Perhaps, concluded Glass, “there is a growing consensus, however sad, that the wayward realm of make-believe belongs only to our children.” I’d reached different conclusions. Hadn’t we adults, like the imaginative preschoolers Glass admires, also been “encouraged ”—by our government, by advertisers, by the fabulists of the cable news—“to mingle fact with fiction”?
    â€œIf men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it to such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale.” So wrote Thoreau, and for a number of years I’d been inclined to agree with him. I’d been inclined to agree, but despite my experiments in the archaeology of the ordinary, I’d also been more inclined to be deluded than to steadily observe realities only. Ask me where plastic came from and I’d have pictured Day-Glo fluids bubbling in vats, or doing loop-the-loops through glass tubes curly as Krazy Straws. If you’d asked me how rubber ducks were made, I might well have pictured them emerging onto a conveyor belt— chuckedy-chuckedy-chuck —out of a gray machine.
    Looking at the