Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

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.

18 AUGUST—35°46? N, 135°28? W

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.