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

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.

21 AUGUST—34°44? N. 142°44? W

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.

23 AUGUST—33°36? N, 146°36? W

We were in it.