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

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.

24 AUGUST—32°59? N. 145°50? W

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.

25 AUGUST—32°53? N. 143°08? W

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