How rough exactly remains unclear. Although it did so on other days, on January 10, the Ever Laurel did not fax a weather report to the National Weather Service in Washington, D.C., but the following morning a ship in its vicinity did, describing hurricane-force winds and waves thirty-six feet high. If the Ever Laurel had encountered similarly tempestuous conditions, we can imagine, if only vaguely, what might have transpired: despite its grandeur, rocked by waves as tall as brownstones, the colossal vessel—a floating warehouse weighing 28,904 deadweight tons and powered by a diesel engine the size of a barn—would have rolled and pitched and yawed about like a toy in a Jacuzzi.
At some point, on a steep roll, two columns of containers stacked six high above deck snapped loose from their steel lashings and tumbled overboard. We can safely assume that the subsequent splash was terrific, like the splash a train would make were you to drive it off a seaside cliff. We know that each of the twelve containers measured eight feet wide and either twenty or forty feet long, and that at least one of them—perhaps when it careened into another container, perhaps when it struck the ship’s rails—burst or buckled open as it fell.
We know that as the water gushed in and the container sank, dozens of cardboard boxes would have come bobbing to the surface; that one by one, they too would have come apart, discharging thousands of little packages onto the sea; that every package comprised a plastic shell and a cardboard back; that every shell housed four hollow plastic animals—a red beaver, a blue turtle, a green frog, and a yellow duck—each about three inches long; and that printed on the cardboard in colorful letters in a bubbly, childlike font were the following words: THE FIRST YEARS. FLOATEES. THEY FLOAT IN TUB OR POOL. PLAY & DISCOVER. MADE IN CHINA. DISHWASHER SAFE.
From a low-flying plane on a clear day, the packages would have looked like confetti, a great drift of colorful squares, exploding in slow motion across the waves. Within twenty-four hours, the water would have dissolved the glue. The action of the waves would have separated the plastic shell from the cardboard back. There, in seas almost four miles deep, more than five hundred miles south of Attu Island at the western tip of the Aleutian tail, more than a thousand miles east of Hokkaido, the northern extreme of Japan, and more than two thousand miles west of the insular Alaskan city of Sitka, 28,800 plastic animals produced in Chinese factories for the bathtubs of America—7,200 red beavers, 7,200 green frogs, 7,200 blue turtles, and 7,200 yellow ducks—hatched from their plastic shells and drifted free.
Eleven years later, ten thousand circuitous miles to the east, a beachcomber named Bethe Hagens and her boyfriend, Waynn Welton, spotted something small and bright perched atop the seaweed at the southwest end of Gooch’s Beach near the entrance to Kennebunk Harbor in Maine. Its body was approximately the size and shape of a bar of soap, its head the size of a Ping-Pong ball. Welton bent down and picked it up. A brand name, The First Years, was embossed on its belly. The plastic was “white, incredibly weathered, and very worn,” Hagens would later recall. Welton remembered it differently. The duck had been, he insisted, still yellow. “Parts of it had started to fade,” he says. “But not a great deal. Whatever they’d used for the dye of the plastic had held up pretty well.”
Much depends on this disagreement. If white, the duck Hagens and Welton saw could well have been one of the 7,200 let loose on the North Pacific. If yellow, it was nothing but a figment, a phantom, a will-o’-thewisp. To complicate matters, The First Years had by then discontinued the Floatees, replacing them with a single yellow Floaty Ducky that also bore the company’s logo. Yellow or white, the thing did look as though it had crossed the ocean; on that Hagens and Welton agreed. It was fun to imagine: a lone duck, drifting across the Atlantic, like something out of a fairy tale or a children’s book—fun but also preposterous. “There were still kids playing on the beach,” Welton remembered. “I thought, okay, some kid lost his toy and would come back for it.” Sensibly, he and Hagens left the toy where they found it and walked on.
METAMORPHOSIS
The classified ads in the July 14, 1993, edition of the Daily Sitka Sentinel do not