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climbed up to the maintop to watch for large objects and current lines. It was infectious.
You might feel suddenly alert and purposeful: Nick had entered the room.
The day's best catch was a large ghost net. George and the captain and I hauled it up
the side, an ungodly tangle of net and rope and mesh, maybe three feet in diameter, that
must have weighed at least 150 pounds. As it plopped on the deck, dozens of tiny crabs
spilled from its recesses, flakes of cobalt blue that scuttled along the planking. They were
the color of the Pacific. We threw them back. For all I know, such crabs only survive in the
central Pacific if they have the animal of a ghost net to live in; and we, the destroyers, had
pulled their host out of the water and consigned the survivors to certain doom in the crush-
ing depths. We paid it no mind. In the future, ghost nets may be protected, just as whales
and manatees are. But for now, it's open season.
I crouched by the ghost to inspect it. What did it look like? A brain? A jellyfish? A
great mound of intestines? Ropes of every color and weave and composition and thick-
ness knotted and twisted into one another. Several bright plastic lozenges—floats, or mark-
ers—lurked in the jumble, marked with Chinese or Japanese characters. Some of the knots
in the ghost's component nets had clearly been tied by human hands, but others had to be
the work of the ocean, tangled flights of topological insanity that bound one piece of junked
rope or netting to the next.
Mary was watching. “I do hope we'll be able to show you something better than that,”
she said. She seemed to have little patience for the ghost nets, which were plastic-poor. It
was plastic that she wanted, the current lines above all.
The current lines had become the Great White Ball of Trash prophesied by Art. Mary
was confident that these strings of concentrated garbage, thrown together by the inner
workings of the Gyre, were out here. The previous year's voyage had encountered them,
she told us, and she was sure we could find one now.
I was getting tired of hearing about them. We were in the Garbage Patch—shouldn't
we just be interested in what it was like? Instead, there was the sense that Project Kaisei
only wanted the stuff. We needed something to show for our efforts. I wondered if this
was symptomatic of a nonprofit bent on impressing its public or its funders. Would they be
disappointed if we returned without a towering pile of trophy refuse? So we wanted more
plastic, more dramatic densities, concentrations that we could really sink our teeth into. It
was a more sophisticated way of believing in the plastic island, that idea that drove us all
batty with annoyance. And I felt it kept us from appreciating the Garbage Patch as it was:
just as vast and as problematic as we had expected, but deeply unspectacular. It required
more than your eyes to grasp it. You had to think.
In this, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a cautionary tale in environmental aesthetics.
We seem to require imagery to go with our environmental problems. If we don't have an
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