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sible, 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 dis-
tribution 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 ap-
proaching—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 seri-
ous. 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 hov-
ering 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.
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