Travel Reference
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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 eco-
tourism—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 determ-
ination. 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-
