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A second more and the ship came through, rising out of the swell, and I saw them. They
were still there, still clutching the bowsprit, all four of them. I counted them again. Four.
Had there been more?
“Is everybody there?” I shouted. “Is everyone still on board?”
But they were already working again, grappling the sails, water streaming from their
jackets, shrieking like bull riders.
Robin let go and we returned to the tangle of lines at our feet. But my head was swim-
ming with the afterimage of the water rising up to us, of the sea invading the deck. I still
felt it, how it pulled at my body, an overwhelming force that swirled around and through
us, the alien gravity of another universe, the black remorseless ocean.
You will have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: an island of trash, formed by a gi-
ant vortex of currents that gathers all the eternal, floating plastic in the northern half of the
Pacific Ocean into an endless, swirling purgatory, a self-assembling plastic continent twice
the size of Texas.
Let's nip this in the bud: It's not an island.
I'd like to say that again. It's not. An island.
There is no solid mass, no floating carpet of trash, no landfill. But it is real. It was first
discovered in 1997 by the yachtsman and environmentalist Charles Moore, who made it
the focus of his nonprofit, the Algalita Marine Research Foundation. It is thanks to Moore's
observations that the Pacific Garbage Patch entered the popular consciousness, sometime
in the mid-2000s. As for who's responsible for the irresistible image of a plastic island,
I don't know. But someone should run them down and give them a nice, quick smack.
Furthermore, an exorbitant fine should be levied on anyone— anyone —who describes this
non-island as being “the size of Texas” or “twice the size of Texas.” When I was doing my
preliminary research, it seemed impossible to find a piece of media about the garbage patch
that didn't mention Texas.
Why Texas? Is there no other territory that could serve as a reader-friendly reference
point? Has hack journalism become so impoverished an art form that its practitioners can't
even be troubled with the five googling seconds it would take to craft an entirely original
gem like “three times the size of California,” or “two Nevadas and an Arizona,” or “nearly
as big as Alaska, if you leave out the Aleutians”?
The real problem is that, although two Texases clear a trim half-million square miles,
nobody knows how large the Garbage Patch actually is. Unlike Texas and, critically, unlike
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