Free Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn

symbolic. They are not so much rubber ducks as plastic representations of rubber ducks. They are creatures of the lab, chimeras synthesized from whimsy and desire in the petri dish of commerce.
    Apologists for plastics will on occasion blur the semantic lines between the antonyms “synthetic” and “natural.” Everything is chemical, they rightly say, even water, even us, and plastic, like every living creature great and small, is carbon-based and therefore “organic.” But to my mind the only meaningful difference between the synthetic and the natural is more philosophical than chemical. A loon can symbolize madness or mystery, and a waddling duck can make us laugh. But the duck and the loon exist outside the meanings with which we burden them. A loon is not really mad or, so far as it’s concerned, mysterious. A duck is not really a clown; it waddles inelegantly because its body has evolved to dabble and dive and swim. A rubber duck, by comparison, is not burdened with thought. It is thought, the immaterial made material, a subjective object, a fantasy in 3-D.

INSIDE PASSAGE
    One night, during the twenty-ninth week of her pregnancy, my wife and I attended a practicum in infant CPR. With the other expecting parents, we’d sat around a conference table set with babies—identical, life-size, polyethylene babies, lying there on the Formica like lobsters. The skin of these infantile mannequins was the color of graphite. Even their eyeballs were shiny and gray. Their mouths had been molded agape, so that they seemed to be gasping for air. To dislodge an imaginary choking hazard, you were supposed to lay the baby facedown over your left forearm and strike its back with the heel of your right hand. If you struck too hard, its hollow head would pop from its neck and go skittering across the linoleum. The morning after my visit with Ebbesmeyer, hurtling up the eastern shore of Puget Sound aboard the Amtrak Cascades bound for Bellingham, it occurs to me that “garbage patch” sounds like “cabbage patch,” and for a moment I am picturing a thousand silvery, gape-mouthed heads bobbing on the open sea.
    The old woman across the aisle, a retired high school chemistry teacher from Montana, tells me that she and her husband are traveling the globe. All they do is travel. She loves every minute of it. They have been to every continent but Antarctica. She teaches me how to say, “I don’t have any money” in Norwegian. She tells me about the mural she saw in Belfast depicting a masked man and a Kalashnikov. She tells me about her grandson, who has in fact been to Antarctica. He spent a night dangling from the ice shelf in something like a hammock. National Geographic named him one of the top rock climbers in the world, she says. Then he died in an avalanche in Tibet. Left three little boys. She smiles as she says this. In the window behind her, the blue waters of Puget Sound flash through the green blur of trees.
    A few seats away, facing me, riding backward, there’s a young couple dressed in matching khaki shorts. She is holding an infant. He has a toddler in his lap. A bubble balloons from the toddler’s right nostril and pops. She laughs deliriously and slaps the window, leaving snotty little handprints on the glass. “Choo-choo!” she exclaims. “Bye-bye! Woowoo! I see cows!”
    The train groans into a curve. Suddenly there are green and orange and blue containers stacked atop flatbed train cars parked on a neighboring track. The polyglot names of shipping companies speed by: Evergreen, Uniglory, Hanjin, Maersk. Then, at a clearing in the trees, the great brontosaural works of a gantry crane loom up above a Russian freighter loaded with what looks like modular housing. PORT OF SEATTLE , a sign on the crane reads.
    We are somewhere east of the Strait of Juan de Fuca—Juan de Fuca, whom I read about in one of the many books I packed into my wheeling