Free Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn Page A

suitcase. He was a Greek sailor in the Spanish navy whose real name was Apostolos Valerianos. He claimed to have discovered the entrance to the Northwest Passage at the 48th parallel in 1592. The transit from the Pacific to the Atlantic had taken a mere twenty days, he reported, and the northern lands between these oceans were rich in silver and gold. Despite how familiar this tale must have sounded, for centuries people actually believed him. Although no one knows for certain whether the Greek sailor ever even visited the North Pacific, his description of the entrance to the passage, then known as the Strait of Anian, bears a superficial resemblance to the entrance of Puget Sound, and so the Strait of Juan de Fuca memorializes the pseudonymous perpetrator of a hoax, and so even our most accurate maps are imaginary. Looking out at the flashing waters of Puget Sound, I am filled with the desire to sail out across them, through Juan de Fuca’s fanciful strait, down across the currents of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, into its crowded, lovely heart, the heart of garbage. But I’m short on time. A ferry ride to Sitka will have to suffice.
    At the Bellingham ferry terminal, I find a café table overlooking the harbor and spend the day reading about the science of hydrography and the history of the North Pacific. Beside me a bronze seagull the size of a condor points a wing at the sky, while beneath it a real gull hops around eyeing my sandwich. Although we are scheduled to embark a little before dusk, the M/V Malaspina is already waiting at its dock. Viewed from shore, it is a splendid sight, its white decks gleaming, a yellow stripe running the length of its navy-blue hull, its single smokestack painted in the motif of the Alaskan state flag—gold stars of the big dipper against a navy-blue sky. All the motor vessels in the Alaska Marine Highway system are named for Alaskan glaciers, and the Malaspina is named for the largest, a 1,500-square-mile slow-moving mesa of ice, which is in turn named for an eighteenth-century Italian navigator, Alessandro Malaspina, whose search for the Northwest Passage ended in 1791 at the 60th parallel, in an icy inlet that he christened bahía del desengaño , Disappointment Bay.
    When I wheel my suitcase down the gangway that evening, the splendor of the M/V Malaspina diminishes with every step. The ferry is, I see upon boarding it, an aging, rust-stained hulk, repainted many times. Posted in a display case of documents near the cocktail lounge one can read a disconcerting open letter in which “past and present crew members . . . bid farewell to this proud ship.” Queen of the fleet when it was first launched in 1962, the Malaspina , the letter explains, “will cease scheduled runs of Alaska’s Inside Passage on October 27, 1997.” Why the old ferry is still in service eight years later the documents in the display case do not say.
    The solarium on the sundeck, where I will sleep for free in a plastic chaise longue, is a kind of semitranslucent cave, glazed in panes of scratched Plexiglas that admit a yellowy view. Electric heaters hang from the solarium’s ceiling, their elements already glowing orange, like those inside of toasters. By the time I drag a plastic chaise to a spot near the back and lock my suitcase to a rail, I am dripping in sweat.
    Outside the solarium, in the open air, backpackers are pitching their tents, duct-taping them down so that the wind won’t toss them overboard. Soon a rustling nylon village of colorful domes has sprung up. “Tent city,” the veteran ferry riders call it. The evening is cool and exhilarating, the sky clear save for a distant, flat-bottomed macaroon of a cloud from which a tendril of vapor rises and coils. The wavelets on Bellingham Bay are intricate as houndstooth, complicated by cross-breezes and by ripples radiating from the hulls of anchored boats.
    At last the ferry’s diesel engines