To see!—this is the craving of the sailor, as of the rest of blind humanity. To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence. —Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea THROUGH THE BERING STRAIT Picture a red beaver, a blue turtle, a green frog, a yellow duck—one set of toys hatched from the same plastic shell. It is February 1992, a month after the spill. The cardboard backs of the packages inscribed with colorful copy have long since dissolved. Carried east by a current known as the North Pacific Drift, the four castaway toys have traveled over two hundred nautical miles along the northern edge of the 45th parallel, the northern edge of the subarctic front, the boundary between the Subpolar and the Subtropical gyres. The four animals have remained close together, and relatively close to the other 28,796 castaway toys, traveling the current in a diffuse flock, smiling refugees on a possibly interminable road, prisoners in the labyrinth of drift, a labyrinth that is the collaborative work of invisible architects—the spinning of the planet and the heat of the sun, the saltness of the sea and the influence of the winds.
