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Chapter One

Chasing Water

I was a penniless, uneducated man. A piece of driftwood.
—Abraham Lincoln

In the wee hours of May 27, 1990, midway between Seoul and Seattle, the freighter Hansa Carrier met a sudden storm and, as freighters often do, lost some of the cargo lashed high atop her deck. Twenty-one steel containers, each forty feet long, tore loose and plunged into the North Pacific. Five of those containers held high-priced Nike sports shoes bound for the basketball courts and city streets of America. One sank to the sea floor. Four broke open, spilling 61,820 shoes into the sea—and into the vast stream of flotsam, containing everything from sex toys to computer monitors, that is released each year by up to ten thousand overturned shipping containers.

One year later, in early June 1991, I stopped by my parents' house in Seattle, as I did every week or so, for lunch and the latest news. My mother, who loved serving as my personal clipping service, had extracted a wire story from the local paper. It reported a strange phenomenon: Hundreds of Nike sneakers, brand-new save for some seaweed and barnacles, were washing up along the Pacific coasts of British Columbia, Washington, and, especially, Oregon, Nike's home state. A lively market had developed; beach dwellers held swap meets to assemble matching pairs of the remarkably wearable shoes, laundered and bleached to remove the sea's traces. The details as to how they'd gotten there were sketchy, verging on nonexistent, and that piqued my mother's curiosity. "Isn't this the sort of thing you study?" she asked, assuming as ever that her son the oceanographer knew everything about the sea. "I'll look into it," I said.

I started looking and never stopped. Seventeen years and many thousands of shoes, bath toys, hockey gloves, human corpses, ancient treasures, and other floating objects later, I'm still looking.

Objects like these have been falling into the sea and washing up on the shores since the dawn of navigation—for billions of years, if you count driftwood, volcanic pumice, and all the other natural materials that float upon the waves. Ordinarily, flotsam is soon lost to human memory—though not, as we shall see, to the ocean's memory. The Great Sneaker Spill would have proved one more curiosity in the annals of beachcombing if my mother hadn't asked her question, and if I hadn't been ready to see the research doors that it opened.

It's only now that I can see how my entire life—from my first childhood encounters with the sea to decades of mainstream research into currents, tides, drifting pollutants, and the curious mobile water bodies called slabs—had prepared me for the puzzle posed by this spill. These thousands of lost sneakers composed a giant scientific experiment on a silver platter, fully if unwittingly funded by Nike—a serendipitous window into the ocean's deepest secrets. They were also the grain around which a worldwide network of beachcombing field volunteers has formed, zealously scouting out and recording telltale washups from Norway to New Zealand.

These high-seas drifters offer a new way of looking at the seas, their movements, and, as we shall see, their music. Call it "flotsametrics." It's led me to a world of beauty, order, and peril I could not have imagined even after decades as a working oceanographer—the floating world.

I did not grow up beside the sea; we lived across the San Rafael Mountains in the hot and dusty San Fernando Valley. My mother and father were raised in Chicago and never saw the ocean until the war brought them to California in 1941. But we were close enough to the water to pine for it—and to escape to the beach whenever we had a free day. Perhaps being so near and yet cut off from the sea made me crave it all the more.

As far back as I can remember, I was fascinated with water and its movements. As soon as I could get my hands on a garden hose, I stuck it in the ground and watched the soil bubble up and wash away around it, like sand on a beach. I would make a pond out of my red Radio Flyer wagon, filling it with water and setting toys and beer bottles floating across it. In elementary school I wrote a story about Paul Bunyan but recast him as a giant of the ocean rather than the woods, striding from sea to sea in his seven-league boots.

My father was a chocolate salesman. Perhaps this followed from his mother's career back in Chicago—making bootleg whiskey, a trade she learned growing up on an Iowa farm and then used to see her children through the Depression after her husband died as the result of an industrial accident. Dad's stock-in-trade was a fine German chocolate brand named Merckens. Twice a month he drove up the coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco teaching small candy shops along the way how to dip conventional American chocolates in melted Merckens. He was a natural at such performances—tall and mirthful, with hair turned a distinguished premature white by all the ether he'd been administered as a teenager during operations on a badly broken ankle. He was a born starter-upper, always organizing projects when he got home—a go-kart for us, new trees for the yard, a block wall around our entire half-acre lot.

Dad's sales trips usually lasted a week, and after each he brought home presents for my brother Scott and me. One Easter, when I was about ten years old, he brought two yellow ducklings. With characteristic whimsy, he named them Flotsam and Jetsam, names that would stay with me for the rest of my life. No one could have guessed how prophetic that gift would prove to be.

Even Dad's chocolate trade seems in retrospect to have forecast the path I would take. The Western world's first chocolate salesman was Christopher Columbus, who brought Europe its first cacao beans when he returned from America. And it was flotsam that led Columbus to America in the first place.

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Excerpted from Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man's Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science by Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Eric Scigliano, Curtis C. Ebbesmeyer
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.