AUGUST–32°53′ N. 143°08′ W

The bowsprit was a good place for a morose crew member to cheer himself up. I sat on the netting, looking back at the place where the Kaisei ’s prow sheared through the water. Looking down, I could see an area of water the size of a living room, undisturbed as yet by our onrushing hull. Hello, human‑scale bit of Pacific. Goodbye.

The Kaisei ’s mission had been easy fodder for a skeptic. It was the perfect expression of the weird symbiosis between an activist and the cause he or she is fighting against. It had been imperative for Project Kaisei to pinpoint, document, almost celebrate, the issue of marine plastic in its most horrifying instance.

But I wasn’t so different. My mission was to find the world’s most polluted places, as if I knew what that meant. Only if I found those ecosystems of despair would I be able to implement my conceit of contrarian ecotourism and compose my great elegy for the pre‑human world. But instead of finding degraded ecosystems that I could treat as though they were beautiful, I was just finding beauty. The Earth had gotten there first. I went looking for a radioactive wasteland and found a radioactive garden. I went looking for the Pacific Garbage Patch and found the Pacific Ocean.

I sat on the bowsprit, leaning my face on one hand, a walkie‑talkie slung around my neck, listening to the ocean crash against the ship. Soon, when we came closer to land, dolphins would find us, capering through the water below the bow net. We would lie in the netting, listening to them chatter and squeal. But for now, I was alone.

A plastic bottle ran under the boat.

I keyed the radio to report it to whoever was manning the debris log. But before I could, a sprinkling of confetti appeared on the water, and then another bottle. Then some more confetti, a piece of tarp, some other objects–a crescendo of trash that peaked within a few seconds. I looked out to starboard and saw us bisect what I thought was a stripe of garbage several meters wide that ran toward the horizon.

It wasn’t solid. No carpet of trash. But it was the densest, most localized stretch of debris I had seen all voyage. I called the wheelhouse on the radio and told them we had just crossed over a current line.

We didn’t stop. Nobody even called Where away? Who was in the wheel‑house–the Pirate King? The captain? They had eyes only for San Diego. But I had just seen it: the Great White Stripe of Trash. I keyed the radio again, filling with rage. This was fucking stupid, I told them. I think we just crossed right over a current line.

The Kaisei motored on toward San Diego. I think Mary was in her cabin.

Five