In 1995, on a beach in WashingtonState, someone had found a turtle, still perfectly blue, and a faded duck. Months later odd sneakers covered with seaweed and small mollusk shells appeared on the beaches of the northwest coast of Canada. And their loss at sea was not the only disaster to occur in those waters: in 1990, in a collision of two merchant ships near Alaska, a shipment of 80,000 pairs of Nike sneakers had been lost.

There were 7,200 ducks, 7,200 green frogs, 7,200 red beavers, 7,200 blue turtles. He learned that in reality the little shipwrecked animals were not all yellow ducks, comically rocked by waves several meters high in the deepest seas, the ones most remote from the planet’s terra firma. At first his investigation was more or less capricious. His wife was pregnant with their first child, and he worked as a teacher in a good school in New York. He imagined the waters of the Pacific covered by an armada of little yellow ducks, dispersed by the currents as the years passed, appearing in blocks of ice in the Arctic or in the seaweed washed up by the tide on beaches in Brazil or New England. On the basis of his early readings, which very soon led him to neglect his work and lose days at a time in periodical rooms consulting obscure journals on maritime commerce or tracking down information on the Internet, Hohn learned that the 28,800 toy animals were little yellow ducks with big eyes and an orange bill like the ones that float in children’s bathtubs all over the world.

Inside one of them was a shipment of 28,800 plastic toys made in China and destined for the United States. Later he would discover that in reality it had not been a shipwreck: a freighter, the Ever Laurel, was caught in a terrible storm, and during one of the violent pitches that almost sank it, some of the containers stored on deck slid into the ocean. Some years ago, Donovan Hohn happened to read the story of a shipwreck that occurred in 1992 in the most desolate area of the Pacific Northwest, south of the Aleutian Islands. There are others that seem to write themselves and grow, guided more or less blindly, by the power of an obsession. There are books that someone plans and writes in an orderly fashion about a particular topic.

Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn