After reading Moby duck, I can see how Donovan Hohn been enthralled by and obsessed over the 28,000 bath toys lost at sea. I too became not so much enchanted with the route that the toys might have taken, but by the lengths and measures by which Hohn took to find them.
Hohn spoke at UCSB through the arts and lectures series. Campbell hall was full. Hohn used Moby dick as a parallel story for his adventure, using quotes, images and antecdotes taken from the Melville tale. Hohn is a great story teller, as engaging a speaker as he is a writer. Using his illustrative language, Hohn recounted bits of his story and showed additional photos from the events. I liked having those visuals to accompany the images in had created in my head from the story.
I was in the center of the auditorium and couldn’t make it to the microphone when there was an open mike to ask questions. I waited in line after the lecture to get my book signed and asked him if he thought that the ducks had really made it thought the Bering straight into the Atlantic. He said at this point, there had been so much time since the spill, that the bath toys would not be able to withstand the elements to make it to the Atlantic. So we shouldn’t go looking for any there any more.
Part adventure tale, part environmental education, I am glad I found myself taken by the ocean currents around the world.