RUBBER DUCKIES - Fan Mail From Some Flounder

 

I find that my view of the oceans has been defined by two cartoon shows. One was the first episode of ”Johnny Quest” in which he battled ”The Mystery of the Lizard Men” in the Sargasso Sea: and the other was "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” when the flying squirrel announced he had an important message and the Moose wondered if it could be “Fan mail from some flounder?” Call it “The Oceanography of Hanna- Barbera”.

The Sargasso Sea was first reported by the Carthaginian navigator Himilco, and first crossed by Christopher Columbus on his way home from "discovering" America. The Sargasso lies in the center of the North Atlantic gyre, trapped between the north and eastern flow of the Gulf Stream, the south bound Canary Islands Current and the westbound Atlantic Tropical Current, which brings hurricanes to North America.

Legend (and Johnny Quest) has it that these “Calms of Cancer” are choked with sea weed and littered with trapped ships. Of course they are not. The Sargasso sits beneath a weather high pressure zone, where wind driven currents are slow and floating patches of sea weed are common enough to provide shelter for adolescent fish, eels and sea turtles. But it is hardly so crowded with Sargassum weeds as to foul propellers and trap ships. But why spoil a legend (or a cartoon show) with reality?

The Sargasso Sea has a counterpart in the infamous “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”. Charles Moore first sailed through this man-made sea in 1988. “As I gazed from the deck…I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic….In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments.” It almost sounds as of the Lizard Men could be walking about by stepping on all the empty gallon milk jugs. Actually things in the north Pacific aren’t that bad. In a way they are worse.

What we commonly call plastics are a product of what I call the “Oil Age”, roughly from 1900 to approximately 2020 or so, when petroleum was (is) still common enough to be cheap enough to be used as 3F - i.e. used as fuel, fertilizer and fat (as in extravagant).

It takes 685 gallons of oil (line at the top of the chart) to make one ton of plastic, which is what makes plastic a “fat”.  And that is not counting the oil you have to burn to heat the crude to 750 degrees Fahrenheit in the cracking tower (on the left side of the chart), which is when the petroleum molecules line up in endless chains called “polymers”, which is another name for plastics.

Because polymer chains endlessly repeat themselves they never completely break down, they just get shorter. And even if the sun finally degrades the plastic in a six-pack ring so that a sea gull can no longer get her head caught in it, the polymer chain merely becomes small enough to be swallowed by jelly fish or plankton, which can then be eaten by sea turtles, which can then be eaten by sea bass, which can then be eaten by sea gulls and humans.

About the same time that Captain Moore first laid eyes on the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” it first occurred to large numbers of people to start asking where the water went when they flushed their toilets. If you live in Asia, or the West Coast of North America, the answer is, eventually, The North Pacific Ocean. And it turns out that is a problem.

On 10 January, 1992 a container ship crossing the Pacific out of Hong Kong bound for Tacoma, Washington, ran into heavy weather as it neared where the 45th parallel touches the International Date Line. A dozen containers stacked on deck washed overboard. About 10,000 such containers fall off cargo ships each year. And in this case, one those 44 foot long aluminum boxes cracked open, releasing 29,000 “rubber duckies” and rubber beavers, turtles and frogs into the cold Pacific waters. At that point the ocean currents took over. In October of 1992 the duckies, frogs and beavers began washing up on beaches near Sitka, Alaska. Between November ’92 and August of 1993 they washed ashore between Cordova and Coronation Island in the Gulf of Alaska.

From here Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer has calculated that a few of the “floating Friendlies” would be carried northward by the Bering Current into the Artic Ocean, where they might spend as long as four or five years trapped in the sea ice. But eventually, Dr. Ebbesmeyer figured, a few would pass through the Davis Straights and reach the North Atlantic Ocean.

And right on time, in July of 2007,  Ms. Penny Harris, a retired schoolteacher, found one of the duckies washed up at the high tide line of a beach in North Devon, Wales, thus proving that no matter where or when you flush your waste, it all ends up in the same place. Eventually that includes even the very bottom of the ocean: which in the Pacific is the Challenger Deep, a section of the Marianas Trench 35,827 feet below the waves. Mount Everest, dropped into the trench, would still be 8,000 below the surface. The pressure here is a thousand times greater than that at sea level.

Humans first visited the Challenger Deep on 23 January, 1960, when US Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh and a Swiss citizen, Jacques Piccard, spent 20 minutes on the bottom, staring out at the featureless ooze. They did not find a "Rubber Duckie",  but a flat flounder did wiggle past their porthole.

It has since been argued that it wasn’t a flounder but a sea cucumber, but I refuse to accept that argument. You can’t get fan mail from a sea cucumber – that would just be silly.  But the "Friendly Floatees", as the duckies have now been named, are still out there, along with everything else plastic ever thrown or dropped in the ocean. Forever.

This is all just something to think about next time you flush. And we all have to flush.  "Rubber Duckie, you’re the one, You make bath time lots of fun, Rubber Duckie, I’m awfully fond of you; Woo, Woo be doo”. (lyrics by Jeff Moss)

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YES, VIRGINIA

I know of only two moments that justifies the sin of pride. Both are a "Horace Mann moment". The first, of course, when you have “won some victory for humanity”, and the second is when a child raised by you does the same. Consider Philip F. O'Hanlon, who in his own life achieved wealth and professional and public recognition. In 1886, right out of N.Y. University Medical School, this sixth generation physician became the head of surgery at the new Gouverneur Community Hospital, on the lower east side of Manhattan.

He was appointed the State Medical Examiner in 1891, and in 1895 became New York City Coroner and Police Surgeon. The later two posts made him famous, and his testimony front page news in several big murder trials. But it was as a father that Philip O'Hanlon won his greatest victory for humanity, because his daughter was Laura Virginia O'Hanlon.

Laura Virginia O'Hanlon (above, she was named after her mother), was born 20 July, 1889, the same year the family leased a larger home, at 115 West 95th Street, between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, just a block west of Manhattan's Central Park. It was a relatively new brownstone, with a red brick front and peaked roof, having just one previous owner. As she reached the age of reason, Laura decided she preferred the name Virginia. And in the late summer of 1897, Virginia approached her father with a simple but profound question, belying her innocence and tender age. 

Fifty years later Virginia remembered the event this way: “Quite naturally I believed in Santa Claus, for he had never disappointed me.  But when less fortunate little boys and girls said there wasn't any Santa Claus, I was filled with doubts.  I asked my father, and he was a little evasive on the subject....It was a habit in our family that whenever any doubts came up as to how to pronounce a word or some question of historical fact was in doubt, we wrote to the Question and Answer column in “The Sun”. Father would always say, “If you see it in the The Sun, it's so,” and that settled the matter. “Well, I'm just going to write The Sun and find out the real truth,” I said to father. “He said, “Go ahead, Virginia. I'm sure The Sun will give you the right answer, as it always does.”

Consider for a moment this privileged Victorian child, Virginia O'Hanlon  (above) -  the daughter of a well known community leader in New York City. At eight years of age she knew children who were less fortunate than herself,  knew them well enough to talk with them, to share the theology of childhood. She was raised in a home in which the family shared knowledge, and the joy of discovery. Parents and their only child learned together. And she was encouraged to seek truth on her own.

So early in September of 1897, Virginia wrote the following letter. “Dear Editor: I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun it’s so.” Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?” She mailed it to The Sun newspaper offices, at 280 Broadway, New York City.

The Sun (“It Shines for All”) had been published in New York since 1833, but in 1868 it acquired its most famous editor, Charles Anderson Dana (above). Under Dana “The Sun” was a strongly Democratic newspaper, and “a newspaper man's newspaper”, and first of the modern newspapers, introducing editorials, society news, and human-interest stories, along side the “hard news”,  all squeezed into eight pages or less, two editions every weekday, and recently even a Sunday edition, with a circulation at its peak of 130,000.  Dana collected about him young, talented writers, and who followed his concisely stated revolutionary approach to news: “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.”

But as Dana aged, “The Sun” became “notoriously inconsistent”. Others improved upon his method, like Joseph Pulitzer at the “New York World”, and built larger circulations, like William Randolph Hearst via his “Yellow Journalism”. By Charles Dana's death in 1897, and his replacement by his son Paul, “The Sun” had slipped to fourth along Newspaper Row (aka Park Row, above ) in lower Manhattan - “The World”, “The Tribune”, “The Times” and now lastly “The Sun”.

It was one of Dana's talented young writers, now an editor, named Edward Mitchell, who was the father of modern Science Fiction. And in early September Mitchell handed Virginia O'Hanlon's letter to a 58 year old editorial writer, Francis Pharcellus Church (above). He was a Columbia graduate, who had reported on the horrors of the Civil War. With his brother, Church co-founded two successful magazines. According to Mitchell, after reading Virginia's letter  “...he pooh-poohed the subject a little. Then he took it, and in a short time handed me (the) article” And on 21 September, 1897,  in a standard 500 word unsigned editorial, printed in the middle of page seven, the journeyman writer responded to the little girl's letter.

“Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age...Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence....Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus...Thank God! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”

The letter and its column were  not an instant phenomenon.  It was not until the 1920's that the newspaper began to reprint it annually. But by 1930, “The Sun” was receiving over 163,000 requests for reprints every year. Since then it has appeared in thousands of newspapers and books, decade after decade , and remains the most reprinted editorial in the English language. But it was not until after his death on 11 April, 1906, that The Sun broke their own rules and named Francis Church as the author.  Church never married and had no children. He is buried in Sleepy Hollow, New York.

In 1898, young William Randolph Hearst, in building his own newspaper empire, drove America into war with Spain. Virginia's father, Dr. Philip O'Hanlon, volunteered as lieutenant in the Medical Reserve Corps. He survived that service, and was listed as still alive in 1920, and still living on 95th street, although now on the south side of the street.

Virginia O'Hanlon  (above) received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Hunter College in 1910,  a Master's in Education from Columbia University in 1912, and the same year she began teaching underprivileged grade school children in New York City schools. 

In 1913 she married Edward Douglas, but he abandoned her just before she gave birth to her daughter, Laura Temple Douglas (above) in March of 1914.  Virginia was eventually promoted to principal, and in 1930 was even awarded her doctorate from Fordham University. Her dissertation was titled “The Importance of Play.” Her daughter would grow up, marry and have seven children of her own.

One of those grandchildren, Virginia Rogers (above, with Virginia), remembered as a child visiting her grandmother in New York City. “Gram was a lady," she said, "Very elegant. She would dress up to go across the street (to the)...post office. At Christmastime, there would be literally box-loads of mail addressed to my grandmother.”  Another granddaughter said, “She was a woman ahead of her time.”

Virginia never took credit for the column her letter inspired. She told her nephew, James Temple, “All I did was ask the question. It was Mr. Church who did something wonderful.” Virginia told an interviewer, Church's column “gave me a special place in life I didn’t deserve. It also made me try to live up to the philosophy of the editorial and to try to make glad the heart of childhood.”

What Virginia did was to teach at Brooklyn’s P.S.401, which held classes for chronically ill children confined at home or in hospitals. Eventually she became a principle at the school. Shortly before she retired she wrote another letter, this one addressed to the “Children of Yesterday.” She pleaded, “Some little children doubt that Santa still lives because often their letters ...never seem to reach him. Nurses in hospitals know who some of these children are. Teachers in great city schools will know others....Won’t you try to seek out these trusting children of today and make sure that their letters in some way reach Santa Claus so that “he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.” Laura Virginia O'Hanlon Douglas had made that her life's work, after retiring from teaching in 1950.

Nine years later she moved to North Chatham, 15 miles south of Albany, New York, to live with her daughter.  During the Christmas holidays in 1969, heart problems forced Virginia to be admitted to the Columbia Memorial Hospital, in Hudson, New York.  There she was visited by Santa Clause (above), disguised as John Harms, a hospital maintenance man, who often visited patients.  He kissed Virginia on the cheek, and she whispered in his ear that she still believed.  Virginia died, in the Barnwell Nursing Home, in Valatie, N.Y., on 13 May, 1974.  She was 81 years old.

Her original letter, which the newspaper had returned, was saved in a scrapbook by a granddaughter and somehow survived a house fire. Today, the brownstone at 115 West 95th street (above), is occupied by The Studio School, where children from “an economically diverse student body” (20% receive financial aid), “ learn to value intellectual and creative ideas, and to take pleasure in the process of discovery.” The school maintains a Virginia O’Hanlon Scholarship Fund to help students with financial needs.

Late in her life, Virginia wrote the following. “Those whom Santa visits think of Christmas as a beautiful, sacred occasion which it should be — but today seldom is. But for every child tucked into bed Christmas night with his new toy, there are hundreds, no thousands, who huddle in ragged bed clothing sobbing in the night at a fate at best cruel.” And Virginia asked us all to “Remember the children at Christmas.”  

Will you try and do that ?  Please.

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THE LIGHT FANTASTIC - Hanukkah

I wish I had been in the Alexandrian suburb of Eleusis, Egypt,  in July of 169 B.C. when for a few brief moments the past and future were divided by a single line in the sand.  

On one side stood the royal egomaniac Antiochus IV (above), whose army was just four miles from capturing the Pharaoh of Egypt. Standing in his way was one old man, the Roman ambassador, Gaius Popillius, armed with just a piece of parchment - a decree from “the Senate and the People of Rome”.   It ordered the upstart Syrian to turn his Slecuid army around, and go home.  

Antiochus IV was infuriated, and bluntly told the old Roman he had to consult his advisers.  Probably he intended on riding back to his cavalry and ordering them to run the old man down.  But Gaius would have none of that. Grabbing a stick the old man drew a circle around the King and insisted, If Antiochus stepped over that line without first agreeing to turn his army back,  it would mean war with Rome.  

It was the original line drawn in the sand, and for maybe the only time in history, it actually worked.   Antiochus IV turned tail and sulked off home. It came to be called the “Day of Eleusis”, and because of that day, we celebrate a holiday – just not the one you're thinking about, probably.

Antiochus IV was King of the Slecuid Empire, centered in Syria and stretching from India on the east and now to the border with Egypt on the west. He called himself Anticochus  Epiphanes, “God Manifest”, but behind his back he was called Epimanes -  “The Mad One”.  And as he sullenly retreated eastward across the Sinai, he got madder and madder.  

You see, some jackass in Judea had spread a rumor that Antiochus IV (above) had been  killed in battle.  Maybe the Romans had spread the story to weaken Antiochus in his rear, and maybe Antiochus had spread it himself, to flush out any trouble makers among his conquered peoples.  But whoever spread it, the hottest hot head in Judea, a religious fanatic named Mattathias ben Johanan, gathered about a thousand of his followers, and came came charging out of the hills to capture the temple in Jerusalem and drive the high priest Menelaus into the wilderness

Now, few people in Jerusalem would miss Menelaus. He had become high priest because his brother Onias had been high priest before him.  But when Onias had sent Menelaus to deliver the yearly taxes to Antiochus IV,  Menelaus had included a little extra from himself, a bribe, and suddenly  Onias was no longer high priest,  Menelaus was. So you can see why Antiochus IV tended not to think very highly of the high priests of Judaism, and now, neither did the people of Jerusalem. Menelaus slipped a little more in public opinion when his brother Onias died while cleaning his sword (above) -  bad luck.  So the Jews of Jerusalem were not really sorry to see Menelaus now running for the hills.

But King Antiochus IV(above) was sorry.  Menelaus might have been a sniveling bottom feeder, but he was the King's sniveling bottom feeder.  And then there was that whole “got to show them whose the boss” dynamic going on.   And Antiochus IV had an army which  had been expecting a rich sacking of Alexandria, which the Romans had put the kibosh to.  So in the dog days of August 169 B.C., everything was pointing toward a very bad day for Jerusalem. And it came.

It seems – oops - somebody had left the city gates open. So the Slecuid army marched right in, as the hot headed Mattathias slipped out the back door.  First the Slecuid  soldiers stripped the Jewish temple of everything of value -  everything not already sold to pay taxes to Antiochus IV, or stolen earlier by the Babylonians and the Egyptians when they each sacked Jerusalem.  Really there couldn't have been that much left to steal.  But whatever was left, Antiochus IV took it. 

And then, according to the holy text, Second Macabbees, “And he commanded his soldiers to cut down relentlessly every one they met and to slay those who went into the houses.” That sounds like pretty much everybody.

The primary non-religious source for what happened was the Jewish radical turned Roman informer, Josephus.  He says that over three days Antiochus IV murdered 44,000 people in Jerusalem,  and sold another 44,000 women and children into slavery.  Antiochus IV then built a citadel right next to the Jewish temple, which he stocked with a permanent garrison.  Then he had the Jewish temple re-dedicated.  On the altar where Menelaus had sacrificed goats to honor Yahweh, the Greek priests now sacrificed pigs to honor Zeus.  Antiochus IV also issued a decree forbidding circumcision - (who was the lucky guy who got to check on that? ). It seemed the Jews had finally ticked off one King too many. Surely they had finally learned their lesson.

But, a year later human nature, or maybe it was Yahweh,  intervened.  In 168 BC, the rising empire of Parthia captured the Afghanistan city of Heart (Hair-it)(above). This was important because  the region around Herat was the bread basket of  Slecuid empire, and sat astride their primary trade route with India. We're talking a major loss of taxes, here.  So Antiochus IV had to turn eastward to deal with the upstart Parthians.  But he did not forget the troublesome Jews.  

He ordered his governor of Syria, a nobleman named Lysias  “to conquer Judea, enslave its inhabitants, utterly destroy Judea and abolish the whole nation." And in 167 B.C. Lysias dispatched four divisions to accomplish this task.

As they marched on Judea Mattathias, who had reappeared (above),  now organized the faithful.  However, because he was a religious fanatic, Mattathias insisted that all his soldiers strictly adhere to Jewish law - that's what they were fighting for, wasn't it?  Unfortunately the Slecuid army did not recognize the Jewish Sabbath, and on a Saturday they attacked the first Jewish village in their way.  Following the law, and Mattathias' orders, the villagers refused to do any work on the sabbath, even refusing to lift a weapon to defend themselves.  All 1,000 of them were slaughtered. 

After this Mattathias was replaced as leader of the revolt by his son, Judah (above). And under him, the Jews decided to compromise on the religious issues and fight, twenty-four, seven.

It turns out Judah ben Mattathias was pretty good at it.  In 166 B.C. Judah fell on the Slecuid supply base at Emmaus, killing its 3,000 man garrison, capturing a huge cache of weapons and food, and forcing half the Seleucid army to retreat.  

A year later he beat the other half of the Slecuid army at Beth-zur, forcing them, again, to retreat.  It was battles like this that earned him the nickname of Judah the Hammer, or in Hebrew, Judah Maccabees.   

Shortly after this victory, word again arrived that Antioschus IV was dead.  Except this time he really was.  He'd been in Babylon, struggling to prepare a counter attack against the Parthians, when he suddenly went sick and dropped dead (above). He might have caught the plague, lots of people did then, , or maybe he got drunk and fell out of his chariot, or maybe it was Yahwah's payback,  but I think it even more likely, he'd been poisoned by the Parthians. In any case, his young son, Antiochus V, now inherited what was left of the empire.

Lysias immediately had himself declared Antioschus V's guardian, which put the Governor in charge of the entire empire. Or what was left of it. Lysias ordered an end to efforts to retake Heart, and in 165 B.C. he marched for a third time on Jerusalem. Third times the charm, right? 

This time Lysias came by the southern road, catching the Hammer off guard. This time Lysias actually laid siege to Jerusalem. This time it looked as if the clock had run out for the Jews. This time there was nobody to save them. 

And then out of nowhere appeared a guy named Phillip, (the royal governor of Babylon, actually), who claimed that on his death bed Antioschus IV had asked him, Phillip, to raise the king's son, now known as Antioschus V, AKA as The Eupator - son of a good father..  That would make Phillip the regent, not Lysias.  Lysias did not believe a word of it. Would you?  But the Romans did. So Lysias would have to deal with Philip’s army.  And one morning Judah looked out from walls of Jerusalem, and saw...nobody. The entire  Slecuid army and all their siege machines had mysteriously disappeared. It was a miracle. As long as you forgot about the whole Slecuid civil war going on.

Judah Maccabees ordered a a new altar built for the temple, and declared 8 days of “sacrifice and songs” for its re-dedication. The pigs and Zeus were out, The lambs and Yahweh were  back in. 

There was only one problem. Tradition said in re-dedicating the Temple required the temple's  menorah lamps to burn every night, all night, during the celebration.  But there was only enough olive oil for one night. What to do?

Now if it was me, I would have ordered the nine lamps on the menorah to be publicly lit at sundown each night, as usual. And then after the faithful had gone home to bed, the priests would quietly extinguish the lamps. This way, instead of burning through all the oil in one 12 hour winter's night, the lamps would burn for a about an hour each night, for eight nights. And I think that maybe that was what the Hammer did. But then, I am a non-believer. And priest are in the business of believing in miracles. And the truth is, miracles don't usually happen without a little help from somebody. Who that help comes from depends on who and what you believe in. Anyway....

It was the first Hanukkah, the first festival of the lights. Two thousand years later it is not a very important Jewish holiday, and about the only one in which women play a leading role. Each of the eight nights a woman first lights the “shamash”, the central candle or lamp, used to illuminate the entire ritual. On each successive night , the shamash is then used to light one more candle each night until all eight are burning. In each Jewish home they are displayed in a window or an exterior door, “to illuminate the house outside” the home. And as they do so, the women recite the Hanukkah prayer.

“We light these lights for the miracles and the wonders, for the redemption and the battles that you made for our forefathers, in those days at this season, through your holy priests. During all eight days of Hanukkah these lights are sacred, and we are not permitted to make ordinary use of them except for to look at them in order to express thanks and praise to Your great Name for Your miracles, Your wonders and Your salivations.”

Lysias defeated and killed Philip in 163 B.C.. But in 162 B.C. Lysias was defeated by Demetrius I, who had been Antiochus IV's older brother and Antiochus V's uncle. Being the older brother, Demetrius was supposed to have been made King first. But when their father died, Demetrius was being held as the official hostage in Rome. So it turned out Antiochus IV had been a usurper, which made his defeat in 162 B.C.,  payback. Demetrius executed both Lysias, and the boy king Antiochus V. Demetrius then tried to reconquer the Jews, but the Fighting Maccabees  held him off for ten years, until Demetrius was killed by a new usurper in 150 B.C. And that was finally the end of the Slecuid empire.

The next empire to come marching down the coast road of Judea would be the Romans. And they and the Jews would have their own problems, strongly reminiscent of the ones the Jews and Slecuid's had shared. They say some people never learn. But I think most people never learn, certainly not in the middle east.

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