Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies (23 page)

It was in this hostile atmosphere, in 1988, that a social movement called the Gagauz People was founded and began to demand independence. A Moldovan Parliament report from 1990 alarmed the movement further by naming the Gagauz not as a national minority but merely as an “ethnic” minority. It was a choice of words that was widely interpreted as a calculated insult. Some members of the Moldovan Popular Front went so far as to demand that the Gagauz, like the Russians, should go “back home.” It was around this time that “Gagauzia” was invented.

The desire to reinvent a place as a nation does not necessarily emerge from long-repressed aspirations but can arise suddenly, especially among vulnerable populations whose identity was once absorbed by vast, multinational entities like the Soviet Union and who now nurse a sense of being discriminated against and overlooked. With that perceived slight, a number of useful myths were born. It was said that Gagauzia had long been repressed, that the Gagauz had long yearned for freedom. Some even argued that they were not of foreign extraction at all but had been in this part of the world longer than the Moldovans. Little of this was true, and Gagauzia was far from ancient. Aside from a five-day independent state, declared in 1906 and limited to the capital (the Republic of Kormat), the Gagauz have never thought of themselves as needing their own nation.

Yet this lack of historical depth only seems to have piqued their political aspirations. In 1990 the unofficial Gagauz flag, a dramatic red wolf’s head on a white circle, appeared on state buildings, and in August of that year independence was declared. Presidential elections were held and a government was installed in Kormat. Over the next four years Gagauzia claimed to be independent, although no other state deigned to recognize its existence. By late 1994 Moldova was willing to concede “self-determination” to “the people of Gagauzia,” and a referendum was held that resulted in the present hotchpotch of enclaves, with thirty settlements voting in favor of being in the newly created “national autonomous territorial unit.”

These concessions don’t amount to much, since the only real gain is a promise that the Gagauz can decide to go it alone if there is a “change of status of the Republic of Moldova.” The reason this matters is that if it wasn’t for the national minorities in their midst, Moldova would probably opt to merge with Romania, with which it shares both history and language. The unification movement is one of the most powerful forces in Moldovan politics, and would turn the Gagauz from a small but vocal minority in a plural state into an “ethnic” irrelevance in a pan-Romanian nation. The Gagauz, along with the even more fiercely independent Transnistrians, who live on Moldova’s eastern flank, have been promised that if that happens, they can leave.

However, the last twenty years have driven home to the Gagauz that being a “national autonomous unit” delivers very little. Gagauzia remains one of the poorest areas of Moldova, which in turn is often claimed to be the poorest country in Europe. The mood for compromise is waning while the momentum toward separation is being given new life by the development of an independent Gagauz media, led by Gagauzia Radio Televizionu. In 2012 a Gagauz nationalist threw a Molotov cocktail at the motorcade of the visiting German chancellor, Angela Merkel. That same year Mihail Formuzal, the governor of Gagauzia, responded angrily to increased signs that Moldovan-Romanian unification was gaining popular support. Formuzal threatened to declare independence and boasted that, this time, his country would achieve international recognition.

There is an unnerving quality to the fragmentary logic of nationalism. Countries one has barely heard of break up into units that mean almost nothing. The logic of disintegration creates a geography of ignorance, in which the flowering of new identities and new nations outstrips our capacity to place or pronounce them. People outside the region throw up their hands: places like Gagauzia are consigned to a growing pile of ignored proto-states. Behind this reaction is an understandable fear: What if every nation started to be pulled apart and the political map resolved into legions of multiplying places? It may be convenient to imagine that we’re above nationalist desires, that they are mistaken or somehow tragic. But such lofty dismissals are based on just as many myths and conceits as the fabricated pasts of Gagauzia. And they lack generosity. Many Gagauz want their own country because without it they will remain placeless and marginal. The fact that it is invented won’t make it any less real.

Part of the attraction of floating places is their unplaceability: they promise escape from prosaic solidity and a freer relationship to the earth. Floating places have been on our minds since Aeolia, the floating island visited by Odysseus whose king was in charge of the four winds. When Gulliver visited Laputa, an airborne kingdom of distracted scientists, and Dr. Dolittle stepped onto the bobbing shores of hollow Sea-Star Island, they were joining a long tradition of geographical fantasy. It is an aspiration that has come into its own with computer games in which players skip between many islets. Further proof, if it were needed, that for earthbound creatures like ourselves, buoyant or untethered land is intrinsically enchanting.

So it is not surprising that the news that there are islands that drift on the sea was greeted with innocent joy. That two should apparently heave into view at the same time sounds doubly delightful, but what a strange contrast they make. One is a coagulation of plastic detritus known as the Pacific Trash Vortex. The other is a natural byproduct of volcanism known as a pumice raft. Neither is the Aeolia or Sea-Star Island of our dreams and even the name of the Trash Vortex sounds deeply sinister, but both remain oddly thrilling. Hence the urgent questions: Can we walk on them? Can they sustain life? The answer to the questions is “yes” for the pumice rafts, and “probably not” for the whirlpool of rubbish.

One of the largest pumice rafts ever recorded was found in 2012. Indeed, to call it a raft does not do it justice. This one, spotted by the New Zealand Air Force 620 miles off the Auckland coast, was spread over an area of 10,000 square miles, or “nearly the size of Belgium” as the New Zealand press described it. Naval lieutenant Tim Oscar said it was the “weirdest thing” he’d seen in his eighteen years at sea. In fact, smaller versions of such rafts are not that uncommon, nor are they confined to the Pacific, since they are caused by undersea volcanic eruptions. Oceanographers have charted their transoceanic voyages back some two hundred years.

Yet they seem to catch even seasoned ocean watchers and mariners by surprise. Making their way to Fiji on the yacht
Maiken
, the Swedish sailor Fredrik Fransson and his crew sailed into one in August 2006. Fransson’s log describes the scene:

We noticed brown, somewhat grainy streaks in the water. First we thought that it might be an old oil dumping. Some ship cleaning its tanks. But the streak became larger and more frequent after a while, and there were rocklike brownish things the size of a fist floating in the sea. And the waters were strangely green and “lagoon like” too. Eventually it became more and more clear to us that it had to be pumice from a volcanic eruption. And then we sailed into a vast, many miles wide, belt of densely packed pumice. We were going by motor due to lack of wind and within seconds Maiken slowed down from seven to one knot. We were so fascinated and busy taking pictures that we ploughed a couple of hundred meters into this surreal floating stone field before we realized that we had to turn back.

Fransson goes on to explain how the pumice abraded the bottom of his boat: “Like we’d sailed through sandpaper.” His photographs show miles of packed rock floating freely on the sea. Photographs taken by marine scientists indicate that the pumice can pile up quite deeply, sometimes extending several feet above the surface and forming an undulating landscape. It is at this point that the rafts can bear a human’s weight, although so far it appears that this has been put to the test only near shorelines.

The rafts eventually drift toward land, clogging up the harbors they bump into. When they make contact with terra firma it becomes evident that they are far from barren. Clinging to the pumice fragments are a range of shellfish. One of the new scientific theories about how plants and animals spread around the world goes under the title of “rapid long-distance dispersal by pumice rafting.” A study of the migration and inhabitants of the rafts spat up from the same undersea eruption that the
Maiken
sailed into found them to be teeming with life. Erik Klemetti, a professor of geosciences at Denison University, records what was found:

The pumice quickly became home to upwards of 80 different species of marine life over the course of its journey—in some cases, single pumice clasts [fragments of rock] were home to over 200 individuals of a single species of barnacle (this means that over 10 billion barnacles colonized the pumice raft). Some of these critters were permanent inhabitants (that is, they were attached) while others were mobile, so if the pumice landed on a beach, off onto the island a crab might scuttle. By a year and a half after the pumice raft was erupted, some clasts had ¾ of their surface covered. It could reach such an extreme that the biological hitchhikers would cause the pumice to sink or preferential float with one side facing up, creating microenvironments on a single pumice clast!

Klemetti concludes that “these volcanic events that have happened frequently in the recent geologic record all over the world may play an important role in how life colonized different parts of the world’s oceans.”

In recent years, stories about pumice rafts—especially the blog and photographs of Fredrik Fransson—have been working their way around the world in the form of “look at this!” email attachments. Everyone loves them. The Pacific Trash Vortex is a scarier but no less jaw-dropping prospect. Estimates of its size vary considerably. The truth probably lies between 270,000 square miles and 5,800,000 square miles. Since Belgium appears to have become an international standard for judging the size of large floating objects, we can also translate these figures as 22 times the size of Belgium to 592 times the size of Belgium—in other words, nearly twice the size of Australia. Also known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the Trash Vortex does not exist as a single entity but is more like a soup or galaxy of garbage, most of which floats just underwater but often coagulates on the surface. Footballs, kayaks, and Lego blocks have all been spotted, along with the usual mass of plastic bottles and fishing nets. As Donovan Hohn revealed in
Moby-Duck
, it is also the resting place of a good many toy ducks.

All the things that are thrown off ships or swept up off the coasts of the Pacific and get caught in the circulation of the ocean waters end up in this graveyard of consumerism. As with the pumice rafts, one of the first accounts we have of this new landscape came from an adventurous yachtsman. In 1997 Charles Moore was on his way back to Los Angeles from Hawaii. He decided to take his yacht into a part of the ocean usually avoided by sailors because of its slow currents and lack of wind. To his astonishment he found himself sailing into a sea of gunk. “Every time I came on deck, there was trash floating by. How could we have fouled such a huge area? How could this go on for a week?” Moore, heir to a fortune from the oil industry, has since become a leading campaigner and researcher on trash vortices. Despite their size, and their human origins, they are little understood. Basic questions about how they move, how rubbish is sorted within them, and where that stuff then goes have yet to be answered. Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer has argued that they “move around like a big animal without a leash,” and every so often they find a shore and cough up plastic all over the beach. Ebbesmeyer puts it in suitably grotesque language: “The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic.”