(Apologies to Jonah Goldberg: This piece has nothing to do with Bigfoot’s brethren or breathy fiction related to the anthropoidal wanderer.)
An invasion is brewing in the Bering Sea. However, this Aleutian Campaign is one of happy discovery and debris-retrieval. The amphibious assault, originating in the Philippines, was prosecuted by beverage coolers popular among upper-middle-class outdoorsmen and Oregonians.
The Wall Street Journal reports that a shipping mishap has made U.S.-based Yeti the largest navy in the world, with 1,600 of its products cruising the Pacific ocean. John Clarke writes:
Kathy Peavey runs a whale-watching tour business and knows the local seas as well as anybody in her coastal city of Craig, Alaska.
When Ms. Peavey heard last fall about a freighter losing shipping containers in rough waters off the coast of British Columbia, the longtime beachcomber knew by experience that cargo would likely drift her way.
. . .
Storms and currents in the gulf of Alaska deliver all manner of flotsam to shore—never, though, a bounty like this one.
In April, Ms. Peavey, her son and daughter-in-law piled into a 22-foot Hewescraft Ocean Pro boat for a scouting mission around Suemez Island. She waited on the boat while they searched the shoreline.
While watching through binoculars, Ms. Peavey soon saw her son carrying what looked like a big Styrofoam block. . . .
It was a Yeti cooler, the kind that fetch as much as $750. “We wanted to keep it quiet,” she said. “But we told a few people, and word got out.”
News of the seaborne windfall kicked off a search frenzy that looked “like an Easter egg hunt,” said Kurt Whitehead, 51, a commercial fisherman in Klawock, Alaska.
It may seem idiotic to some, but I rather like the idea of valuable cargo bobbing along until discovered by some delighted Alaskan or Okinawan ten years hence. Indeed, nothing sounds more fun than hopping in a bush plane and scouring the coast for a few hours like a container-vorous osprey. Similar to the pre-Columbian mystery flotsam of unknown continents making landfall on the American, African, and European coasts, Yeti coolers are delivering astonishment and baubles to be boasted of.
American exceptionalism afloat.