The Way of the Puffin.(Travel narrative)

The puffin was a Christmas present from my brother Bob. It came in an unmarked plastic bag and appeared to be some sort of puppet or plush toy. It had a fleece-lined body and a big, orange, squeeze-inviting beak, and its eyes were set in triangles of black fur that lent it an expression of sorrow or anxiety or incipient disapproval. I warmed to the bird right away. I gave it a funny voice and personality and used it to entertain the Californian I live with. I sent Bob an enthusiastic thank-you note, in reply to which he informed me that the puffin was not a toy at all but a golf accessory. He'd bought it in the pro shop at Bandon Dunes, a golf resort in southwest Oregon, to remind me of the fun I could have golfing and birding in Oregon, where he lives. The puffin was a head cover for a golf driver.

My difficulty with golf is that, although I play it once or twice a year to be sociable, I dislike almost everything about it. The point of the game seems to be the methodical euthanizing of workday-sized chunks of time by well-off white men. Golf eats land, drinks water, displaces wildlife, fosters sprawl. I dislike the self-congratulations of its etiquette, the self-important hush of its television analysts. Most of all, I dislike how badly I play the game. Spelled backward, golf is flog.

I do own a cheap set of clubs, but there was no way I was going to impale my puffin on one of them. For one thing, the Californian had taken to clutching it in bed every night. The puffin had quickly established itself as a minor household character. Out in the world of nature, real puffins (and many other pelagic birds) were suffering badly from overfishing of the oceans and degradation of their nest sites, but nature could be a cold and abstract thing to love from the middle of New York City. The toy was furry and immediate.

In Jane Smiley's novel "The Greenlanders," there's a tale about a Norse farmer who brings a polar-bear cub into his house and raises it as his son. Although the bear learns to read, it can't help remaining a bear, with a bear's huge appetite, and eventually it begins to eat up all the farmer's sheep. The farmer knows he has to get rid of the bear, but he can never quite bring himself to do it, because (according to the story's refrain) the bear has such beautiful soft fur and such beautiful dark eyes. Metaphorically, for Smiley, the bear represents a destructive passion too pleasurable to resist. But the story also works as a straightforward warning about sentimental idolatry. Homo sapiens is the animal that wants to believe, in defiance of harsh natural law, that other animals are part of its family. I could make a pretty good ethical argument for our responsibility to other species, and yet I wondered whether, at root, my concern for biodiversity and animal welfare might be a kind of regression to my childhood bedroom and its community of plush toys: a fantasy of cuddliness and interspecies harmony. Smiley's smitten farmer is finally driven to offer the flesh of his own arm to his insatiable bear-child.

Late last fall, while the Times was running a series of long articles about the crisis of pollution, water shortages, desertification, species loss, and deforestation in China and I was managing to read no more than fifty words of any of them, a great new Jeep commercial was airing during football games. You know: the one where a squirrel, a wolf, two horned larks, and an S.U.V. driver join together in song while rolling down an empty highway through pristine forest. I especially enjoyed the moment when the wolf gulps down one of the larks, receives a disapproving look from the S.U.V. driver, spits the lark back out unharmed, and bursts into song. I knew perfectly well that S.U.V.s were even more hostile to horned larks than wolves were; I knew that my domestic appetites were part of the same beast that was devouring the natural world in China and elsewhere in Asia; and yet I loved the Jeep ad. I loved the worried eyes and soft fur of my golf accessory. I didn't want to know what I knew. And yet: I couldn't stand not knowing, either. One afternoon, with a kind of grim foreboding, I went to the bedroom and grabbed the puffin by its wings and stuck it underneath a bright lamp and turned it inside out, and there, sure enough, was the label: "HANDMADE IN CHINA."

I decided to visit the part of the world where the puffin came from. The industrial system that had created the fake bird was destroying real birds, and I wanted to be in a place where this connection couldn't be concealed. Basically, I wanted to know how bad things were.

I called up the American company on the puffin's label--Daphne's Headcovers, of Phoenix, Arizona--and spoke to its president, Jane Spicer. I was afraid she'd be reticent about her Chinese sources, especially in light of the recent Chinese toy scandals, but she was the opposite of reticent. In our first phone conversation, she told me about her golden retriever, Aspen, her found cat, Mango, her late mother, Daphne (with whom, at the age of ten, she'd started the company), her husband, Steve, who ran the production end of things, and her most famous customer, Tiger Woods, whose furry tiger head cover, nicknamed Frank, had co-starred in a series of Nike television ads in 2003 and 2004. She told me that Daphne, herself an immigrant from England, had made a point of hiring immigrants to sew the head covers, and that she, Jane, had once lent some workers to a woman who manufactured cat toys and had lost her own workers and was desperate to get her orders filled, and that, years later, in the mysterious way of karma, after the woman had struck it rich and Jane had forgotten all about her, she'd called up Jane and said, "Remember me? You saved my business. I've been looking for a way to repay you, and I'd like you to meet some friends of mine from China."