Category:

PROLOGUE

"THE WORLD HAS FALLEN APART."

Southern California appeared to be under siege from a blockade.

More than fifty enormous vessels bobbed in the frigid waters of the Pacific Ocean, marooned off the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. As days stretched into weeks, they waited their turn to pull up to the docks and disgorge their cargo. Rubberneckers flocked to the water's edge with binoculars, trying in vain to count the ships that stretched to the inky horizon.

This was no act of war. Rather, this was what it looked like when the global economy came shuddering to a halt.

It was October 2021, and the planet was seized by the worst pandemic in a century. International commerce was rife with bewildering dysfunction. Basic geography itself seemed reconfigured, as if the oceans had stretched wider, adding to the distance separating the factories of China from the superstores of the United States.

Given the scale of container ships—the largest were longer than four times the height of the Statue of Liberty—any single vessel held at anchor indicated that an enormous volume of orders was not reaching its intended destination. The decks of the hulking ships were stacked to the skies with containers loaded with seemingly every conceivable component of contemporary life—clothing, electronics, auto parts, furniture, refrigerated fruits, toys, medical equipment, bottled beverages, and drums full of chemicals used to concoct other products, from paint to pharmaceuticals.

Among the ships held in the queue was the CSCL Spring, a Hong Kong-flagged vessel that was carrying a whopping 138 containers from Yihai Kerry International, a major Chinese agricultural conglomerate. Together, they held 7.3 million pounds of canola meal pellets—enough animal feed to sustain twenty thousand cows for a week. This was exacerbating shortages of feed afflicting American livestock producers.

Five ships in this waylaid flotilla were collectively hauling 13 million pounds of Fiji bottled water. More than 17 million pounds of Heineken beer was held up. The Singapore-flagged Wan Hai 625 was carrying almost 3 million pounds of polyethylene terephthalate resin, a key element for manufacturing synthetic fabrics and plastic bottles used to package soft drinks—another commodity in short supply. The same ship held 5.2 million pounds of solar panels and 1.6 million pounds of material for chain-link fencing. The Cyprus-flagged Hyundai Hongkong, just in from the South Korean port of Busan, held 64,511 pounds of vehicle carpet fabric that was destined for Tesla vehicles along with 28,723 pounds of cornhole game equipment.

By one estimate, the ships waiting off Southern California's two largest ports were collectively loaded with more than $25 billion worth of goods. And this was a mere fraction of the wares stranded by a global breakdown that had reached staggering proportions. Nearly 13 percent of the world's container shipping fleet was floating off ports from China to North America to Europe. Upward of $1 trillion worth of product was caught in the congestion.

All of this stuff was supposed to be somewhere else.

But the docks were overwhelmed by an unprecedented influx of containers as Americans stuck in quarantine outfitted themselves for the apocalypse, filling their basements with exercise bikes, their bedrooms with office furniture, and their kitchens with baking equipment. Most of these goods were manufactured in Asia. The trucking industry complained that it could not hire enough drivers to move this tsunami of product. Warehouses were stuffed to the rafters and short of workers. The railroads—hollowed out by years of corporate cost cutting—were buckling in the face of a surge of demand.

So tens of thousands of containers sat stacked at the ports, waiting for someone to haul them to their next destination. Out on the water, miles from shore, ships lay at anchor, their listless crews wondering when they would next encounter land.

 

Here was the central explanation for why Americans suddenly found themselves unable to buy everything from medical devices and hand sanitizer to toothpaste and smartphones. The scene off Southern California was the reason that carpenters could not find wood, why families painting homes were settling for whatever color was available, and why hospitals were substituting subpar medicines for the ones they could not procure.

For decades, the world had seemed compressed and tamed, the continents bridged by container ships, internet links, and exuberant faith in globalization. Now, the earth again felt vast and full of mystery.