My latest passion is making things out of objects I
find on the beach. Not useful things -- fanciful things in the shapes of
people, animals and space aliens. Among my dozens of drifters are
Armadillo, Rover, the Blues Brothers, Pigtails and the Coconut Choir. The
house is filling up.
"Um, how many of these guys are you going to make?" my
husband said when he saw me drilling holes in the wall for another set of
shelves.
How many walls do we have?
Now that I'm on the prowl for pieces of plastic, which I view as character
traits, walks on Kailua Beach have become fabulous treasure hunts.
But last week when I arrived at the beach, eager to see what the wind blew
in, I found dozens of garbage bags high on the berm.
A crew from the women's correctional facility had cleaned the beach. Three
times, a supervisor told me.
My spirits drooped.
Of course, I appreciate the fact that these women worked hard to make the
beach clean and beautiful.
Picking up beach trash is how I got started with drift art in the first
place. I just wish I'd gotten there before they tied up those bags.
This case of one person's trash being another person's treasure reminds me
of two Seattle oceanographers who in the early 1990s got interested in
some specific marine trash.
When containers containing 60,000 Nike shoes and 29,000 bathtub toys fell
off ships and broke open during storms in the North Pacific, these
oceanographers viewed the accidents as opportunities. By asking
beachcombers to report when and where they found these items, the
researchers could study the large picture of Pacific Ocean currents.
I always wondered why these guys didn't just put a message in a bottle and
see where it washed up. What was the big deal about a bunch of green
frogs, blue turtles, yellow ducks, red beavers and Nike sneakers?
Mostly their large numbers. For scientists studying oceanic currents, the
rule of thumb is that as the distance of the release site from shore
increases, the number of objects recovered decreases.
For example, if you drop bottles several miles offshore, beach walkers
will find about 50 percent of them.
At several hundred miles, the recovery rate is below 10 percent. A
thousand or more miles offshore yields only 1 percent or 2 percent of the
objects dropped.
Therefore, if you want to study ocean currents using bottles, you need
tons of them. Drift-bottle studies have ranged from 1,000 to 150,000
bottles. But acquiring and launching these numbers of bottles requires
hard-to-get grant money. The shoes and toys were free.
Of the 60,000 drifting Nikes, beachcombers found about 1,600, or 2.6
percent. People recovered about 400, or 1.4 percent, of the 29,000 toys.
These recoveries, and their locations, provided the researchers with
useful data to test and refine their models of North Pacific currents.
As I slumped in front of those garbage bags last week, my dog tugged at
her leash, pulling me down the beach. And lo and behold.
Even with three consecutive days of trash pickup, the sand still contained
a wealth of ropes, floats and plastics. I found so many good things, I
could barely carry them back to my car.
But I managed, and those stranded voyagers now have a loving home.
There went another wall.
