Running on the highway, I once found a perfectly serviceable machete. The beach is our more common source of junk.

Yesterday was easier. Gary found a commercial grade 3/4 size garbage can kicking around in the creek a little over a half mile north. We almost filled it with plastic trash, including the rubber boot, but we didn’t find the oversize shoe this morning. The thick black lid in the upper right corner [above] was about ten inches across, and half under it, what is that flexible grill-like nylon object? It weighed a ton.

We’ve always gathered litter, but mostly stopped in March 2020. Even then, Gary would pick up dangerous stuff that could hurt someone: syringes and fluorescent light tubes. But we’re back at work.

Today was harder but we started at 6:30 and the tide was well out. We recovered twenty or thirty pounds of flotsom and jetsam. Most of what we pull off the beach is just trash: fast food containers, candy wrappers, plastic water bottles, cleanser and bottle caps, fishing tackle, commercial fishing items that sometimes have only obscure use from our point of view, and lots and lots of polystyrene foam and plastic bottle caps. We find plastic bags and broken bits and pieces of blue and white plastic, clear bags, food wrappers, bait boxes and filters, but it’s not all junk. We also find children’s beach toys that have been kicked around by the tide, plastic floats, and perfectly good rope. The good stuff, including several shovels over the years, we leave to be washed around through several tides before we consider it fair game. The really fat rope below is in our front yard because for four days no one would take it, and Gary didn’t want it rotting in front of the house. It’s about fifteen feet long and each end is completely unraveled into a two-foot spray of mermaid’s hair. It was so heavy Gary couldn’t lift it, but had to drag it from one end and then the other to get it up our path. It’s a part of a tow rope off a ship.

The barnacled rope in the lower photo is at least five inches across. Today, Gary spent a long time detangling some nice-looking red rope while I worked on two other pieces that are blue and green. They were wound around with kelp. What we carried home over more than a mile isn’t shown in these photos, but the distance made it a tougher haul.

Over the years I can count on one hand the people, other than us, who have picked up the beach. The years I kept track, 2019, we took over a half ton of trash off our beach. We’d measured over two hundred pounds before Covid put us on pause that first year of the pandemic.

Mostly we walk north, so even though Adopt-A-Beach thinks we clean South Arch Cape. We mostly do the middle mile. On a good day I might bend over fifty times to pick up Styrofoam or a bottle cap, each bit small that a postage stamp. And then there are the heavy plastic bins and jars and the occasional vodka bottle.

Some might want to blame tourists and construction crews for the litter. It’s true that we find fresh candy wrappers and cigarette butts, takeout containers and socks and strapping from bundles of firewood, once a huge piece of polystyrene foam that maybe came from a local delivery of a fancy refrigerator. And some of the tackle is from surf fishers, but there isn’t much of that. We managed to return a computer and a cell phone to their owners. Several lost dogs too.

However, most of what we find comes from watercraft. The surf doesn’t often take plastic out; it pushes it in. That garbage can yesterday and most of the thick commercial plastic chunks are from boats. It’s been in the water a long time and is covered with seaweed and gooseneck barnacles to show for it. Sometimes food labels are entirely in another language.

A strong west wind drives it on shore and we pick it up.

What do we do with it all? We do not make “art” out of it, though plenty of people who do not bother to pick trash off the beach have suggested we should. The intact beach toys are stored in two laundry baskets (also beach finds) and our grandchildren play with them. Some of the less disreputable foam, plastic, and metal floats are decor. [The old glass fishing floats are in the house.] Our front gate is cobbled together out of a plastic grate, rope, and other finds. I have favorite fishing cord that’s green and orange, always with a knot at one end—it’s easier to cut the cord than untie it. I gather those bits in a beach-find container beside the front door.

Most of what we find isn’t salvage but goes in our garbage, because that’s what it is, not recyclable, not art material, no longer useful to anyone, and almost all of it is plastic.

That found garbage can from yesterday? It was furry with seaweed when Gary found it. He put it in the yard so the raccoons could play with it in the night. They did.

Yesterday a dozen pieces of seaglass; today just one.