Honolulu Star-Advertiser © Susan Scott
June 18, 2004
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.