Washed Up Read online

  On idyllic summer days, I’d awake to the low burr of the foghorn at Point Robinson lighthouse. I couldn’t wait to hit the tide line, and I ran without caution along a nettled path leading to the beach because I knew some great new discovery washed up with each new tide. We found life rings on the beach, pieces of boats, discarded boating supplies, whiskey bottles, fishermen’s nets, cork floats, barnacle-coated glass fishing floats from Japan, and once my brother, Rob, found a live octopus, weighing around twenty pounds, beached on sun-toasted rocks. He fetched a wheelbarrow, plopped the octopus into it, and wheeled it up a steep hill to show our grandmother; then he rolled the wheelbarrow back to the beach and set the octopus afloat. I’ve often wondered what the octopus thought about his brief landlubbing adventure.

  My older sister, Suzie, was enamored of sand-frosted bottles and frosty glass shards that washed up. She collected her sea jewels in a clear glass jar, submerging them in freshwater to show them to best advantage. Some white glass pieces that had over time developed a purple cast were her favorites even before she learned the explanation for their distinctive violet hue.

  The Romans collected beach glass, as did other ancient Mediterranean cultures. Tumbled by the action of water and sand, broken glass over time washes up on beaches, transformed into uniquely frosted translucent shards. Artists have found innumerable uses for beach glass, from mosaics to jewelry to leaded glass windows and lamps, picture frames, mobiles, and more abstract creations. Probably the most desirable sea glass, or beach glass, is the lavender glass my sister preferred. It originated in the United States during World War I, when U.S. manufacturers were unable to figure out the correct chemicals for making a type of glass they had previously purchased from Germany. The glass version they did manufacture, based on a slightly altered formula, turned lavender, or light violet, with age. This purple or lavender glass is easily distinguishable and can be dated. Because glass is biodegradable, its presence in the ocean does not generally harm the marine environment. I suppose a fish might swallow a sharp piece of glass to disastrous effect. Beyond that, glass returns eventually to its original form: sand.

  More plastic than glass now washes up along the world’s beaches; still, glass shards etched over time by contact with underwater rocks and sand wash up on beaches everywhere. Fully intact glass bottles, these days, are indeed a rare treasure. Beach glass has become so scarce that glassmakers now manufacture a product called beach glass, meant to substitute for the real thing. Glass flotsamists shun the fakes.

  Rocks, their shapes and striations, fascinated me in my early flotsaming days. Warmed dry by the sun or still cold and coated with seaweed slime, the rocks on my childhood beach were of many colors, some bright red or green, some translucent yellow, some sparkling with fool’s gold or silver, and others simply smooth gray, green, or black spheres. At four years old, I had no idea that many of these rocks had originated high in the Olympic and Cascade mountains, had tumbled downstream on fresh mountain rivers that poured into the ocean, and had then been shoveled ashore by powerful incoming tides. The best rocks went into my sunsuit’s pockets, and I filled them until their weight forced me to hunch over and almost crawl—still, each was a keeper. Imagine my disappointment when, once I’d hauled them up the hill to my grandparents’ summer house and set them on the porch to dry, most of the keepers turned dull and uninteresting; shape shifters of the mineral world. If they didn’t pass the dry test, I’d toss them back into the Sound, and if they skipped, I counted them worthwhile.

  Riding incoming tides, seashells got tossed up to form a delicate white necklace on the beach, each shell also a keeper. Once again my sunsuit pockets filled until I could barely walk. Each shell had a story. Some still housed tenants, and these also went immediately back into the Sound, a reprieve from death by beaching, at least in my imagination. The best shells were lined with mother-of-pearl—oyster shells or deep blue mussels—or were clam shells larger than my father’s hand, bleached chalky white, deep ridged semi-spheres, best when discovered with joints intact, two shells forming a nautical castanet.

  And bones—fish bones, whale bones, seal bones, maybe even human bones—the remains of living creatures thrilled a four-year-old’s soul. I created a life-and-death history for each bone I collected off the tide. A pirate’s finger. A sea lion’s claw. Once, in Canada, on a low tide off Point Roberts, I found an entire horse’s skull. Sand crabs had moved in.

  Having traveled the world on Great Britain’s last great tall ship, my grandfather taught us to respect everything that came from the sea. This included the masses of driftwood flotsam that washed ashore to decorate the high tide line along the beach. Huge logs of old growth trees, uprooted or sawed down, made barefoot walking less daunting than on the rocky beach, if you didn’t count splinters. When high tide hit and the waves chased us up the beach, we’d scramble onto the highest logs, timing our escape just right for maximum risk and thrill. Some logs still had root systems and branches intact; standing on end as they had in the ancient evergreen forests, they would have dwarfed the nearby lighthouse. Driftwood came in many shapes and sizes, often bleached and weathered to a fine silver sheen. Every day new logs washed up, some so gnarled they looked like sea monsters rising from the deep.

  Whenever my grandfather walked on the beach, he would have, besides his pipe and his panama hat, a walking stick—always chosen from a driftwood pile at the beginning of his walk and always returned to the pile at walk’s end. He had learned as a young boy aboard ship that everything must have a purpose; it was either ballast or had some other practical application, with a few exceptions for aesthetic necessities—the piano in the captain’s quarters, for example. But everything that came from the sea must be returned to the sea; everything that the tide tossed onto land must either be used for good purpose or placed back on the beach where it had washed ashore, until another wave raked it adrift once more.

  Like my ancestors, I have spent nearly a lifetime traveling the world relentlessly, have washed up at many exotic ports and gone adrift again in search of new adventure. Throughout my travels I’ve collected flotsam, jetsam, and lagan from the world’s beaches, often provoking startled reactions from customs officials. Why would anyone want five kilos of seashells from the Black Sea? What kind of contraband is an old Coke bottle with Russian labeling sealed with a note inside written in Chinese characters? And what are these tiny bones here in your cosmetic bag?

  Yet even while I acknowledge my flotsam origins and lifestyle, constantly washing up and going adrift again, I had to ask myself, when all is said and done, am I simply a beachcomber? Or amIatrue-blue flotsamist? The mysterious, befuddling floating stone had triggered this question, launching me on a quest to discover its origins, and the difference between a mere beachcomber and a flotsamist. This called for plunging into the very essence of flotsam and jetsam.

  I. FLOTSAM’S NOBLE ORIGINS

  Little by little, when the tide receded, we made our way down among the crags until we came to a strip of seashore, and from this point we could see that the island was of large size, its interior being sheltered from storms by the front of the mountain. But what took our wonder was this: on the seashore was amassed the wealth of a thousand wrecks. Scattered here, there, and everywhere, in foam and high and dry, were flotsam and jetsam of richest merchandise, much of it spoiled by the sea, but much more cast high up and still of great value.

  SINBAD THE SAILOR

  THE SIXTH VOYAGE

  One Thousand and One Nights

  Ancient Flotsam

  Who knows what the earliest sailors jettisoned from their outriggers and canoes? Surely anything that impeded forward motion in an emergency was tossed overboard to sink, swim, or bob off on a passing current. In fact, before the concept of synthetics took hold, everything that went into the sea consisted of organic matter, and much of it floated. Surely ancient mariners jettisoned their spoiling dinner leftovers, emptied snuff spittoons, and so forth—offal to the gods. When sailor
s figured out that ballast made for a safer, steadier, and more balanced ride, they used rocks to weigh down their boats. Eventually rocks were replaced with lead, and then manufactured goods. In a pinch, when the ship’s hull was hit by hostile gunfire and a hole resulted, or stormy weather threatened to sink the ship, some or all of the ballast was jettisoned in order to raise the hull high enough to keep the hole out of tempestuous seas. Under the most treacherous circumstances, they jettisoned precious cargo, chests of gold and jewels, even, I dare say, human cargo—which did not usually go willingly into the big drink.

  Most ballast sank, but some, such as bloated corpses, if not gobbled up by scavengers, or snagged and entangled in Davy Jones’s graspy fingers, eventually washed ashore. And so jetsam became flotsam for a time, until it beached—or until it sank and became lagan. Over the eons since Poseidon first thrust his furious trident into solid land, flotsam and jetsam have gained generic status in the vernacular, yet its origins are maritime in nature: Flotsam refers to articles found floating on or slightly beneath the ocean’s surface, some of it washing ashore along the tide line. Flotsam can be human, arriving via the oceans in boats, or washing up as corpses drowned at sea. Or flotsam can be drifting wood, or Nike athletic shoes, refrigerators, television sets, rubber ducks, or any object the sea churns to the surface. What’s important about flotsam is that, at least for a part of its life journey, it floats. Jetsam is whatever is jettisoned into the water, including ballast, cargo, plastic soda bottles, glass fishing net floats, bales of marijuana, soccer balls, hockey gloves, plastic ducks, or dead bodies. If it floats, jetsam then becomes flotsam. If it sinks to the ocean floor, it becomes lagan, such as the remains of ancient shipwrecks littering that watery grave mariners dread: Davy Jones’s locker.

  Little is known about man-made flotsam and jetsam before the era of Europe’s tall ships, but the earliest beachcombers were at least as curious as today’s strandliners and certainly paid heed to what washed up on their beaches. Eskimos dwelling on remote, treeless Arctic islands for centuries constructed their homes entirely from flotsam driftwood, some arriving from as far away as Polynesia. Kayaks, too, were fashioned from driftwood frames upon which sea otter, or seal, hide was stretched taut. One-hundred-percent organic ocean material went into the ancients’ homes and conveyances. Coastal natives throughout the world depended upon this early form of Home Depot delivered via Federal Express—in this case, drifting currents—and so invested the oceans with a powerful “gifting” reputation, though the early gods of the sea weren’t always in a benevolent mood: The sea could turn against a sailor, even against whole coastal communities, its ferocious, often hair-trigger temper attributed to powerful gods dwelling within the rogue waves blown out of proportion by Triton’s fickle conch.

  Ancient Greece identified Poseidon as the temperamental god ruling the watery realm, but then the Romans, who had to own everything, changed Poseidon’s name to Neptune; still the same god with the same surly temper. This is not important, except to point out that a god by any name never deserts his realm.

  Whether pirates’ treasure, a ship’s hull, or a human skeleton, lagan often finds a new purpose as aquatic shelters for sea creatures, at least until an enterprising diver discovers it and hauls the treasure up into a boat. Now it’s loot. Most undersea treasure hunters let old bones alone, either in respect for the dead or because they aren’t worth salvaging. Human bones don’t bring much on the market. Some lagan rests buried beneath ocean sediments until Neptune pitches a tantrum and shoves his little finger into the soup, generating massive undercurrents that rip up sediment and send lagan afloat, tumbling into a shallower current, where the stuff might travel for centuries before sinking again, or breaking up, hurling treasures like pieces of eight tumbling ashore. Flotsam of the gods. Which, naturally, leads to cargo cults.

  The concept of cargo cults was popularized in the film The Gods Must be Crazy, in which an isolated African tribe discovered a Coke bottle that fell from the sky, and believing it had come from the gods, treated it as an object of worship. What Karl Marx called “commodity fetishism” was called “cargo cults” by social anthropologists. Both labels described the nineteenth-century phenomenon of European explorers and missionaries along with their ships and cargo washing up on the shores of Melanesia. Melanesians believed the marvelous Western goods arriving on tall ships were created by their ancestors and sent from the sea, where white people hijacked what rightfully belonged to the Melanesian descendants. The natives reacted by performing rituals including imitating the behavior of the white people in the belief that this mimicry would attract more cargo from their ancestors. They constructed elaborate miniature artifacts of European ships and their inhabitants (and after World War II, when cargo was dropped from aircraft via parachutes, they made miniature planes and airports), believing that new cargo would land on the replicas. They set the miniatures, like shrines, along the tide line and waited for treasures to wash up. And they did. Only problem was that white folk, with their nasty habits and queer religious rites, accompanied the goods.

  Such respect for flotsam is not necessarily infused with religious or apocalyptic inferences. Yet, unlike the Melanesian cargo cults whose interpretation of Europeans washing up in huge boats epitomizes the flotsam fetish, Pacific Islanders believed the Europeans who made sudden appearances on their beaches were actually ghostly spirits of their ancestors returning from their ritual burial grounds at sea. Others thought the pale-skinned beings unloading the gods’ wonderful cargo were at worst hijackers, at best merely the gods’ delivery vehicle—not really humans, more like UPS delivery agents, aliens from the Brown Planet—who had no value beyond delivering the goods. So they killed them.

  Flotsam not only changes lives, but it can also transform an entire community’s world view. Imagine beachcombing on the island where you had lived all your life and finding a stranded crate containing a refrigerator. But you’ve never seen a refrigerator before, don’t understand its purpose, or even why the sea gods sent it to you. But they did, and what the gods send is either good or evil, depending on which god dispatched the item. In your spiritual eschatology, all sea gods are venerable; therefore, what is delivered up from the sea is good, and meant to serve as food, shelter, clothing, tools, art, or even an object worthy of worship. In this case, the refrigerator isn’t applicable to any of your day-to-day needs, and as you caress its smooth finish, its curves and its corners, you perceive it as more than aesthetically pleasing; indeed, you experience a heightened state of mind, a spiritual rush, and recognize that the sea gods have sent you a religious artifact meant to be worshipped. Welcome to the cargo cults.

  God as Flotsam

  As recently as August 2000, a millenarian, or apocalyptic, form of cargo cult sparked to life on a beach in Indonesia’s Moluccas Islands. This one involved God as flotsam, and he seemed to have arrived on the last tide. In his first appearance, God suffered from kasado, a terrible skin condition, and performed humanly impossible feats such as piercing a coconut with a grass straw. In the second instance, when God washed up on the beach, he was apparently suffering from latah, a speech condition similar to Tourette’s syndrome. Cursing, he chased a young boy, threatening him with a knife. Both cases of God as flotsam are hotly debated today, although the second washed-up God may have been a Bugis from Sulawesi. The Bugis tribe, native to Sulawesi, operate a commercial sailing fleet, are Muslim, and are religious and tribal enemies of the minority Christian Moluccans, who discovered the latah-stricken apparition on their beach.

  Oceania in particular, because of its many islands and therefore many beaches, embraces what washes in from the seas as spiritually infused. Usually these beliefs are tied to powerful supernatural beings and to dead ancestors or rulers. Micronesian and Polynesian spiritual beliefs involve cults of gods and heroes. When early Europeans overlaid the natives’ pagan mystical animism with Christianity, the two melded into a sort of polytheistic magical Jesus and Mary cult, all this being win
dow dressing for the natives’ deepest spiritual connection—with the gods of the sea. In Oceanic and Arctic societies, rituals exhort intervention of sea spirits to clear stormy weather, deliver whales, perk up the fishing and life in general. In the Coral Islands, natives believe two sea spirits, Soalal and Mar, capture the souls of the dying and take them to the bottom of the sea to live. Mar is a good spirit who communicates with the living. Soalal is evil and causes illness and sometimes misfortune at sea. When people died from accidents or childbirth, they were buried at sea to minimize their spiritual influence on land. Their bodies were wrapped in mats, weighted, and offered adrift to Soalal. Some sank; others bobbed and floated along on currents that carried their bloating, gaseous corpses to distant beaches where they were hailed by total strangers as the returning bodies of long-lost ancestors. They were prayed over, sometimes lavish parties were thrown for them, and once again they were set adrift until, at long last, they sank for good.

  The lesson here is that proper weights are extremely important, as is knowledge of winds and currents. Every flotsamist knows this. You only want to launch a dead body once.

  This reminds me of a wake I once attended in Finland. It was winter solstice. Snow carpeted the ground. We’d been drinking Finlandia since 11 a.m. in a narrow bar on a Helsinki mews just off a small public park. We were holding a wake for the departed summer. My friend Alpo Suhonen was at the time coach of the Finnish national hockey team. On the third or fourth round, Alpo brought up the subject of burial at sea. This led to my remark on the cultural value of flotsam. The very subject of flotsam so electrified Alpo that he nearly levitated off the bar stool, and we passed two forgettable hours reminiscing over what we’ve plucked off ocean beaches.