Looking and Seeing

How's this for a story.

Early summer, at the height of the Roman empire, the commander of a Roman frontier fort receives word that he and his troops are being sent far away to fight a new war. The fort becomes a beehive of activity. Soldiers hurriedly pack up all their goods, repair what they can, dispose of what they can't. Tents are patched, shoes re-soled, weaponry honed.

As one of the final acts before shipping out, servants round up the commander's old paperwork and pile it in a heap in the livestock yard. They set a bonfire and then leave the fort, and their old lives, behind. A typical storm brews in the hills, dousing the bonfire before it's done its work. But by then there's nobody left to relight it.

The fort sits abandoned through the rest of the summer and into fall. Leaves blow into the buildings, squirrels hide acorn stashes amid the rush floors. But before winter hunger sends them back to collect their hoard, the next army garrison arrives, half-heartedly knocks down & covers the old fort, and starts to build its new home there.

This isn't a fantasy or a novel. This happened. The year was AD 105. The place, Vindolanda, in what is now northern England. Thanks to thick Northumbrian clay, remains like acorns, leaves, straw carpet, leather shoe soles, oak joists & floors, iron tools, animal dung & stable flies, and thin wooden postcard-sized writing tablets survived some 1900 years to tell the tale.

The hobnailed leather shoe sole of a Roman soldier that
I excavated at Vindolanda in 2005; quite a thrill!

The famous Vindolanda "birthday invitation" from the wife
of one fort's commander to another's; circa AD 100

These artifacts didn't reveal their secrets all by themselves. Tireless work by archaeologists, conservationists, linguists, and historians over decades has pieced the details together. Because of the care they have taken to fit everything in its place, they now have a story of real, named people and real life on the very frontier of "civilization" from an ancient time.

When I started the Flotsam Diaries, now almost two years ago, I realized that studying flotsam was, in essence, just another form of archaeology. The physical remains of human activity. The archaeologist in me knew -- and knows -- that each thing that washes up isn't just junk. It's got a story to tell. The trick is learning how to read the story.

When, where, and how was it lost? What did it encounter while it was out there in the deep? What did its path to my shore look like? What combination of forces finally brought it out of the depths and amid the sand at my feet?

Some items offer tantalizing clues for where to start:

40+ of these washed up over a few weeks in summer '11 --
suggesting a much larger dump/accident in Canadian waters

Others tell tales of currents and gyres and the persistence of modern plastics:

4 million of these escaped from Hooksett, NH's sewage plant
in March '11; to reach so far north they must have first flowed
east, caught a Gulf of Maine mini-gyre, and got tossed back

Tens or hundreds of thousands of those disks are still unaccounted for. They're polyethylene, and float easily on the surface of seawater. They will probably be washing up on both sides of the Atlantic for years to come. The ones I find still look brand new, after 10 months in the harsh salty sea.

Other artifacts I find have spent long years in the watery grave.

The aluminum lid to a steel Schlitz beer can, in a style only
used from 1973 to 1975; it finally washed up in October 2011

Poignantly, many speak to one of the big problems of modern plastic junk in the ocean:

This Carmex tube washed up yesterday; punctures and
half-moon bitemarks on it are similar to many plastics I find

Some ocean fish species known to ingest (not just bite, but swallow and consume) plastic: menhaden, herring, rockling, pollock, silverside, croaker, tautog, goby, grubby, seasnail, flounder, cod, whiting, perch, bass, dolphin, wahoo, tunny, tuna, searobin, pinfish, spot, mullet. (Great write-up of the known science in a PDF file here.)

About 2/3 of the 630 lobster claw bands that I've collected have what the Gulf of Maine Research Institute has tentatively identified as cunner bite marks. It's not known if cunner ingest plastic, or just bite and reject. The point is, the ocean is brimming with toxic plastic garbage, and with sea creatures up and down the food chain that eat it.

---

All of the above to say, there's a difference between just looking at a piece of washed-in debris, and actually seeing it. Discovering the stories it has to tell. It's impossibly sad that we've polluted our oceans so much in such a short amount of time. That every tide brings plastics and other debris in with it. But if that's the case, the least we can do is really take the time & energy to see it. And to learn from it.

You Are(n't) What You Do

A few years ago, visiting Hadrian's Wall Country in northern England, I was talking with the landlord at the local pub.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/45501032@N00/3726553037/

(Twice Brewed Inn -- a must-visit if you're in the area, especially for Tuesday Quiz Nights.) Something he said stuck with me - when Americans first meet at the pub, invariably they ask, "So, what do you do?" He said, "Whereas we Brits, we don't care!" And it's true. You can sit at a table full of Englishmen and women, share pints, tell stories, build memories, have a blast -- and never have a clue what half the people's day jobs are.

What "I do" to earn a living is copyedit college-level computer science texts. A new graphic design suite, the new version of Office, or of Windows itself -- the textbooks that teach these things to students, I make sure the words are right.

It's good work, and often interesting, though I've been at it for years. It's nice to be a fly on the wall, to get a sneak-peek at new software, to learn a little bit better how my own computer works.

But I am not a copyeditor. If someone asks me "What do you do?" the answer won't get them much closer to who I am.

Which is why the past few months of The Flotsam Diaries have been so eye-opening. Because I'm finding, this is who I am. Wherever I wander, I see bits & bobs lying in the gutter or the side of the road or a sand dune. Today our family visited a few state parks in Mid-Coast Maine. I couldn't leave Reid State Park without collecting all the jagged pieces of someone's water gun lying near our beach towel.

Before going to bed I noodle ideas for the Diaries, new posts I want to make, ways to try to make a difference. I want to learn how stuff gets on the beach, how long it will stay, what kind of damage it's doing -- both in my lifetime and in my daughter's and her descendants'.

Friends and family now always ask what I've found, what the most interesting piece was, something Flotsam Diaries-related. I'm awful at answering; whatever eloquence (or even basic literacy) I muster on the page evaporates when I open my mouth. But I'm working on it.

Like I've mentioned, I'm an archaeologist at heart. It's my first love. And a surprising lot of the Flotsam Diaries is still the archaeologist that courses through me. Archaeology is the study of the physical remains of human activity. Well, what else is flotsam?

But it's funny how life happens. How it pulls you.

When I first held my little newborn girl now almost 3 1/2 years ago, I was just a scared guy with a kid. Now I'm a dad. I don't know how or when it happened -- it just did. In the same way, when I picked up my first bag of flotsam at Ocean Park in March this year, I was just a guy with a trash bag. Now I'm a Flotsam Diarist. I still have no idea what that actually means in the long-run. But I know that I'm viewing the world now in a completely different way than I once did.

And I like it.

Collection Report July 6-7, 2010

(Broke this one into two days, coz 7/6 pinged the mercury at 82 degrees before 7:30AM.)

Bay View public beach, Saco, Maine, following the fabled 4th of July weekend. And a sweltering one at that. The aftermath was going to be interesting, for sure.

First, new sign on the lifeguard station:

Effective?

A new one-week record for cigarette butts from zone N suggests otherwise. But if you get lemons, make lemonade. This week's "bounty" got me thinking of a new way to look at cig waste. I started separating out filters that looked ocean-borne (paper wrapper missing, bleached/washed filter). It may be possible to tease out a bit more of the story from these little pockets of poison. (Yes, appearances can deceive, which is why I'm already noodling ways to test whether a filter has been immersed in seawater.)

All told, predictable remains from a busy week. Zone N, July 6:

304 finds in total:

• Building materials: 2
• Foam/Styrofoam: 12
• Fishing misc: 3 (1 rope, two fairly fresh claw bands)
• Food-related plastics: 59
• Food-related metal/glass: 8
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 41 (inc., 2 Trojan wrappers and 1 photographed but uncollected Trojan... gack; untossed bag of dog poop... gack; yellow hair roller, pail handle, 3 bandaids, 2 small pieces of broken vinyl from a lobster trap cage, Blistex tube, Home Depot price tag for a sling chair -- $19.98!)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 121 (112 local cigs, 8 likely ocean-borne, 1 wrapper)
• Paper/wood: 25 (inc. Subway sandwich wrapper, Slush Puppie cup, Earl & Wilson beach towel tag, beach hut instructions, Skimboard user guide, AutoZone receipt, matchbox)
• Misc./unique: 33 (23 firework pieces, one boy's jersey, one flipflop, one toddler "water shoe," one black sock, one white sock, one piece of rubber sole, 3 plastic tie-bands, 1 kite string/handle)

Zone S (July 7) was, as usual, much cleaner, and in many ways much more interesting.

48 finds:

• Building materials: 5
• Foam/Styrofoam: 1
• Fishing misc.: 1 (rubber lobster trap bumper)
• Food-related plastics: 3
• Food-related metals/glass: 3
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 7
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 25 (17 local cigs, 7 likely ocean-borne, 1 wrapper)
• Paper/wood: 2
• Misc./unique: 1 (piece of firework)

Again, less foot traffic = less disturbance. Stuff that washes in doesn't move around as much as at zone N. It's still got its context. I managed to find many pieces lying at high-tide line right where the sea had last dumped them:

What does ocean-tumbled plastic and cigarette waste look like? Just like these things. Context!

So, the celebration of our nation's founding brought extra waste and litter to a beautiful beach. But it also brought more opportunities to learn. Which is, after all, the point.

Re-Education, Part 1

Context. Another archaeology term. It means that an artefact's true value comes from understanding how, when, and why it ended up where it did. The same is true of flotsam. Finding a piece of trash is great. But only by knowing the how, when, and why will it tell you its whole story.

My initial plan was simple: pick an area of a beach I love, walk up and down the high-tide mark for a couple blocks, collect whatever trash I notice, catalog it, report it. And then -- most important -- learn something from it.

I posted my March 8 & March 19 finds to this blog a month ago. To any who think I then quit, oh no. Below are results of my April 3 haul:

My half-hour two-block stroll on April 3 netted me: Several pounds of commercial fishing rope, an unidentified burlap scrap, 8 scraps of aluminum can, 24 lobster claw bands, a plastic cup, two cup lids, a plastic knife, two plastic forks, various scraps of cups & plates, a popped balloon enmeshed in kelp, a decayed rubber baseball, a shotgun shell, two beach umbrella bases, some newspaper, a 10-inch-tall oil filter, part of a "No Trespassing" sign, and a few bits of unidentified molded plastic.

I have more plastic bags of trash down in the shed waiting to be cataloged, from 4/14, 4/20, 5/11, 5/18, 6/2.

One problem: My initial plan? It kind of sucked. The story lacks context. Turns out, I didn't have very good controls at all. Instead, my plan let in too many holes -- too many variables -- to actually say much.*

Hole #1: Randomness -- Picking casually, instead of fully clearing an area, hamstrings me. Did that oil filter arrive between 3/19 and 4/3? Or was it there long before? No idea. Did it wash in by normal waves? By a storm? Get tossed intentionally? No clue.

Hole #2: Outside influence, small-scale -- There may be others collecting trash. And for sure there are others collecting kelp (with its debris) to use as compost. So even if I collected everything I found, does that mean I've collected everything that was there? No idea.

Hole #3: Outside influence, large-scale -- Tractors now hit the beach frequently, and they're drastically churning & changing the landscape. As of 6/8, most (not all) of the lobster traps have been hauled off. If I had started my hunt this week, there would be much less meeting my eye than there was in March. What else have they been hauling away or burying? No clue.

In the end, my first method was hopelessly lacking in controls. It left me unsure of when debris arrived, how it arrived, and how much of it arrived. It's time for a new approach, and I think I've found it. Stay tuned.

-----------------------------------------------

* Lest this seem all doom & gloom, the past couple of months have opened my eyes in -amazing- new ways. And the trash itself has at least spawned good questions, if not always good answers. The aluminum can scraps, for example. By studying them, I'm learning that the insides are mostly intact. They've been eaten away from the outside. Something besides seawater (which obviously sloshes around inside -and- outside a can) may be the culprit that's rotting these cans down. More to follow.

Experimental archaeology

Instead of just thinking about how people used to make tools, build walls, create things, archaeologists are now actually doing it themselves. By experimenting, hands-on, they've overturned many venerated theories, and opened up new ones. It's an exciting field that has cast new light on everything from how Bronze Age Britons built Stonehenge to why Civil War weaponry & tactics were so deadly.

It's also useful for understanding how & why artefacts decay -- how they meet their end. I'm excited now to be tossing my hat in the ring.

I had asked a question about aluminum cans rotting at the beach.

I wanted to learn just what makes a soda can break down like the ones I had collected, and how long it really takes. It turns out, there are actually some really interesting experiments with how to corrode aluminum cans. But nothing that I found showed the natural effects of beach and ocean and salt.

So I decided to do an experiment of my own. From what I had learned, it seemed a can doesn't rot just because of seawater -- it also needs iron nearby to help it corrode. This seemed a good place to start my test. I would run a controlled experiment -- I'd put two cans in two buckets of seawater. One bucket would have iron nails in it, the other wouldn't.

This morning I grabbed an empty 5-gallon bucket from our condo's basement, went to Ocean Park, and filled it up in the ocean. I stopped at Hannaford's and picked up a 12-pack of ginger ale, then headed home. Cut the tops off of two milk jugs, emptied two of the cans (but left them unwashed to better simulate a can tossed out at the beach), and grabbed a handful of nails from the toolbox.

At 9:15AM, 5/25/2010, I filled each milk jug up with 2 1/2 quarts of the seawater, dumped the nails into one of the jugs, and put one can in each jug.

Lastly, I put a little clingwrap lightly over each jug to slow evaporation but still allow oxygen from the air to get in, and set the jugs off in a corner.

The next step is simple -- just wait and see what happens. Maybe nothing, maybe an answer. Stay tuned!

Details, details - Part 1

I'm an archaeologist at heart -- if not by profession. I love the forensics of it -- taking the tiniest shreds of physical evidence and trying to tease the truth from them. There's an irony that if this bag of trash were from 2,000 years ago, I'd be thrilled to pieces. But it's not ancient. And seeing it isn't a thrill.

Still, just as with pottery shards, coins, nails, and other "small finds" at an archaeological dig, this modern trash is evidence. And it has a story to tell; it's just a question of learning how to read it.

So a little more detail about the bag collected on March 19.

Some things don't take much detective work -- such as the remnants of somebody's trip to Dairy Queen.

But some things do.

132 of these rubber-bandy things in my first bag. 31 here in this bag. What on earth? Well, there was a big clue in the huge amount of trawler rope and broken traps from commercial fishing fleets. Plus, I remembered many trips to Hannaford's, with my daughter waving hi to all the lobsters scrunched in their tank. Their claws were tightly banded so they wouldn't snap and maul or murder each other.

And if there were any doubt left, a clean-up of my finds revealed:

It's not hard to picture the scene. Lobster boat crew racing to get the bands on their newly-hauled catch. It's a dangerous job. A lobster pinch can tear the flesh off of a finger, and even badly bruise a gloved hand. Not to mention lobsters wounding each other and rendering the catch worthless.

It's also not hard to picture hundreds -- thousands -- of these little bands going overboard. Who would give a second thought to a little rubber band? Just grab another one. They're sold in bulk, all over the world. (How many bands -do- you get for a 25 lb. carton?) If you Google "lobster bands" you get some 2,840 hits. It's a big business.

Sadly, as I was learning with my beach-combing, these lost bands don't sink to the bottom of the ocean, to be covered by sediment and become future fossils. They don't melt into nothing, disappearing back from where they came. They simply don't go away.