Introducing Curtis Cove

I've mentioned in passing that my work lately has expanded beyond one beach. Time to dish on what I've been up to these past several months.

Welcome to Curtis Cove, Biddeford, Maine:

I discovered this place in December 2010. It's at the end of a long, winding, wonderful seashore drive that wends past salt marshes and beautiful homes. The road grows more & more narrow and rustic -- and isolated. Then, rounding a sharp corner bordered by a rip-rap seawall and thick brambles, it ends abruptly at a private dirt access road (the arrow below).

When I got to the end, I hopped out for a look. The cove was private, so I didn't stay long. It should have been a little slice of heaven. An untouched secret shore with rocky headlands at its front, a salt marsh & tidal estuary at its rear. But what I saw shocked me. The entire beach was littered in garbage. Rope, old cups, a balloon, innumerable lobster trap parts, unidentifiable but long-suffering plastic scraps, a tire.

This private, untouristed, unknown cove was a dump -- a huge collection spot for ocean-borne garbage. I took some pictures, and left heavy-hearted.

Fast-forward to Fall 2011, when I came across amazing news. The family that owned the whole 97-acre peninsula was selling. To a group of conservation organizations. One of the last undeveloped coastal gems in southern Maine was going to be preserved forever! And I just might have a chance to get back onto Curtis Cove to have a real look.

In the end, the peninsula, "Timber Point," came into the hands of the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge. I met with the refuge management, discussed my flotsam work with them, and suggested that Curtis Cove would be an ideal spot to see -- really see -- what's out there in the Gulf of Maine. And happily they agreed! Within weeks my permits had been signed & granted.

I was in!

On January 1, 2012, I visited Curtis Cove for the first time as a licensed Flotsam Diarist. I scouted the land and decided on a plan of attack for studying the beach. With the heavy influx of flotsam, I decided to focus on a 150-foot wedge of shoreline along the northern part of the cove. And I got to work. Thanks to a ridiculously mild winter, I was able to spend January and half of February cleaning off the age-old debris, finally getting to a clean "baseline" on February 22.

Since then, I've been returning weekly to scour the same 150-foot stretch of beach and see what's come in.

The results have been gobsmacking.

This is 1325 feet of fishing rope. More than 1/4 mile of rope, 757 individual pieces, washed in between February 29 and May 17. And it shows no signs of stopping, or slowing.

But far beyond just rope is the assortment of other debris, almost all plastic. A few examples. February 29:

Or March 7:

Or March 13:

Or the huge shocker, March 30:

On March 30 alone I collected 526 pieces of garbage -- 398 of them were little scraps of vinyl coating torn from derelict & rusting lobster traps. At least half a million derelict traps now rest on the floor of the Gulf of Maine. Each trap will release over a thousand of these vinyl scraps by the time it's done disintegrating. They don't go away.

Curtis Cove has always been a natural collection point of ocean debris. Seaweed still washes in two feet thick if the weather's right. As it decays (the nose won't miss this), it pours an amazing amount of nutrients back into the soil and the water. This rich environment supports wonderful tide pools, choc-a-bloc with life and diversity.

A nudibranch -- a shell-less snail

A gunnel, or "rock eel"

When the gulls bobbing on the incoming tide cry... or the geese soar by overhead straight as an arrow... or the surf roars as it breaks on the distant ledge at the head of the cove... or you discover a new creature you've never seen before... that's when you realize that this is a special place.

And when you see a gorgeous tide pool littered with modern junk:

...that's when you realize that the special places in the world are under assault. From our plastic lifestyle. And that this has to change. Curtis Cove is now a wildlife refuge. A place protected from the modern world. But there is no protection from what the modern world has dumped into the sea.

It's not really possible to overstate how badly the Gulf of Maine is being abused by persistent plastic garbage. But now that I have Curtis Cove to visit week after week, it is possible to shine a bright & searing light on it.

Collection Report Dec 1-2, 2010

Welcome back to Bay View beach, Saco, Maine. December 1 was mild, mid-40s, but blustery. (In fact, a gust clocked at 41 mph.) Gray clouds were gathering, so I snuck in before the rains -- and the next high tide.

The flats at low tide

Remember the two tide lines & the berm of just one week before? All that stuff I thought I was figuring out about how the contour of the beach was changing? Well, do you see any of that in the picture below?

Me neither

Clearly I have a lot to learn about how wind & tide, current & rain really behave. Here's one thing I did discover. The winds buffeting me on Dec. 1 were largely from the SE; they were blowing in, fiercely at times, off the ocean. Pushing the tide unnaturally high, and blasting the heck out of the prior week's landscape.

At first I thought this meant another bumper crop of debris, fishing rope, boats, you name it. But it wasn't to be. Bay View had been assaulted by forces that can bury 3 feet of fishing rope without a thought.

What do you mean three feet?

Oh, that's what you mean.

It was dumb luck that I found that bit of rope. Most anything else? Blown away or buried deep. In the end, my trash bags were very light.

On December 2, I decided to take another quick swing by. The lay of the land looked much the same. The wind had raised foot-high sand drifts in places. And did other weird things.

Sand blows, but leaf doesn't blow?

When I spotted this leaf, I knew this week's collection would be hopeless. A light, dry leaf didn't blow away, but the sand did blow across and nearly cover it. WTH?

A short walk up Zones N & S proved I was right. Very little debris to be found. Not that it wasn't there, just that it couldn't be seen.

So, a collection of Zone N:

37 finds:

• Building materials: 3 (2 fence slats, 1 chunk of asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 6 (inc. a piece from the boat insulation)
• Fishing misc.: 8 (7 scraps of rope, 1 claw band)
• Food-related plastics: 2 (bottle caps)
• Food-related metal/glass: 4 (aluminum can, can scrap, 2 bits of sea glass)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 11 (3 scraps of packaging, 2 bits of grocery bags, 3 hard plastic scraps, 1 scrap of boundary tape, 1 tiny bit of balloon, 1 sm. red hard plastic bit)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 1
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 2 (scrap of fabric, freshly-lost tennis ball (dog toy?))

A bunch of usual suspects. Though, to be honest, 37 is more than I thought I'd collected. It doesn't take long to add up.

On to Zone S:

18 finds:

• Building materials: 2 (fence slat, chunk of asphalt)
• Foam/Styrofoam: 4
• Fishing misc.: 4 (shotgun shell wadding, 2 bits of rope, claw band)
• Food-related plastics: 0
• Food-related metal/glass: 0
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 8 (bag scrap, green soldier, tampon applicator, bandaid, tie-band, clear scrap, green scrap, yellow scrap)
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 0
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

Quick closeup of the small, but delightfully varied, non-food plastics:

Would be OK not finding another tampon applicator

So this week, I was well & truly schooled. Nov. 24-25 had put assumptions in my head that didn't last seven days. Which just proves that it might be a bit early for me to be making assumptions. Still, every idea that we get wrong gets us one step closer to getting it right.

Besides, I like a world that's full of surprises.

Losing Yourself

The Diaries came about from raw emotion. Love for my daughter, sadness and anger at a polluted beach, hope of making a difference -- fear of living a life that didn't make a difference.

My time spent beachcombing is also filled with emotion, and wonder. Not to mention a sensory cornucopia -- the roar of the surf, the texture of the sand, the scent of salt, the sight of a gull diving down right behind me to "recycle" a small, shiny, dead fish that had just washed up seconds before. The air bubbles escaping from underground as a wave recedes.

Plus a thousand other things that don't register as strongly in my memory.

We've all got the things that we're attuned to -- that matter to us, that move us. We are very much a product of our experiences, and our surroundings. For some it's the fishing fleets on the horizon that speak to them. I don't recall whether there have been any fishing boats out in the water -- they didn't register. But I do remember the tiny ripples of fresh sand running in a winding ribbon along the beach where the recent high-tide had just laid them.

They're like snowflakes. Alone, they're helpless & fragile. But given time, they can utterly reshape a landscape. (Gentle summer waves add sand to a beach - burying what's there under fresh layers. Strong, storm-fed winter waves tend to erode the beach, exposing deep layers and buried flotsam.)

All of which brings a problem for a Flotsam Diarist: You have to constantly be on guard against letting your own biases dictate what you look for, what you collect -- even what you see. At Ocean Park, I rarely picked up wooden slats, or pieces of napkin, or little chunks of asphalt and concrete. I don't even remember if I saw any. I wasn't interested. Trouble is, I have to be. This isn't the "Plastics Diaries" -- it's supposed to be a chronicle of all human debris. It's all part of the story. And even if, say, a few pieces of shaped wooden lathe or half a brick don't float my boat, they're no less relevant to the story.

So, doing this work right means being objective. It means losing myself.

And it's funny, as I learn to lose myself when I walk the beach at Bay View, I'm amazed at how much more I see. And that in itself is a valuable lesson.

Baseline: Collection Report June 15/16-2010

Discovering Bay View brought a lot to the table: nearby beach; distinct high-traffic and quiet zones; no industrial disturbances. A real find and a great location for a budding beachcomber.

But location is only half the game. Clueing in about how & why debris ends up on a beach means knowing just what's there from week to week. (An obvious concept that still took me a couple months to learn.) So I resolved to pick up every last scrap of trash that I could find, each trip. A burden? For me, the scent of saltwater carried on the crisp morning air, and the rhythmic crashing of the ocean in my ears, is anything but.

So, last week I created my baseline. On 6/15 I scoured the quiet, "S" section of Bay View beach, picking up every piece of manmade debris I could find on the surface. Results:

53 finds:

• Building materials: 6
• Foam/Styrofoam: 14
• Fishing rope: 3
• Fishing misc.: 2 (inc. 1 claw band, lobster trap tag not associated with any trap found yet)
• Food-related plastics: 5
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 11
• Cigarette filters: 9
• Unique: 3 (cardboard package; Y-shaped plastic... thing; "Sea Bass" fish fillet knife sheath)

No clue whether the plastic thingy is a toy, or a disposable tear-off cap to a bottle, or what. Thoughts?

The knife sheath was neat, given all the clamming and shoreline fishing that I've witnessed -- and given its age & wear. Otherwise, there was little that stuck out, except maybe the bits of broken red balloon. How many are released every year, to explode high in the sky and cascade to the ground who-knows-where?

 The next morning, 6/16, I hit the "N" section:

A true mother lode! 271 finds in all:

• Building materials: 14
• Foam/Styrofoam: 17
• Fishing rope: 20
• Fish misc/claw bands: 14 (inc. 8 claw bands)
• Food-related plastics: 33 (inc. 7 straws/stirrers, 2 forks, PB cracker wrapper, 5 bottle caps, 2 ringpops)
• Non-food/unknown plastics: 44 (inc. Bubblemaker cap, Trojan wrapper, adult & kid bandids, ChapStick)
• Cigarette filters: 95 (!)
• Paper, identifiable: 10 (inc. dryclean tag, Whole Foods napkin, Hannaford coupon, Walmart receipt 5/26/10) 
• Paper, unidentifiable: 17 (inc. 5 pieces of bonfire cardboard)
• Misc./unique: 7 (flipflop, soda can, 2 can scraps, 2 wads of gum, pillowcase scrap)

And there we go. Two sections of a southern Maine beach, picked as clean as possible. Some eye-openers among the bags too. 104 cigarette filters total, that blew me away. The Walmart receipt was interesting -- it shows that even fragile paper withstands exposure to sun & storm for weeks at least. But what really gets me is the breadth of finds. It's not just the expected "beach" stuff. It's a full slice of life -- commerce, industry, retail, sex, household, food, bad habits, even a late-night bonfire or two. This little stretch of little-traveled shore is a snapshot of American life.

At any rate, now the fun can really begin. I left my "N" and "S" sections as trash-free as I could. I've got my baseline. This week I'll be going back. And I'm actually excited to see what's arrived in the interim.

How weird is that?