Christmas Wishes

This will mark my third Christmas as a Flotsam Diarist.

My third Christmas seeing the world through a different set of eyes. Eyes that seek out -- and thrill to find -- the unexpected connections in our world. Between nature's beauty & bounty and the threads we weave as we build our lives. Eyes that spy a glimmering grain of sand in my daughter's shovel on the beach and imagine it once high and proud on a now-lost mountainside. Eyes that see springtime rivers running strong with snowmelt, emptying into churning seas, nutrients mixing and spawning incredible plankton blooms. Blooms that feed an ocean and give us every second breath of life we take.

Eyes that grimace & wince at needless waste, thoughtless pollution, the harm we sow which our children and grandchildren will reap. Eyes that study the staggering costs of things we've been taught to call "cheap." That see, week after week, a gorgeous deserted cove ruined with newly-laid cast-offs of modern life.

I think of the incredible gift of being aware of the beauty around us, of a past that stretches back impossibly far, or a distant future that we are building today -- this very minute -- at the same time that it's molding and building us. The gift of knowing that there are forces far beyond us, and also that the smallest person can be the snowflake that starts the avalanche.

We may be the only species on Earth with the ability to ruin Earth. But we're also the only species that can appreciate it. To well up with emotion at a pink & golden sunrise; or feel the pull of the sea as we walk an undiscovered and unmarred stretch of shore; or smell the salt air and think on our distant ancestors and our distant descendants doing the same. To burst with the need to create art & song & beauty that had never before existed, in much the same way as we had never before existed.

To become bigger than the moment, bigger than we are.

To me, Christmas is a message of hope. A message that love and light are true things; that ugliness and shadow are mockeries that can't touch or harm those eternal truths. It's a message that the holiest and the highest could rest within a human heart. And that if we look inside, and then look outside again with new eyes, we might see glimpses of what we're all searching for. Guideposts.

The Flotsam Diaries isn't what I do; it's who I am. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

To you and yours, a very Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays!

XO

The Living Shore

Today at Curtis Cove, I saw a rare treat:

Air volcanoes! (Or more prosaically, "blisters.)

The sand piled up on any given beach isn't a static, solid block. It's utterly filled with spaces and gaps. When the tide goes out, the water that had been in those gaps is replaced by air from the atmosphere. When the tide comes back in, that air has to go somewhere. As the tide rises and the water table at the beach rises, the air gets compressed and forced upward. Usually it escapes easily, leaving thousands of tell-tale "nail holes" dotting the sand just behind the high-tide line:

From: http://coastalcare.org/educate/exploring-the-sand/

But in some conditions, the air can't escape so easily. If the surface of the sand is very fine, smooth, undisturbed, it can become "cemented" by salt crystals (or kissed by frost) -- making a (largely) impermeable sheet. The air becomes compressed, and actually forces & bulges its way upward as each wave slams against the shore. Eventually it bursts through in more pronounced nail holes, and leaves the blistered landscape behind.

Beaches -- and the science of beaches -- are amazing things.

For a great read on things you can look for at your beach, check out "Exploring the Sand" from CoastalCare.org and Dr. Orrin Pilkey.

Curtis Cove Report - Oct 6, 2012

Saturday, October 6. 10:15AM. A bright morning inland, misty with a seabreeze at low-tide. Temps in the low 60s. A little overnight drizzle--most obvious at the high-tide line.

Clues in the sand

There was good sorting of wrack & debris. And enough energy in a couple tides to push up and over the foreshore "barrier" onto the high ground beyond. Overall? Just a beautiful day to be at a breezy, deserted beach. A day of snail shell graveyards...

Also well-sorted into this one "nest" 

Beautiful balls of quartz...

Once a mountain-root, now beach rubble

Violet rivulets running through wrack-stained sand...

Unfiltered, it really looked like this!

And one of the few pieces of local litter I've found here in the past 10 months...

Hope they enjoyed the view

Amid the wrack there was definitely an uptick in what washed in. I found...

29 pcs of rope, about 26 ft total

103 pcs of nonrope debris

132 finds:

• Bldg material/furniture: 0
• Foam/styrofoam: 1
• Fishing rope/net: 29
• Fishing misc.: 69 (52 lobster trap vinyl scraps, 9 trap parts, 2 bait bags, 5 claw bands, fishing line)
• Food-related plastics: 8 (bottlecap o-ring, 5 cup scraps, food wrapper, straw)
• Food-related glass/metal: 3 (fresh aluminum can, old can top, sea glass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 12 (3 balloon string, latex balloon neck, cigarette, bandaid, bag scrap, 2 cords, silicone strip, flower tag, umbrella base)
• Scrap plastics: 10 (4 > 1" , 6 < 1" )
• Paper/wood: 0
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 0

The numbers were definitely up. And it was all the usual. Including the fact that about 3/4 of it was lobster-fishing debris. No surprise. In the Gulf of Maine as many as one million lost, derelict traps are rotting on the seabed right now. Our legacy to our grandkids.

The mists actually picked up throughout my collection. A lot of moisture pulled in from the sea was gathering into clouds inland, and the drive home was a gray and ominous one. Neat to have been there to see it happen.

Running YTD counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 9536
• Pcs fishing rope -- 1951
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 4422

Curtis Cove Report - Sep 27, 2012

Thursday, September 27, 2012, 1:30PM. Hour and a half before low tide. My first autumn visit to the cove.

One final hurrah

This was a day of dragonflies, white butterflies, honeybees. Color. The last bits of life and warmth before the end. Even the rockpools teemed with vibrance & life!

Look closely, you'll see at least a dozen krill in this pic

The past week saw some seriously windy days inland. But the waves here at the beach hadn't crested very high. And a lot of blow-down spoke of winds howling offshore, not on. The same blow-down also revealed at least a couple once-buried goodies.

I see you, bait bag!

The sorting was better this week than last. But there were still jumbles of rock massed here and there -- including an impressive rock wall built up at the back of the southern foreshore.

Chock-a-block with new & old wrack

So, what did all that vibrancy & energy mean for debris? Well, this is one clue:

The wrong colors

It was going to be a bigger day than last week. Here's what I ended up with:

33 pcs of rope, about 30 ft total

93 pcs of nonrope debris

126 finds:

• Bldg material/furniture: 0
• Foam/styrofoam: 1
• Fishing rope/net: 33
• Fishing misc.: 45 (22 vinyl coating scraps, 3 bait bags, 2 bumpers, 4 trap parts, 3 trap tags, 2 fishing lines, 6 claw bands, shotgun shell, poly/rubber glove scrap, shotgun shell wadding)
• Food-related plastics: 11 (bottle scrap, 2 bottlecaps, 7 cup scraps, food wrapper scrap)
• Food-related glass/metal: 1 (beer bottle)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 14 (mylar balloon, 2 trash bag scraps, 5 cords, duct tape, plug, lock cover (?), 2 cable ties, mouse rollerball)
• Scrap plastics: 19 ( 11 > 1" , 8 < 1" )
• Paper/wood: 0
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 2 (metal clip, sock scrap)

2 1/2 times the amount of debris this week compared to the previous. And this week was also interesting both for how large many of the scraps were, and for how lightweight.

The soak tank

Curtis Cove is actually notable for how much debris comes in from the seafloor. So to have this much floatable this week? Something strange in the winds & waves, for sure.

Also this week, my most unexpected find yet:

Hello World!

Yes, an old-school rubber mouse ball. If you can imagine it, you can imagine it in the ocean.

Running YTD counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 9404
• Pcs fishing rope -- 1922
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 4370

Curtis Cove Report - Sep 20, 2012

Thursday, September 20, 2012. 8:45AM. Greetings, from a lingering Maine summer.

Sun-kissed beach roses and other wildflowers greeted me this morning. Low tide, deserted shores, and clean bright skies:

A beautiful morning.

Over the previous few days big storms and huge winds had come through. The sand "cliffs" high on the foreshore were knocked and dragged back over. Fresh wrack ripped from the cove's basin lay scattered and smeared up and down the beach.

Messy, messy!

Yet it was a surprisingly light day for debris. The lightest so far this year. The energy that brought new wrack onto the beach also spent much time dragging that wrack (and its plastics) back down the foreshore.

Outflow

The high tides weren't high enough to dump any debris on the flat backshore. Instead, it came to rest on the sloping foreshore, where most was pulled out to sea again by the offshore winds and receding tide.

The finds:

13 pcs of rope, about 15 ft total

37 pcs of non-rope debris

50 finds:

• Bldg material/furniture: 0
• Foam/styrofoam: 0
• Fishing rope/net: 13
• Fishing misc.: 14 (bait bag, fishing line, trap tag, 8 vinyl trap coating scraps, 2 trap parts, claw band)
• Food-related plastics: 12 (8 cup/top scraps, bottlecap o-ring, cutlery handle, 2 straw scraps)
• Food-related glass/metal: 2 (aluminum can base, sea glass)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 3 (baggie, strapping, tape)
• Scrap plastics: 3 ( all < 1" )
• Paper/wood: 0
• Non-plastic misc./unique: 3 (2 scraps, cord)

All the usual culprits. Just less of them this week. Which left me more time to look at the beautiful.

Sandpiper tracks

Shaggy beach cobbles

What's more beautiful than life? Tenacious, wonderful life.

Running YTD counts:

• Total pcs of litter -- 9278
• Pcs fishing rope -- 1889
• Vinyl lobster-trap scraps -- 4348