Microwunderkammer

 Parental Artifact #7–a glass fishing-net float.

Some families have ties to the sea; ours has ties to the beach. I grew up in Pacific Palisades, a town name-checked by The Beach Boys in “Surfin’ USA.” My dad grew up in a house on 2nd Street in Santa Monica, two streets over from the beach. While my mom grew up in a more desert setting, from high school on, she lived near the ocean. My parents met in an outing club in college at Berkeley, and there are lots of old pictures of them at one beach or another.

When my dad was in graduate school in the 1950’s in Seattle, my parents continued going to the beach. My dad took up fishing, but the main thing they did was to hike on the beach, collect interesting driftwood, and maybe the occasional bit of striking flotsam. The nature of the Pacific Ocean is that currents swirl north off the coast of Japan, sweep eastwards past Kamchatka and the Aleutians, then down south along British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon (This is how, years after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, a Torii from Isukushima washed ashore in Oregon). Plastics were not so common then, and cork may not have been readily available in Japan. However, something was necessary to provide buoyancy for fishing nets in the Japanese fishing fleet. The solution was to make large hollow spheres out of thick, cheap glass.

There must have been tens of thousands of these in service at the time. Inevitably, some broke free of their nets, and bobbed, wobbled, and floated on a leisurely roundabout that eventually brought them to the Pacific coast of Washington and Oregon. Some of these orbs survived pounding surf and and rocky shingles and landed intact on beaches where my parents walked. For beachcombers such as they, these glass orbs were prized trophies, with their exotic origin and miraculous journey. Two decades later, during my youth, they still had these trophies on display in our living room, along with a very large, elegantly labeled saké bottle that had also floated over from Japan.

In the early ‘70’s, my dad was able to take a sabbatical year, and the entire family decamped to Dunedin, New Zealand, home of the University of Otago. I was only five at the time, and I don’t remember much, but I do remember the beaches. They were the best. Accessed by beautiful walks through fields of lupines, or wretched walks through gorse, the beaches had just the right balance of craggy rocks and broad sand, lots and lots of seashells, tidepools, seaweed, shorebirds, weird and interesting Maori names—even though I was only five, I already knew enough of beaches to appreciate that every single thing was different.

One drive in the little blue Morris took us to Moerake Beach. Like the Washington beaches my parents walked before their life was complicated by children, Moerake Beach also has notable spheres. These, however, are natural, and native to the place. The geology of the shore produces large, spherical concretions, over a meter in diameter. These lay scattered along the beach, singly and in bunches, high on the beach and almost buried in the surf. They are hilariously intriguing for a beach-happy five year old. Some of them have cracked open, revealing an inside full of fissures and gaps, some of which hold miniature tidepool ecosystems. There are so many natural wonders in New Zealand that we visited that I have no memories of—I know I saw them, we have the proof in pictures!—but one of the few that stuck in my mind was the giant stone spheres of Moerake Beach.

One other feature of almost all the beaches in New Zealand—one strikingly different from the beaches I knew in California—was that the high tide line was often bright orange. This was not because of any natural phenomenon, but because of the massive sheep population of the country. Every lamb would get its tail docked, and most ram lambs would get castrated, and this was done with a small, fat, bright orange rubber band about the size of a Cheerio. Called elastrator bands, these cut off circulation and the offending body part shrivels up and falls off. Used elastrator bands get washed from pasture, to creek, to river, and to the ocean, where they wash up on the beaches and limn the high tide line. It didn’t strike me as pollution; it was just a thing about the beaches in this strange country, maybe like the tar blobs back home.

Many years and many beaches later, I worked as a postdoc in landlocked Sacramento. It was a delicious treat to take a day at the beach, especially during stiflingly hot summers. Fifty years earlier, my parents would go beachcombing; now, when we went to the beach, we’d always bring a bag and fill it up with garbage before we left. On one outing with my brother M, there was so much garbage that we focused on just one type—“orbs.” Tennis balls, fishing floats, golf balls, toys, boat bumpers, lures, things we couldn’t identify…all spherical plastic garbage polluting this one beach, and enough to fill both our sacks. It was disheartening, but also a little funny.

Last week my brother E came for a visit. Our farm is landlocked Roseburg, but it’s not a long drive over the coast range to the charming little beaches of Cape Arago. We had a pocket beach to ourselves for the afternoon. I had a nice lunch, and then without thinking I started filling my emptied lunch bag with the plastic debris which was thickly blended with the chunks of driftwood and seal bones there. A distressing thought passed through my head as I picked up a plastic bottle that had, judging by the label, drifted over from Asia.

No one now alive will ever see that beach without plastic litter. My parents might have, 70 years ago, but I grew up accustomed to seeing some plastic litter on the beach, and tar from an oil spill, and orange rubber cheerios. The plastic that is entering the Pacific today will long outlive all of us. If everyone stopped littering right now, it would still be generations until people could walk that beach, and find it amazing that a bit of flotsam had drifted all the way from Japan.

Driving back to Roseburg, one passes through Coos Bay, which is partly supported by the tourist trade. In the gift shops in Coos Bay, and all along the Oregon coast, one can find glass orbs for sale. They aren’t from mid-20th century fishing nets. They are manufactured, as souvenirs of the Oregon coast, in the orient, then hurry across the Pacific in a straight line in a cargo ship. From the port, they go by road to a warehouse, and then a distributor sells them to the gift shops. I suppose they are reminiscent of beachcombing and a simpler time, but the memory is vestigial and artificial, like a mail-order family crest. I have the real thing. As I look upon it, it flits back and forth from being a beautiful, nostalgia-laden object with a history both familial and epic, to being the first harbinger of an ecological catastrophe.