by Skye Moody
By the 1920s, nearly as much man-made as organic flotsam and jetsam was washing up on the world’s beaches. Beachcombers began holding scavenger hunts along the tide lines, with prizes offered for the most interesting flotsam. And beachcombers also had learned that the more valuable items weren’t necessarily found on a beach’s surface, and that by probing a few inches into the sand, they often plucked old coins and even valuable jewelry from the beach, some of it flotsam from shipwrecks, ancient and modern. On the U.S. East Coast, a popular flotsaming beach was the Long Island strand from Nassau-by-the-Sea to Jones Inlet. After a winter storm, beachcombers bragged of collecting enough driftwood on this strandline to last the entire winter. Not only driftwood, but hewn logs of valuable white oak washed ashore here and were collected to sell at market. Finally, beachcombers became more adept at reading ocean currents, and science was about to make flotsaming a geek’s pastime.
Seattle’s Alki Beach, on Puget Sound, is the landing point for much of the flotsam, jetsam, and lagan washed in from the ocean via the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Scuba divers come daily to view numerous treasures hiding beneath the water’s surface. Many come to visit the resident octopus; he’s only about thirty feet long—small compared with other octopuses in these waters supporting the world’s largest. He’s somewhat shy and keeps to the colder water near a submerged natural shelf, and I don’t blame him, because on any given day, a dozen or more divers seek him out. There’s more to see while searching for lagan: bright violet and orange-fingered anemones; jellyfish, two feet in diameter, fringed red and ruffled; iridescent, transparent, dinner-plate-size jellies; and of course the great lion-maned medusas. There are huge Dungeness crab, salmon, six-gill sharks (one measured twelve feet long), wolf eels so tame they eat out of your hand, and sea lions, seals, otters, even migrating whales. Some local divers have lately reported counting six small sharks nearby, though these I haven’t seen yet. All within Seattle’s city limits.
Diving conditions at Alki are so ideal that diving schools train their students here, and police SWAT divers come here to stay in shape. Eight minutes by car from central downtown, Alki is easily accessible during an office worker’s lunchtime, and so many divers come to escape the city’s noise and hubbub in the silent underwater world. Yet the most fascinating dives take place at Myrtle Edwards Park and along the piers and docks lining Seattle’s downtown waterfront. Here’s where local history’s lagan surfaces, gets plowed under, then surfaces again, until some enterprising or just plain curious scuba diver plucks the treasures and brings them to the surface. Glass bottles are a frequent find, dating from Seattle’s infancy—liquor bottles, or medicine bottles, even milk bottles. Some are more than a century old; others, like the hair tonic bottle I found recently, are relatively new discards. Its cap was intact, so unlike other bottles I’ve found, nothing lived inside. Porcelain dishware, ceramic shards, old stoneware mugs, and dishes are among my favorite finds. Some divers go after metal—gold coins, old ship bells and lanterns, silver jewelry, anything that makes their metal detector tick, click, or jump. Every coastal city in the world is girthed with history’s lagan.
Dead Men Don’t Lie
War never spared an ocean. The old bones of countless sailors inhabit shipwrecks on the ocean floor, and ocean beds are littered with the lagan of naval battles fought over thousands of years. Live land mines and grenades washed up on beaches have killed and maimed thousands of children who found them. What remains of humankind’s conflicts on the seas is Poseidon’s secret, until the sea gives up a piece of it to remind us of our dark side.
During World War II, Great Britain, preparing to invade Sicily, needed a strategy for diverting German troops from Sicily before the invasion. Numerous scenarios were tossed around among British Intelligence officers. Then Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu, the point man in charge of the invasion, asked his colleagues, “Suppose I wanted to put a dead body in the sea, and let it float ashore, and have it accepted by the people who find it as the victim of an air crash at sea. What sort of body would I need?” The answer to that question sparked the idea for Operation Mincemeat, in which the Allies created the illusion that Great Britain planned to invade Greece.
In order for the ploy to work, a dead body had to be procured, phony invasion plans planted on his corpse, and his corpse set afloat at sea where the tides would wash it up on a German-occupied beach. A beachcombing German soldier might spot and retrieve the dupe. Surely dead men don’t lie.
This brilliant military plan was implemented with the body of a freshly drowned young Scotsman, whose corpse was fitted out with the phony papers and conveniently jettisoned to wash up on an enemy-patrolled beach.
In 1956, this true tale of how the Brits fooled the Germans was the subject of the film The Man Who Never Was, the script co-written by Montagu himself. Clifton Webb starred in the role of Montagu, while Montagu himself played an uncredited cameo as an air marshal. The uncredited voice of Winston Churchill was actually that of a young Peter Sellers.
Sir Lindal’s Miraculous Floating Homes
Imagine you are beachcombing when you stumble across a huge crate washed up on shore. Hauling it above the tide line, you find the crate is entirely intact. You fetch a tool to pry the crate open, and when you look inside, you see ... a complete Lindal prefabricated wood home. A kit, really; you have to put the home together, but still ... this sort of bounty is megatreasure from the sea.
One of flotsam’s greatest legends belongs to the 1970s, when an Alaskan coastal native did find a crate washed ashore that contained a Lindal prefabricated home and built it for his family. It’s a true story, but there’s more: Sir Walter Lindal, entrepreneur and owner of Lindal Homes based in Seattle, has reports of several washed-up crates containing his custom-designed prefabricated homes, some fully intact, others in pieces, all from cargo spills. Lindal ships its containers from Port Angeles, Washington, to customers in Alaska and Hawaii. Storms at sea have claimed numerous shipments as the storm-tossed ships lose cargo overboard. Sir Walter says that more than one lucky beachcomber in Hawaii and Alaska has discovered this high-tech driftwood.
Sir Walter, whose title traces back to preindependence Iceland, was inspired by his ancestors’ creative use of flotsam. As a young entrepreneur in the 1930s, he began finding ways to use “waste wood” such as wood flotsam in sophisticated home construction. As his prefabricated-homes business thrived, Sir Walter lived in one of his own designs on a beachfront at Three Tree Point in Washington State. “On several occasions,” says Sir Walter, “hunks of our houses washed up on the beach right in front of my home.”
In the same decade, a rural commune spontaneously erupted on the Pacific Northwest coast at Shi Shi (pronounced shy-shy) Beach. Back-to-the-landers pitched tents at Shi Shi and lived off the land, illegally hunting berries, mushrooms, and other vegetarian delights found in abundance in nearby lush forests. One couple, we’ll call them Dan and Sue, had fled Seattle for the riparian lifestyle at Shi Shi, living in a tent on the beach. As the northbound Alaska current snatches flotsam off the North Pacific Drift, it deposits tons of flotsam on Shi Shi Beach. These currents combine with powerful, often treacherous tidal action off Shi Shi Beach, the result being great heaps of flotsam washing ashore. Since northwestern Washington is logging country, a commercial wood-products mecca with huge cargo ships hauling prime cut logs across the ocean to Japanese builders, much of what washes up at Shi Shi is made of wood. In fact, incoming tides along the northwestern Washington coast are deadly, their waves daily tossing massive logs onto the beaches, scraping them back into the tides and slamming them once again onto the shore. Some of these flying logs that the waves jettison have killed unwary beachcombers. The hippies constructing their squatters’ shacks on Shi Shi Beach collected the washed-up logs for building material. (Although surrounded by lush forests, the squatters opposed cutting down living trees.) But hapless Dan and Sue never seemed to catch the big log, and so they vowed to leave Shi Shi before the damp
chill of winter set in.
One evening as they sat by their campfire, Dan said to Sue, “This is it, honey. Fall has arrived and we’ve failed to gather enough wood to build a home. Tomorrow we pull up stakes and head back to Seattle.” Sue wasn’t ready to give up quite yet. She said, “Let’s sleep on it and make the final decision in the morning.” Dan reluctantly agreed. Next morning when they stepped out of their tent, they found an entire barge load of precut wood siding washed up at their feet. Dan ran for a hammer and nails.
Dutch Treat
Holland’s Terschelling Island is famous for the rich flotsam washing up on its beaches. Like Holland’s other barrier islands facing into the North Sea, Terschelling beaches after violent storms receive the detritus of centuries of shipwrecks. In late December 2003, Dutch beachcomber G. Klaase was surveying Terschelling’s strandline when he came across a strange piece of flotsam: a wine bottle, some wine inside, shaped like a cannonball with a long neck. Klaase turned to experts who identified it as dating from around 1690. Although it made the news, Dutch flotsamists were only mildly impressed, and no one could convince Klaase to drink the three-centuries-old vino. By a European flotsamist’s standards, it wasn’t ancient enough to cause a stir.
Flotsam Follies
On the lighter side of organic flotsam, this popular and well-documented tale comes to us from Florence, Oregon. On November 12, 1970, beachcombers discovered the rotting carcass of a gray whale on a beach just south of Florence. Some Firecracker Frank with the Oregon Highway Division, the agency with jurisdiction over coastal beaches, got the bright idea of blowing up the carcass with dynamite. Presumably the next outgoing tide would clear the odoriferous evidence. This made some sense; the agency employed similar tactics to remove boulders that had fallen across highways. Videotaped footage of the actual event is available on the Internet (www.perp.com/whale/index.nc.html) and has forever placed Florence, Oregon, on the oddball’s map, for this historic event has developed a global cult following.
Picture a misty day, the tide rolling in. Above the beach, grassy dunes afforded spectator seating for dozens of Florentines who had arrived to witness the dynamiting of the whale. Men scurried to and fro around the forty-five-foot-long, eight-ton carcass. A half-ton of dynamite was placed around the whale, mostly on the leeward side, the theory being that the blast would shoot most of the remains out to sea. In the near distance, gulls could be seen lurking, waiting to score juicy whale entrails. Finally the area around the carcass was cleared. The highway crew beat it to the dunes to join the civilian spectators. Small children trained their eyes on the smelly monstrosity. BOOM!
Smoke rose so thick it obscured the carcass. Then flames shot skyward, and from the dunes came laughing and cheering. Then a woman screamed as boulder-size chunks of whale flesh bombarded the crowd. People ran for their lives. The video-camera’s lens got smeared with oily blubber. The lens went dark. A quarter-mile distant, in a parking lot, a chunk of rotting whale meat landed on a car’s roof, crushing the passenger side.
The city of Florence and its people will never be the same, for their memories are forever engraved with that one terrifying moment when the sky rained rotting blubber.
On the morning of June 7, 1974, a fisherman off the coast of Trinidad observed a strange object floating on the water near Balandra Bay. The thing, about twelve feet high and fourteen feet in diameter, was terrifyingly similar to images of alien spaceships, those flying saucers from 1950s’ black-and-white television dramas. The fisherman contacted police and word soon reached local villagers, many of whom “rushed to the scene while others ran away,” according to reporter Phillip Fraser of the Trinidad Guardian.
“It was rumored that twenty-four little men—one of them with a radio on his back—had emerged from the strange vehicle and walked inland,” the news report said. Brave police confronted the strange floating object and soon identified it as a Brucker Survival Capsule, a sort of pumpkin-shaped survival device made of fiberglass, used in emergencies by the U.S. Coast Guard and many offshore oil operations. Manufactured in LaMesa, California, this capsule contained neither human nor alien bodies, and probably accidentally jettisoned from an oil rig during stormy seas.
Humans have always used oceans as their personal garbage dumps, creating an infinite variety of flotsam and jetsam. The casual strandliner today never knows what might float in on a high tide. Several years ago, Diane Kinman of Bellevue, Washington, was walking along Tillamook Head Beach in Oregon, minding her own business, when she nearly tripped over what at first she thought was driftwood. It had apparently floated in on the last tide. Kinman bent over to inspect the flotsam and came face to leg with a human’s prosthesis. Needless to say, the lady was fascinated, and slightly spooked.
The artificial leg included a foot, its toenails painted.
Diane Kinman has entertained herself since then speculating over where the leg came from and what happened to the rest of the person. The leg’s skin color was an uncommitted shade of flesh and the toenail polish was true red. Its somewhat battered condition combined with barnacles on the toes suggested it had traveled a considerable distance, perhaps from Alaska on the southbound California current. Or it might have traveled across the Pacific Ocean from Japan, or Polynesia. The artificial leg, wherever it came from, has lately entered the flotsam lexicon: Any piece of beach or tidal flotsam resembling a human body part is today known as a Kinman leg.
Maybe the original Kinman leg was attached to a Captain Hook of the female gender—or persuasion—who was taken prisoner, her artificial leg jettisoned overboard by her captors to thwart an escape. But whoever lost the Kinman leg may still be searching for it, and this truly disturbs Kinman, because she did not pick up the leg and take it home. Along that sparsely populated, rarely traveled stretch of strandline, the leg most likely got caught up on the next ebb tide and carried back out to sea. Chances are the Kinman leg is still traveling the oceans, enjoying adventures its former owner never dreamed of.
So I said to my psychiatrist, “I think it’s time you appreciated the depth of my grieving over the floating stone.”
He dangled his Mont Blanc and relaxed his jaw. “You mean,” he said, feigning surprise, “you still can’t grasp its womb symbolism?”
“I mean, it’s time to talk flotsam,” I said, irritated. After all, I was paying him.
He surprised me this time, by saying, “What about flotsam?”
Brilliant! For months, I’d been raising the subject of flotsam with virtually everyone I knew, even with strangers. Without fail, the word flotsam seemed to spark a glint, however faint, in a person’s eye. Some even waxed enthusiastic, and one actually clapped her hands. “Flotsam and jetsam!” they’d exclaim. “I just love that subject.” Yet, as the discussion evolved from Nikes to Legos to yellow rubber ducks, ad nauseam, to the more fascinating and intricate subjects of, say, the six ways a cargo vessel can move simultaneously (heave, yaw, roll, pitch, sway, surge) as it accidentally jettisons flotsam-to-be, or the fetch of a wave and the reach of its fingers, an ocular veil would glaze the person’s eyes, followed by a yawn, and then, inevitably, a change of subject. The only folks who stayed alert were those with their own flotsam stories, and some of these were doozies.
Kat Silverman, for example, a Britisher who lived for many years along Cornwall’s seacoast, immediately lit up when I mentioned flotsam. Kat has flotsam memories not only of the many shipwrecks along the Cornish coast; she also recalls a particular incident in which some local men discovered a large vat of scotch washed up on a beach not far from Sharpnose Point. Because the vat was too heavy to move off the beach, the men organized their drinking fest right there. Kat could not recall which single-malt distillery had lost its vat; nonetheless, I’ve lately considered relocating to Cornwall.
A stranger from Perth, Australia, responding to my mention of flotsam, recounted his discovery of a human hand washed up very near his beach cottage. He fetched the nasty flotsam off the strand, marched straigh
t to the local police department and, well, handed it over to a duty officer. Upon investigation it was averred that the macabre flotsam had belonged to a sailor aboard a pleasure craft who had apparently been tipsy when he tried slicing himself a wedge of cheese or sausage or some such snack at the exact moment his sail boat heaved, yawed, rolled, pitched, swayed, and/or, surged.
Almost everyone has a flotsam tale, some more fantastic than others. And while the amateur beachcomber possesses only one or two really good flotsam tales, professional flotsamists can carry on for hours about their intertidal discoveries. In my quest to delineate between a beachcomber and a true flotsamist, I found that the vast majority of truly fascinating stories come from casual beachcombers, folks who don’t go out looking for flotsam but who stumble upon such wonderful treasures as a vat of single-malt. Flotsamists have many tales, but on average, they are somewhat less enchanting. It’s the accumulative quality of their pastime that makes a great story.
And the flotsamist possesses special personality traits. This was the subject I wished to discuss with my psychiatrist.