by Skye Moody
Tragic and Troubling Flotsam
For thousands of years, hurricanes and typhoons have sent oceans into tempestuous swirls while onshore winds scoop up humankind’s property and debris and deposit it into the ocean. A landlubber’s loss can float on ocean currents, carrying with it the memory of disaster, destruction, despair. The Boxing Day 2004 Indonesian tsunami carried offshore human remains and property, some of it washing up later along East Africa’s coastline, much of it still traveling ocean currents. Similarly, Hurricane Katrina and her fellow 2005 tempests have deposited tons of property into the U.S. Gulf Coast, where, following a loop current and a strong eddy flow, treasured bits and pieces of people’s lives have begun washing up along the coasts of Cuba and Mexico. A beachcomber on South Padre Island in Texas, about six weeks after Katrina, found a real estate guide from New Iberia, Louisiana. From New Iberia to South Padre Island, the guide traveled more than four hundred miles. One longtime beachcomber likened collecting disaster debris to taking pennies off a dead man’s eyes.
In the spring of 1987, while photographing for a newspaper feature about a water music festival on the Washington coast, I drove one afternoon along the coast in search of the perfect beach to serve as backdrop for a cello. Eventually I found a small sandy cove surrounded by massive black boulders, the ocean foaming to shore in the background—the ideal spot. I hauled the cello down to the beach and placed it upright against some boulders, rearranging it until I was satisfied. Peering through the camera lens, the image seemed right, except for something glinting in the background off the tide line. Somewhat irritably, because a mounting storm threatened to pour rain over the borrowed cello, I trudged down to the tide line to remove the offending matter, expecting to find a soda bottle or some other innocuous object that had caught the last of the sunlight and reflected it into my image. Instead I found a pile of medical waste—dozens of hypodermic needles and syringes, and empty glass vials, their labels missing. I looked up. More vials and syringes were floating in from the ocean. I gathered them, made the cello photograph, then photographed the medical waste for the local newspaper, and, on the way to the darkroom, dropped the medical waste off at the county health department for testing.
Three days later the results came back. I recall the editor of the Chinook Observer calling me into his office to deliver the news. The vials had been contaminated with, and had probably at one time contained, substances used in biological warfare.
For decades rumors have persisted that nefarious crews of ships at sea were dumping medical waste overboard. Evidence appeared on ocean beaches throughout the world. In the 1980s, around the same time I discovered the medical waste on the Washington coast, a flurry of news stories appeared in Great Britain and the United States citing mysterious medical waste, including syringes and empty vials washed up on beaches in England and Wales.
In July 1982 the U.S. Navy confirmed it normally discharged its garbage and other wastes into the Atlantic Ocean—among other sites, in the New York Bight, the area of ocean lying between Montauk Point, Long Island, and Cape May. Lieutenant Jeff Fay of the U.S. Coast Guard, stationed on Governors Island, was asked to identify the contents of a perforated galvanized canister, two and a half feet long, found bobbing on the ocean about thirty-three miles southeast of Manasquan Inlet. The canister, which was plucked out of the ocean by the crew of a sportfishing vessel, bore a red label denoting that it contained chemicals. When the Coast Guard retrieved the canister, it was, according to Lieutenant Fay, empty.
He added, “It’s garbage from one of the Navy submarines. I think it’s safe to say that’s the way they dispose of their garbage in that area.” Fay added that the Navy “apparently forgot to tie a weight” to the jettisoned canister, which, instead of sinking, bobbed across the ocean until the fishermen retrieved it.
On July 14, 1988, the New York Times reported used syringes and other medical waste washing up on Midland Beach on Staten Island—some, according to New York City officials, containing blood contaminated with the hepatitis B virus. The incident was just one of several on Staten Island beaches and along Rockaway Beach in Queens, where more than a dozen syringes were discovered. Despite the earlier reports of medical wastes on beaches in the United States and Great Britain, no substantial efforts addressed the potential danger until the discoveries on New York beaches. Location is everything.
Following the Staten Island incident, federal, state, and local officials convened a meeting to address the problem. While the group vowed to prosecute anyone found illegally jettisoning dangerous items into Long Island Sound, they could not agree on the origin of the medical waste. While the Rockaway Beach syringes may have been left on the beach by drug users, the contaminated vials at Midland Beach, said the City Health Commissioner, Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, were almost certainly the result of illegal dumping at sea.
But not all dangerous flotsam is jettisoned at sea: Sewage travels. Despite the effectiveness of many municipal sewage treatment systems, vast amounts of refuse from urban and small-town sewage systems escape into bays, harbors, and sounds, much of it eventually reaching the sea. While some of the floatables ride the ocean currents for hundreds, even thousands of miles, beaches in the vicinity of sewage outlets often are littered with flotsam backwash as, caught on an incoming tide, much of the escaped refuse returns to land.
Following the New York flotsam scare, Congress passed the Medical Waste Tracking Act of 1988.
Pure Garbage
The year 1987 proved a fairly trashy one for Americans, what with the Jim Bakker evangelical sex scandal and the Iran contra and Wall Street infamies, but the scandal that stank the most materialized in the form of a garbage barge named Mobro, containing thirty-two hundred tons of garbage, that traveled six thousand miles, pulled by a tugboat, searching for its ultimate destiny. Even garbage is destined, and in this case the wandering tugboat Break of Dawn and its famous Mobro garbage barge spurred national debate over the ultimate fate of human refuse.
The story begins with an Alabama entrepreneur named Lowell Harrelson, who experienced a personal eureka: Trash can turn a profit. Long Island had a garbage crisis. Overloaded landfills causing ground water contamination had prompted the state legislature to pass a no-landfills law to take effect in 1990, and Long Island’s growing population had created a garbage emergency. Harrelson proposed barging its trash down South, where it would be dumped at cheaper landfills.
Problem was, nobody wanted a few thousand tons of New York trash. Mexico and Belize refused to take the garbage. Even Cuba refused U.S. dollars in exchange for taking New York trash. Turned away at every port where it tried to land, the garbarge Mobro—forlornly pictured on daily newscasts—continued its six-thousand-mile odyssey. Johnny Carson suggested the barge go to Iran.
Eventually, in May 1987, the Mobro anchored in Brooklyn, at Gravesend Bay, where it served as a tourist attraction until, following charges that organized crime had its foul hand in the trash, a settlement resulted in the garbage being incinerated, the ashes deposited into the Islip landfill. The Mobro’s memory has entered into urban mythology, where the term “That’s garbarge” is used to denounce a bad idea.
The Professionals
Last summer, at the helm of our thirty-foot 1965 Owens Flagship cabin cruiser, I revved the speed up to thirteen knots just to see the boat’s wake. Puget Sound was choppy that afternoon, not many other boats out on the water, and I had a clear view ahead. The GPS told me fish were everywhere, but I’m no fisher. Suddenly I felt a thud—heard it, felt it—and fought the wheel to keep the cabin cruiser on course. Something had hit the stern, maybe disabled the rudder. I turned out of the site of the impact, circled, and saw the thing rise up on the waves. A deadhead. A huge chunk of driftwood, its mass mostly beneath the water’s surface, only a small snag showing above the water. Mariners dread these stealthy floaters. Contact, especially at high speeds, can flip a boat, or at the very least damage its hull. Fortunately the Owens wasn’t damaged, but it got me
thinking. A sailor can be prepared for anything and still encounter the unexpected. Deadheads are one of the worst surprises on the water.
Puget Sound, being surrounded by the leftovers of clear-cut logging, is full of the stuff. Like other great bodies of water, the Sound is patrolled by a flotsam collector, a large vessel with a crane that tries to sweep the Sound free of debris. The debris is transferred to a barge and later dumped in a landfill. The flotsam collectors say they love their job, and who wouldn’t during the summer months? But they’re the professionals, and even in winter squalls the flotsamists are scouring the Sound for dangerous debris, deadheads being the worst. The pros have seen everything floating in Puget Sound—well, maybe not a size 40D Aubade brassiere—but they go after the dangerous stuff, and that’s why the world’s bays and harbors aren’t more littered. Perhaps in the near future similar crews will scour the heavens, cleaning up space flotsam.
Techno-flotsam
Reports of cell phones washing onto shore add a new product to the growing list of techno-flotsam items. Other technological wonders that have washed up include balloon-borne payloads lost over the North Pacific. One payload, a research experiment for a U.S. government-funded Mars landing project, was accidentally jettisoned into the Pacific when an unexpected storm ditched the balloon and its costly hitch-hiker. Only a true flotsamist would recognize the package adrift on the currents; the equipment is encased in white Styrofoam and appears to be simply a chunk of some small-time boater’s ice chest. John Anderson of Forks, Washington, has recovered numerous similar payloads near his favorite beachcombing site at Queets, Washington.
The balloon launch company tracks its payloads by airplane and by monitors attached to payloads. But this time the storm prevented an aerial search, and the monitor apparently failed when it hit the ocean. The launch company, which offered a hundred-dollar reward for the balloon-borne payload, was soon contacted by a fisherman who had plucked the expensive flotsam out of a chilly ocean current on the Pacific Northwest Coast. Since the fisherman had no use for the strange package of wires and transmitters, he might have tossed it in the garbage. Instead, he made one phone call and pocketed a hundred bucks.
“You don’t want this to happen,” says a spokesman for the company, which prefers anonymity. “When it does, we appeal to the public’s bottom line: cash reward.”
On September 7, 2005, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev and his American colleague, astronaut John Phillips, aboard the joint U.S.-Russia International Space Station, jettisoned its accumulated trash—over one ton of garbage inside a Russian cargo spaceship aimed at the Pacific Ocean. The Progress 18, as the garbage ship was known, splashed down the following day at 8:13 a.m. Pacific daylight time, delivering some fascinating space flotsam into Earth’s biggest flotsam collector. Included in the garbage were leftover food packages, solid waste from scientific projects, empty fuel tanks, clothing, “treated” human waste, and presumably the space station’s primary oxygen generator, which had failed, causing the two astronauts to rely upon a backup oxygen supply.
The bulk of the space flotsam burned up when the garbage ship entered Earth’s atmosphere. Still, some flotsam made it into the ocean. The jettisoned space flotsam generally lands in the South Pacific Ocean somewhere between New Zealand and South America.
The same day that Progress 18 splashed down, the joint space agencies launched the spaceship Progress 19 from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, carrying 2.8 tons of food, water, technical supplies, and parts for a new oxygen generator at the space station. As with Progress 18, the Progress 19 would later become a trash receptacle, its payload aimed at the Pacific.
Rocket wreckage recovered by John Anderson.
Ocean-borne space flotsam is a rapidly growing specialty for a certain subcult of flotsamists.
Italian Flotsam
Only a woman can truly appreciate Rome’s most ubiquitous flotsam item. Ilyse Rathett, co-owner with her husband of Ritrovo, a U.S. importer of Italian food and wine, tells of the mysterious objects that for decades have washed up in abundance along the beaches at Ostia on the Mediterranean Sea. “Little sticks,” she says, “thousands of them were washing up along the beaches at Ostia. For a long time, no one knew where they came from. And then someone—no doubt a woman—figured it out. Q-tips.”
Why Q-tips? Rome’s women wear a lot of eye makeup. Q-tips are a staple for every woman who knows how to apply and remove eye makeup. Discarded after use, the Q-tips traveled through the city’s sewage system, eventually to reach the sea. The cotton tips had washed off during the product’s maritime adventures, so by the time they strand, they are just little sticks.
Italian-American Flotsam
One of the more interesting bits of flotsam I have personally collected is an ID card from the order called Sons of Italy in America. “Member Name: Linda Holman. Member #SI20328749.” This bit of plastic-coated paper washed up on Alki Beach in Seattle in late 2004, after a winter storm. On the front, the image of a golden lion is inset into a double circle, with the words “Liberty, Equality, Prosperity.”
Sons of Italy. I envisioned a stereotypical Tony Soprano dumping Holman’s freshly killed body into the waters off Atlantic City. Somehow, Holman’s corpse traveled thousands of miles, perhaps through the Panama Canal, and up along the Pacific coastline, eventually entering Puget Sound, where it beached a few dozen yards from the Coast Guard lighthouse.
A Washington, D.C., address and telephone number appear on the front of the ID, along with a fax number, but no e-mail address, indicating the card was issued before e-mail addresses were commonly added to official documents. I called the number and spoke with a receptionist who must have imagined she was speaking to a crackpot.
“Obviously,” she sneered, “the member must belong to a local chapter in your area.” She reeled off the telephone number of the Pacific Northwest regional director of Sons of Italy. Then she hung up. The regional rep lives in rural Washington State, and was as intrigued as I about the mysterious Ms. Holman’s identity and whereabouts.
“She isn’t a member of our region,” the rep told me. “The Washington, D.C., office address tells me she’s from the East Coast.”
Touché, sneery receptionist.
I suppose Tony Soprano’s boys might have transported Holman’s corpse to Seattle in a Garden City garbage truck. Once here, they might have rented a boat and dumped her in Puget Sound. Why else would a decades-old Sons of Italy ID wash up on a local beach?
So, Ms. Holman, if you are still alive, and seeking your Sons of Italy ID card, please contact me, as I will be relieved to learn you were not the victim of some plot.
UFO: Unidentifiable Flotsam Obituary
Recently the pungent, decomposing carcass of what I guess was a medium-size dog, or possibly a giant opossum, washed ashore on the beach in front of my house. Gruesome, malodorous—I photographed it up close and personal—yet its Darwinian kinship sparked strong visceral empathy. Looking pathetic and foolish, the creature’s remains had been tossed by waves onto the rocky beach where it lay on its back, four legs akimbo, its flesh bloated and white, only a few hairs remaining on its tail and some tufts at the leg joints, its skeletal paws clean to the bone, resembling human hands, fingers clutched in agony, its headless corpse confounding immediate identification. The sight and odor triggered nausea and an odd sensation of ennui.
Sons of Italy ID card, medical refuse, and other tiny flotsam treasures
Odiferous Corpus Mysterious.
The carcass flotsam raised questions: What business did an opossum have riding the waves? Or a dog, for that matter? Was it surfing? Had it drowned while swimming across Puget Sound from Bainbridge Island? Had it stowed away, perhaps on one of thousands of ocean-crossing container vessels making port around Puget Sound? Was it a Japanese opossum? A Portuguese water dog? Had it been shanghaied? Or had it simply scampered out of the woods right here on Alki Beach, entered the frigid water, and suffered a heart attack? On this question I occasi
onally speculate, though I less often view the picture I made of its pungent, decomposing corpse. RIP, fellow air breather, and thank God for outbound tides.
Free-Range Flotsam
Annual beach clean-up events produce tons of fascinating flotsam, jetsam, and lagan. In 2005, following their annual beach sweep, the Friends of McNabs and Lawlor Islands in Nova Scotia tallied their bounty and listed it in their newsletter, Rucksack: “375 bags of trash, including thirty bags of recyclables. Along with the normal junk were a few unusual items such as a bingo ball (B-9), an Eastern Bakeries bread tray, a weathered plastic toy soldier, a hospital name tag, a bicycle seat with a helmet, and a TV/VCR unit, found by Clean Nova Scotia Foundation volunteers at Ives Cove.
“Plastics such as fishing gear, motor oil containers, Styrofoam, and plastic tampon applicators [oops, those beach whistles again] were among the perennial items found on the beaches again this year. The latter should be banned from all Maritime communities.... Volunteers ... are tired of picking up ‘beach whistles’ that had been flushed down the toilets of Metro and ended up in the harbour.... These unnecessary products should be banned altogether or taxed heftily, to pay for their disposal.”
The world’s beaches accumulate tons of washed up detritus each year. Items collected during worldwide beach cleanups include bones, false teeth, clothing (socks and men’s briefs seem most prolific), jewelry, watches, cell phones, television tubes, fishing gear, food and drink containers (including pottery shards from broken dishes, often originating in Asia), personal items (deodorant containers, razor blades, condoms, beach whistles), empty suitcases, plastic toys, furniture (e.g., white toilet seat), medical wastes (syringes, prescription medications, glass ampoules, illegal drugs), shopping bags (with shop names), rubber tires (often used as tugboat fenders), and empty food containers including ketchup bottles, sardine tins, and tofu wrap—all this representing the proverbial tip of the garbage heap.