by Skye Moody
Table of Contents
Also by Skye Moody
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
I. FLOTSAM’S NOBLE ORIGINS
Ancient Flotsam
God as Flotsam
Dragon Spittle Fragrance
Mrs. Stramanos’s Wonderful Flotsam Jewelry
Shell Lust
Barnacles
Ancient Flotsam Cures and Cosmeceuticals
Poseidon’s Drifting Limbs
The Chilean Blob
The Drifters
Velella velella: Flotsam’s Harbinger
II. ADRIFT AT SEA
A Brief History of Bottled Romance, Adventure, Research, and Heartbreak
The Emperor of Flotsam
Politics Afloat
Trolling for God: How to Make a Missionary Bottle
SOS
Neptune’s Lost and Found
Love Gone Adrift
III. FLOTSAM’S EVOLUTION
Lagan Loot
Treasure Runners: Shaking Lagan Loose on the Tides
Whose Beeswax?
Pirates, Pillagers, and Mooncussers
The Victorians
The White Bullock of Bombay
IV. FLOTSAM SCIENCE
Flotsam Density
Currents, Whorls, and Gyres
The Great Garbage Patch
The Slick Sargasso Sea
Nike Flotsam
Not Only Nikes
The Rubber Duck Lowdown
Year of the Flotsam
V. LIFE’S A BEACH
Dead Men Don’t Lie
Sir Lindal’s Miraculous Floating Homes
Dutch Treat
Flotsam Follies
Seashell Desecration
The Amazing Captain Crowe
Off the Wrack: Seaweed Flotsam Revisited
Swimming Pigs Meet the Big Wooden Phallus in Emperor Ishii’s Office
Dragon Lagan
Pumpkins, Sausages, and Rolling Pins
Prince of Tides
Creative Flotsamists
Tragic and Troubling Flotsam
Pure Garbage
The Professionals
Techno-flotsam
Italian Flotsam
Italian-American Flotsam
UFO: Unidentifiable Flotsam Obituary
Free-Range Flotsam
Fear of Geekism
Strandings
Acknowledgements
Suggested Reading: Books on Flotsam and Related Subjects
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Copyright Page
Also by Skye Moody
FICTION
The Good Diamond
Medusa
K Falls
Habitat
Wildcrafters
Blue Poppy
Rain Dance
NONFICTION
(as Kathy Kahn)
Fruits of Our Labor
Hillbilly Women
In memory of my mother,
Donna Kelly,
who taught me to float.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
—T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Flotsam: n. 1) Wreckage of a ship or its cargo found floating on the surface of the sea. Usually associated with jetsam. 2) Timber, etc., washed down by a stream.
Jetsam: n. Goods discarded from a ship and washed ashore; material thrown overboard in order to lighten a vessel (also called waveson). Usually associated with flotsam.
Lagan: n. Also lig- (lagmar=dragnet). Goods or wreckage lying on the bottom of the sea.
Occan Surface Currents © 2006 Dr. Michael Pidwimy
TIDE LINES: An Introduction
The Nautical Gods Must Be Crazy
Can a stone float? I plucked it from a rock pile six feet above the tide line. Holding it in the palm of my hand, the apricot-colored stone felt too light for a rock. It was the size of a hen’s egg, or a peach pit on steroids. Its narrowest end was tipped black as if dipped in an inkwell, and pockmarks riddled its surface, the way brick looks after it has lain in saltwater for a while. Yet when I ran a fingernail across its orange surface, it didn’t powder like brick or tint my fingernail orange. I looked around. Why, out of millions of rocks that wash up on this beach, a varietal bazaar of colors, shapes, textures, and striations, had I singled out this particular stone? What had drawn my fickle flotsamist’s eye to a stone I could easily discard as just another boring chunk of baked clay washed up on the tides?
For one thing, the last high tide had shoveled ashore this pile of stones hours ago, and now beneath a burning noon-day sun, the multicolored mountain of rocks had dried to a dull gray, as colorful stones will when coated with saltwater. This orange stone lay on top of the heap. It had not dulled when dried, and it stood out the way an agate, when dry and salt-coated, still emits a luminescence that separates it from duller opaque stones. This stone wasn’t glowing like an agate, but its vivid color popped despite saltwater and the sun’s heat.
I carried the stone to the water’s edge and placed it on the becalmed ebbing tide. The greater the density of an object in relation to the amount of water it displaces, the deeper it sinks to the bottom. Spheres, like this stone, can be deceptive; the stone seemed too light to sink, yet too heavy to float. I pressed it between thumb and forefinger. It didn’t react to the pressure. I held it against my ear and shook it, but couldn’t tell if it was hollow.
Yet it floated. So, flotsam. That it remained floating on the water’s surface suggested an air pocket inside. Ridiculous, I sneered, and snatched it up off the tide.
Turning it over in my hand, I had to make a decision: My pockets, even the hood of my sweatshirt, were chockablock with flotsam I had scored that morning along a lonely stretch of Alki Beach on the shores of Puget Sound in Washington State. I had no room for another object. If I kept this peculiar stone, I’d have to toss out the little pink plastic propeller, or the white coral, or the Jagermeister screwtop with the Exacto knife inside, or the driftwood knot shaped like a talking duck’s head. No, I couldn’t afford to sacrifice any of my treasures for a mutant peach pit.
Years ago, in Tokyo, I accompanied a Japanese friend to a Shinto temple. The quarter-mile path to the shrine was graveled with tiny gray stones. After posting our petitions, as we returned along the gravel path, I suddenly had an inexplicable urge to lean over and pick up a certain piece of gravel, a specific stone indistinguishable from the millions of others, except it seemed to scream “Pick me up!” Stooping, I picked up the screamer, about the size of a nickel. Holding the tiny stone in my palm, I turned it over. A human face had been drawn on it.
Why, out of several million gravel rocks, had I chosen the one with a face drawn on the other side? The other possibility was that every stone on the Shinto path had a face drawn on its other side. For years afterward, that image haunted my dreams.
A lifetime of flotsam collecting has invested a certain discernment into my beachcombing practices. I’ve learned to distinguish unusual flotsam from ordinary flotsam, and I’m very picky about what I collect from the world’s beaches. This morning at Alki Point, everything in my pockets and hood had been judiciously selected as a keeper. In the end, I photographed the peculiar stone and left it on the beach near the tide line where I’d found it.
Six hours later, the highest tide of the year washed over the beach. At ebb, its powerful wet fingers clawed and raked and rearranged the rocks and logs, leaving a new wrack line and a completely rearranged beach. Anything that floated had caught the seaward drift, including the mysterious stone.
You’d think after the Japanese gravel experience I would have learned
my lesson. I still have that tiny piece of Shinto gravel with the face drawn on it. Alas, like the fool on his journey, I failed to look back into my knapsack of experience, and so years later, I let the special beach stone wash out on the tide.
That evening I studied the picture I’d taken of the stone that floated. Now beyond my grasp, it seemed even more compelling. Something uneasy in—yes—the pit of my stomach told me I’d made a terrible mistake. After all, I could have carried the stone home in my mouth.
A stone light enough and impermeable enough to float. Or had I simply romanticized a chunk of brick that had been burned on one end? But wait. Check out this cool pink plastic propeller. Where do you suppose it floated in from? I decided it came off a Japanese boy’s toy airplane and had floated across the Pacific Ocean to wash up on a beach in Puget Sound. Now that’s a great flotsam story.
Flotsam Nightmares
The nightmares changed. Now instead of a million gravel faces, I dreamed oceans of ovoid bricks came floating toward shore. As they washed onto the beach, they self-constructed a Great Wall of America all along the Pacific Coast, an impenetrable barrier whose single purpose was to strand my piscine nature from my spawn mates out at sea. On the beach side, I hammered and chiseled at the growing brick wall; more bricks floated in and reinforced the wall. Then, just before waking in sweat-soaked sheets, I saw the strange stone floating out of reach on the water side of the brick wall, a sacred object mocking my foreshortened graspy fingers.
I have tossed floating objects into the Sound only to find them, several days later, back on the beach in approximately the same spot, give or take a few yards, where I’d thrown them, their traveling speed and distance dependent on the winds and the water’s surface currents. I’ve even experimented with the phenomenon by tossing unusual flotsam, even rocks, into the water, finding them washed up nearby again the next day, and the next, and the next.
A week after photographing the stone and enduring its taunting nightmares, I returned to the beach in search of it. Starting at the lighthouse, at approximately the same spot where I’d found the stone, I worked methodically along the tide line. If the Coast Guard was watching, they surely marveled over the hooded figure digging madly through heaps of beach rocks in the pouring rain. I’m lucky they didn’t report me to Homeland Security.
It was there somewhere, I could feel it. I dug like a Labrador pawing for a bone. I’d make one hole, fill it back in and dig another, and so on, until the stones themselves began complaining: “What are you? Some kind of cargo cultist who’s mislaid your talisman?”
They were right. In one week I had gone from a simple, devoted collector of tidal gifts to a full-fledged, raving cargo cultist, believing in my heart and soul that this particular stone I’d found and spurned was actually a gift from the nautical gods meant for me alone, my talisman, my own little maritime miracle.
I looked into cargo cults. The more I read, the more I knew I was one with them, a worshiper of exotic phenomena inexplicably materializing in my own private marine world. Only the gods could have sent this mystery flotsam. Like all novice cargo cultists, at first I thought the gods must be crazy. Venerate a floating stone? “Flotsam worshiper!” hissed my inner ear demons. Come on, get a life.
I printed several copies of the photograph, placing the stone’s image all over the house: on the refrigerator in a magnet frame, in the laundry closet where my husband never went, in my private loo where he wouldn’t see how obsessed I’d become. Again, I reminded myself this was just flotsam. This thing I had so foolishly abandoned yet could not forget had been reclaimed by the sea, and only the gods knew where it was headed now—certainly to someone more worthy. I followed currents up and down the beach, scanning with binoculars. It couldn’t have gone far. Or could it? Days passed, then weeks. I must have pawed through a thousand rock piles, having long ago given up filling in the holes, instead leaving little volcanolike structures as I moved methodically from one section of beach to another.
Other beachcombers began grumbling about my disruption of the strandline’s natural pattern. I began to resent their intrusion into my search. They were only interested in pretty seashells, fully intact—heaven forbid they’d collect a cracked or otherwise deformed oyster shell—or beach glass, preferably violet hued—God, the fights I’ve seen over violet-hued beach glass. They’re the type who snub their noses at the really cool beach finds, walk right past a Japanese flip-flop sandal, or a rusted sign for A&W Root Beer, or a pair of men’s Hanes jockey briefs washed up in a bright navy-blue swirl among the wrack. No, these beachcombers with their little plastic drugstore bags take no interest in barnacle-coated soccer balls, itinerant geoduck harvesting licenses, rusted oil drums, mysterious light bulbs, and little plastic toys. Litter, they label it in their pitiable ignorance. If they resented my hole digging, I sniffed at their competitive head butting over trivial bits of colored glass. Talk about cargo cultists.
For half a millisecond I considered asking one beachcomber if he’d seen my lost stone, and then realized he wouldn’t have noticed it if it had hit him between the eyes; he had no more interest in floating rocks than I had in perfect oyster shells, the latter an object so redundant on this tide line you might as well name it Beach Rockefeller. Anyway, Oyster Shell Man was probably collecting shells for his garden. A lot of people do that; they come to the beach and harvest oyster shells to crush into bone meal and feed to their roses. I don’t know if this practice is legal, or even if it offends the ecological sensibilities of nondiggers. I wonder, though, if Neptune snickers at such minor scrapes on the fringe of his domain.
Weeks of searching the strandline and pawing through stone heaps failed to produce my precious flotsam stone. I made another copy of the photograph for my car and pasted it to the dashboard. I did not yet resort to petitioning the saint of things lost. St. Anthony is a last resort and, besides, I still had a few cards up my sleeve before calling up the Patron Ace of Carelessness. I vowed to reverse my sin of omission, my failure to accept with grace the gift Neptune had offered me to have and to hold, to keep and to worship. No soul-stealing photograph could replace the real thing. I would find it, or I would find its match, and no measure of grumbling about disturbing the natural strandline would deter me. And by the way, flotsam worship is not confined to egg-shaped stones. In fact, the little pink plastic propeller I plucked from the sand enjoys a prime position on my flotsam altar. This is no ordinary gift from the sea. After all, how many pink plastic propellers have the oceans coughed up?
By the Wind Blown
In a sense, we are all flotsam and jetsam. Created in watery media, we wash up without personal choice on life’s foreign shores, only to navigate unpredictable currents and tides, blown from one circumstance to another, until we land, finally, for the last time, eventually bereft of flesh and humors, a mere carcass whose tactile memory of its adventures has been only partly etched into its hollowed bones. Like so much flotsam, what’s left of us tells some, but not all, of the story. Like flotsam, our personal journeys will never be fully understood or explained. And thank the gods for that, for the journey is who we are; without our personal mystery and its individual transformations and permutations, we’d be as indistinguishable as grains of sand viewed by the naked eye, our legacy unthinkably transparent.
Flotsam of Flotsam
This much I know about the saltwater in my veins: In 1898, Master Mariner Captain Alfred J. Green, for thirty-five years commander of British sailing ships, saw the inevitable demise of the magnificent masted barques and clippers, those tall ships, those seagoing gems, being rapidly replaced by steam-powered vessels. Captain Green saw the future and it wasn’t made of canvas sheets. Bowing to modern technology, which he knew included the dumbing down of all aspects of sailing, from relationships among crew members to the formal traditions and pristine conditions of these vessels, Captain Green didn’t exactly abandon the sea; he decided to view it from a rocky beach. That year, with his wife and six children, he d
eparted England’s port city of Liverpool aboard a steamer and crossed the Atlantic to Montreal, Canada. The family traveled by train to British Columbia, eventually sailing southward into Puget Sound, by then officially located in the United States of America. Captain Green had visited this part of the world during his many sea voyages and had determined that no place on the globe could match the natural beauty of the U.S. Northwest. Rather quickly the family settled on ten acres, including six hundred feet of shoreline, on Vashon-Maury Island at Quartermaster Harbor. They had a house built and named the family settlement Stillhaven, perhaps because this marked the location on the globe where the Green family set aside navigational charts as stillness replaced moving with the tides.
Captain Green was my great-grandfather, the fifth generation of English sea captains who skippered British sailing ships. My grandfather Alan was just a boy of six when the family settled on this American beach, but he had already traveled the world aboard the British barque Wilhelm Tell, his father at the helm. In his book Jottings from a Cruise, a collection of his father’s ships’ logs and a personal memoir, Alan recalled that Stillhaven had “a nice gravel beach, where Indian arrows were frequently found, and where every tide brought in an interesting assortment of flotsam, the greatest portion being driftwood.”
On that same island, more than fifty years later, I too beachcombed, and there, my feet in Keds to protect them from barnacles, I learned to swim. Bouyant saltwater lends a sense of security; surely a body will float to the surface every time. I could lie on my back, arms and legs outstretched, and float, it seemed, forever, until something distracted me and I disturbed the balance between my body and the water it displaced. If I didn’t start swimming, I’d sink. I was proud of my ability to float, bobbing on the waves, drifting with the currents. I suppose this is when I first recognized my flotsam heritage, and first became fascinated with the odd bits of flotsam and jetsam washing up on the beach.
