by Skye Moody
“These folks are nuts,” I started.
The doctor flashed a cautioning hand. “Pot calling a kettle black,” he said.
“They are obsessed with flotsam,” I said, avoiding his pitiful attempt to divert the subject. “I heard about this so-called beachcomber in Orange Beach, Alabama. You know, the place at the center of that hurricane.”
“Which one?”
“Whichever hit Orange Beach. So this beachcomber guy, I’m told, is collecting disaster souvenirs. So I track him down, and sure enough, the guy’s a hardcore flotsamist. Has been for something like forty years. But, guess what? Are you listening?”
He nods, half-comatose.
“The guy only collects evidence that supports his theory of alien landings in the Gulf of Mexico.”
“You mean boat people?”
“I mean ‘alien,’ as from Mars.”
The shrink straightened up in his wing chair, coughed lightly, jerked his chin out the way men do when their ties are choking. He swung the Mont Blanc like a metronome and said, “Time’s up.”
“I’m talking obsession here,” I push. “Flotsamists are absolutely fixated on collecting stuff. Alien spaceship parts, whatever. They’re totally obsessive-compulsive. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking about my floating stone. But that’s not obsession. I am merely ...”
“I’ll see you on Thursday,” he said. “Meanwhile, I suggest you stop fixating upon that little floating stone and invest the attention in a new pastime.”
But it was no use; flotsam had become my life, fitting me like a second skin. I spent more and more time in the water, chasing flotsam, diving for lagan. When I wasn’t in the Sound, I was standing on my deck with binoculars, scanning the beach for freshly washed-up objects, a habit that preceded daily beachcombing forays. As the kitchen counters and library shelves filled up with flotsam discoveries, the house gradually acquired the pungent scent of fresh wrack. The deck and living room were merely an extension of the beach, and seabirds thought nothing of crossing the threshold. I passed a summer battling sand crabs and tripping over rusted ship parts I’d salvaged from the sea floor. Alas, like a tunnel-eyed bottom scavenger, I lacked a broad perspective.
Unlike their primitive ancestors, twenty-first-century beachcombers don’t scour beaches for food staples, goiter cures, and construction materials. Today’s beachcomber is more often a strandliner of leisure, clad in chic beachwear—or else American—searching for the cheap thrill of it, finding something for nothing, or an individual who believes Neptune has lobbed a gift especially to him or her, material or spiritual, viz., the vision-questing lady, the more remarkable the better. Alas, today’s flotsam, jetsam, and lagan is 99.44/100 percent debris, and the .56 percent worth a eureka is, ironically, usually plucked off the waves by novice beachcombers or the casual strandliner plaguing the beach purely for its palliative effects. These juttering interlopers can’t appreciate what they’ve stumbled upon, and usually after mulling it over, lob the treasure back into the sea from whence it came. This sort of beach bum is the flotsamist’s cruelest thorn-in-the-side nemesis, a creature simultaneously to abjure and to stalk—for his ignorance is the flotsamist’s reward.
The flotsamist finds intrinsic value, or scientific significance, obvious or potential beauty, and sometimes even aesthetic properties in objects ordinary beachcombers find ugly, uninteresting, or even blots on the environment. The beachcomber stumbles upon a barnacle-coated, rusty, unidentifiable length of steel and curses it, or just ignores it. The flotsamist gathers up the object, like so much golden fleece, takes it home to ponder over, to find a practical use for, or just to have around to look at. With Sherlockian devotion, the flotsamist will spend weeks, months, even years researching an object’s point of origin, tracing its voyage across the oceans.
The world is awash with these oddballs; and flotsam eccentrics ply the tide lines of every country embracing coastal waters. This universal flotsam fetish is nowhere more pronounced than in the northernmost islands of the Netherlands. Take, for example the strandliners of Texel and their flotsam museum.
The price of admission is worth every kroner. Go Dutch or pay for your date, either way, a visit to the Jutters (Beachcombers) Museum in Texel, the Netherlands, will send thrills up your favorite flotsamist’s spine. The museum explains: “Beachcombing is second nature to the people of Texel. For centuries, it was a necessity. Wood was always needed to stoke the stove and build with. The cargo vessels stranded on the coast of Texel were often a supplement to the local people’s frugal existence.”
The strandovers of Texel, like beachcombers everywhere, love nothing more than a great flotsam discovery, except, perhaps, telling the flotsam tale. In Texel’s Jutters Museum, flotsam collected off area beaches is displayed—where else?—in the Jutterii (strandover’s museum), where every day from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., Texel’s strandovers and shipwreckers and their fans gather there to swap flotsam tales, each focused on a particular item of flotsam found on Dutch beaches.
In 1931 the Netherlands passed the “Jetsam law” prohibiting beachcombing on its beaches. Whatever washes up in Holland belongs to the state unless its owner can prove right of possession. Each case is settled in the locality where the flotsam is found. The local mayor is also chief wreck-master of beaches within his or her jurisdiction. Texel’s mayor has six deputy wreckmasters who beachcomb for flotsam along the coastlines of the North and Wadden seas. Still, illicit beachcombing is commonly practiced, particularly for driftwood to use in construction.
Texel is one of the Wadden Islands; it’s the northernmost island facing into the North Sea, with the Wadden Sea on its east-southeast shores. Thousands of ships have wrecked off the storm-wracked North Sea and Wadden coasts. On a single night, Christmas Eve 1593, nearly two hundred ships, unfortunately mostly lashed together, went down during a violent storm. Today, ships commonly strand or go down along Texel’s coastline. The Jutters Museum is home to one of the world’s finest messages-in-bottles collections: Cor Ellen’s bottled mail collection, circa 1950-2003.
Seashell Desecration
Today’s world of crafts is rife with cheesy seashell-encrusted offerings—seashell-encrusted lamp shades, cigarette lighters, drink coasters, placemats, picture frames, jewelry boxes, bathroom tissue holders, even computer monitor frames, for criminy sake—all of which should be bought for the single purpose of dismantling them before someone gets the eureka to place one inside a time capsule. One craft teacher instructs her students to boil seashells they find on beaches, to ensure the animal inside won’t stink up the tchotchke. What glue are these crafters sniffing?
Flotsam art is an extremely complex genre, not suitable to the crafter. In fact, North America’s Van Gogh of flotsam art, Jay Critchley of Provincetown, Massachusetts, never works in shells; Critchley, a true artist, sometimes works in beach whistles, as will be described eventually. As for flotsam crafters, none are represented in the American Museum of Folk Art, and if I were a seashell, my worst nightmare would be spending my legacy Krazy-glued to a black velveteen tissue-paper box. On the other hand, I own a Victorian snuffbox fashioned from two limpet shells edged in gold banding with a handmade gold clasp and hinge, and I defy anyone to sniff at its extraordinary beauty.
Seashells, in their original unglued, pre-tchotchke state, can be worth thousands of dollars. Indeed, many Pacific Islanders, Filipinos, Japanese, and coastal Africans work fulltime as beachcombers or undersea divers, seeking the shell equivalent of the Golden Fleece. Since the early eighteenth century, Bohol, on Panglao Island in the Philippines, has been a center of the profitable seashell trade. Local markets hawk to private collectors and seashell businesses, many of whom today resell them on eBay. Buyers from all over the world visit the Bohol markets, and competition for rare specimens is fierce—even tinged with foreign intrigue, in some cases, the stuff of crime thrillers.
Bohol isn’t alone in the shell game. Throughout the world, divers illegally harvest s
eashells to supply a thriving international black market. It’s possible to pay upwards of $50,000 U.S. for a particularly rare and coveted shell in excellent condition. Fishermen often illegally sell shells caught up in their nets to wholesalers. Harvesting living animals has caused some species to vanish, the price a species pays for its exotic beauty. At least these collectors aren’t gluing them to clocks and cookie jars. At least, I don’t think they are, but you can’t predict what devil-may-care trends are infecting the nouveau riche.
Beach treasures that crafters covet include the sand dollar and the starfish. These hapless creatures washed up onto a beach—some still alive—form the nexus for some of beachcombing’s rowdiest fisticuffs. Serious snatching competitions break out, epithets are muttered or even shouted; I once overheard a California beachcomber say to another, “I don’t care if you got here first, I saw that sand dollar through my binoculars from fifty yards down the beach. It’s mine by first sight.”
First-sight beachcombers never attain the rank of flotsamist. A flotsamist understands possession is nine-tenths of the law; touch it and it’s yours. Only for heaven’s sake, leave the live sand dollars and starfish alone. They’d rather die from exposure to sun than to a crafter’s glue gun.
The Amazing Captain Crowe
Because my heritage traces back through five English sea captains, and because I grew up fending off boyfriends’ advances beneath the misty tracking eyes of my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Peter’s sea captain portrait, I think I know what a man of the sea is supposed to look like. Adding to my credentials, I’ve met a lot of ship’s captains around the world, some, like their vessels, more seaworthy than others. The Spanish captain of a Morocco-bound steamer who let me take the ship’s wheel as he delicately balanced his hand on my waist later delivered us safely from the mawing jaws of a freak Mediterranean storm. He ranks among my favorite sea captains, not only for his graceful hand and maritime expertise, but also because Captain A-hem was an expert on Mediterranean flotsam. In fact, I learned from Captain A-hem that a popular jetsam flung overboard off the French Riviera is clothing, most commonly ladies’ bikini tops, and usually haute couture. The captain recalled for me a particular wire-cupped size 110D (U.S. size 42D) Aubade soutien-gorge he’d personally retrieved off an incoming Riviera tide. He even offered to let me try it on, and when I quipped I’d only need half of it, he lost interest, and I never got to view his collection. Some flotsam is too hot to handle.
Off the Latvian coast, during the Soviet occupation of the Baltics, I hung out with Captain Janus Vitols on his oceangoing fishing boat. Our common language was Spanish, convenient since Natasha the Russian journalist dogging my heels didn’t understand it. Captain Vitols has plied the world’s oceans and braved major storms—the sea is chiseled into his jaw, and though he has frequently fished off the Chilean coast, he’s never encountered the Chilean Blob. I wondered about his experiences with pecios a la mer. The chiseled jaw tightened. Captain V. said, “Yo me busca bastante tipo raro a inundar la calles de Moscu,” or, loosely translated, “I’ve caught enough queer fish to flood the streets of Moscow,” a cynical political jibe he knows the loyal Soviet, Natasha, cannot translate.
So when I say that I know what a ship’s captain should look like, I think folks should sit up and take note: Captain John Crowe of Newport Beach, Oregon, is Neptune personified. Not only is Captain John one of the world’s most accomplished deep-sea divers, he also possesses a heck of a flotsam and lagan collection, all of it hauled up from the sea floor or plucked off the ocean waves by Captain John himself.
Professional divers like Captain John work jobs that take them deep beneath the ocean’s surface, where they may have to perform intricate repairs on ship’s propellers, or check a hull for leaks, or rescue a person or a valuable item that accidentally plopped into the drink. This true man of the sea has seen more flotsam, jetsam, and lagan than all of the Baltic populations combined.
Captain John Crowe was born in a Southern California beach town and spent his childhood swimming and snorkeling off Laguna Beach. As a young boy, he was one of Catalina Island’s “little imps,” as they were known, the boys who met the tourist boats sailing into Catalina’s Avalon Harbor. Tourists would toss coins into the sea and the boys would dive off the rocks, recover the coins underwater, and resurface, holding the coins aloft to the amazement and applause of the tourists. As a schoolboy, John Crowe regularly skipped school with his beach buddies, swimming and snorkeling off Laguna Beach at a spot called the Thousand Stairs. The stairs ran down a steep vertical cliff to the beach, “not really a thousand of them, but enough to keep the truant officers from coming after us.” At fifteen, Captain John took up diving, and he hasn’t stopped in more than fifty years.
Captian John Crowe at the flotsam portal to his home.
Over a lifetime career, Captain John has dived in the world’s oceans for NOAA on research vessels and for other government agencies and private contractors. He possesses finely honed underwater instincts he’s had to depend on long before the advent of technologically sophisticated diving equipment. This keeps him in demand; when a really difficult dive is planned, it’s John Crowe the experts call in to do the underwater work. When John needs assistants, he looks for surfers. “They make good divers,” he says.
Today, Captain John lives with his wife, Patty, in Newport, Oregon, where he bases his diving company. The Crowes’ front drive, its amassed flotsam collection forming a wondrous barricade against landlubbers, informs even the casual passerby that true mariners live here. The front gate is a ship’s interior door complete with porthole, and on either side of the door, lush gardens are landscaped with giant fish-net floats that dwarf Pilates exercise balls, a propeller that could have driven the Titanic, a massive rusted anchor, ships’ lanterns, bells, giant buoys—name your flotsam, it’s in Captain John’s front yard, and every object was fetched from the sea during his underwater exploits.
Diving extracts its toll on even the strongest human, and so not long ago, Captain John was hospitalized for heart bypass surgery. As is usual in bypass surgery, surgeons remove sections of arterial vein from the patient’s leg to replace the heart’s damaged arterial veins. Following the successful surgery, Captain John’s leg became horribly infected.
“They took a section of my leg the size of a two-by-four,” says Captain John. “From up near the groin all the way down my leg; they cut it all out.” But the infection blossomed and physicians began talking about amputating his leg. Captain John made an appointment with his surgeon in Corvallis. The day before the amputation surgery, the surgeon died, leaving Captain John in a hospital with the leg infection threatening to kill him.
“I wouldn’t even look at it,” he told me. “My wife did, but I never looked at it. They said it looked horrible, and I could smell the infection. It smelled awful.”
A physician stepped in for the deceased surgeon and after trying everything he could think of, he prepared to amputate the leg. Then a nurse took the doctor aside and suggested he try seaweed. Most American surgeons balk at any suggestion from a nurse, let alone what sounds a lot like a folk cure. But this Mexican physician went with the idea, ordered some sterilized seaweed, and packed Captain John’s leg with seaweed (Note: Do not try this at home). And waited. The cure didn’t take long, and today Captain John walks gratefully on his own two feet, still operates his diving business, and continues retrieving some of the world’s biggest flotsam from the ocean waves.
Off the Wrack: Seaweed Flotsam Revisited
Flotsamists love nothing more than a good wrack. It’s that green-to-brown seaweed and kelp line that forms on most saltwater beaches at high tide. The thicker and fresher a wrack, the more its attraction to a flotsamist, for within that twisted, braided, mashed, and crumpled mass are found the jewels of flotsaming. My little pink plastic propeller was rescued from wrack, as were several excellent plastic fishing bobs and perhaps a third of my porcelain shard collection. You never know
what a good wrack will contain unless you’re willing to crouch down and get personal with it. The serious flotsamist pays no heed to smirking beachcombers who pass by in search of, you guessed it, the Golden Fleece, for within the wrack lie un-countable exotic treasures ... but wait: The wrack itself floated in on the tide, and is flotsam of the first order.
Today, seaweed is commercially marketed as an antioxidant, which may prevent damage to the human body caused by cancer and by environmental toxins such as heavy metals and radiation by-products. Scientists at McGill University in Montreal have shown that a product derived from the algae wakame binds to radioactive strontium 90 in the human body, allowing the toxin to be excreted with the binding material. Some physicians recommend ingesting a wakame-based product before having X-rays, in the belief that any leaking radioactivity from the X-ray will be eliminated from the body along with the wakame.
Our distant ancestors’ cure-all has lately enjoyed popularity both for its cosmetic benefits and healing properties, John Crowe being a fine example. Taking a cue from Eastern medicine, surgeons in the West have lately been applying sterilized seaweed as a topical treatment to reduce swelling at incisions and for improving skin texture. Meanwhile, in the era of über-haute cuisine, chefs around the world prepare entire meals using only sea-derived foods. Arame, harvested on the beaches of the Ise Peninsula on Japan’s east coast, has for more than a thousand years been used as a sacred offering. This organic flotsam is harvested in late summer at low tide, when the plants are still young and tender.
Ever looked inside kelp? First thing you notice is its thickness. Kelp is another organic wonder that washes up on saltwater beaches. Known for its high nutritive value and mineral content, kelp is sold as vitamin supplements, tea, and compresses for arthritic joints. As a food, kelp is served raw or cooked, and my one childhood kelp-as-food experience reminded me of chewing on salty rubber bands. The sea plant is even hawked as a cure for cellulite and for weight loss, but don’t waste your money. Finally, kelp is considered an effective diuretic. Next thing we’ll hear about is kelp catheters.
