by Skye Moody
Pumpkins, Sausages, and Rolling Pins
The world’s serious flotsamists have their special beaches, and these are based on the ocean currents, tidal action, weather, and sundry personal tastes. Lieutenant Colonel A. H. Richardson, U.S. Marine Corps, travels once or twice a year from his Maryland home to Japan to beachcomb for glass fish-net floats. Richardson’s house is a colorful jungle of these jewel-like bubbles, all of which he harvested, and in the blink of an eye he can tell a genuine glass float from a fake. He may be one of the West’s experts on Japan’s beach flotsam, and like other devoted flotsamists, he has his favorite beaches. But flotsam doesn’t select its beaches the way people do.
The posh beach communities of Laguna Beach or Martha’s Vineyard may regard their strands exempt from receiving a headless corpse or a couple hundred Nikes—all leftfooted—or a half ton of putrid, decaying Velella velella, but in all its organic and inorganic wonder, flotsam goes where it goes. Winds and currents deliver flotsam to its destiny. The surprise is, as Richardson says, just another reward of the hunt.
Other collectors of Asian glass floats have established places in flotsam history. Alan Rammer, marine education specialist for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, is a glass-float specialist who often lectures on the subject. Rammer, assisting his late mentor, the flotsam author Amos Wood, were first among members of the world flotsam community to develop a systematized protocol for classifying glass floats. Their work inspired today’s most renowned glass-ball collector and specialist, the cigar-chomping, eagle-eyed Walt Pich, whose book Glass Ball is a kind of bible for the subgenre of Asian glass-float collecting.
Pich, who also wrote The Beachcomber’s Guide to the Pacific Northwest, has been collecting glass floats ever since he saw his first one roll up on a California beach. The pastime turned into a serious hobby, and as Pich amassed thousands of glass floats of every description, he began traveling to Japan to research the history of the Japanese glass fishing float. This research forms the basis for the book Glass Ball, although Pich hastens to credit his predecessors, notably Amos Wood, and says his own classification system only builds on Wood’s work. But Pich, too, has contributed enormously to the science of glass-float identification, and flotsam professionals depend on Pich’s guide to classify their finds.
Pich’s book describes the difference between a doughnut-mold jumbo glass float and a dot-mold jumbo. “The doughnut mold is often found with an appealing blue cast,” he explains. “It may be the oldest of the jumbo rolling pins.” Pich describes the various characteristics of floats that lucky beachcombers find on the tide line, including size, color, swirls, manufacturing techniques, flaws, etc. Through use of photos, diagrams, and Japanese characters, he deciphers a float’s identity and gauges its value on the market—a market that is huge and profitable.
The “pumpkin float,” a relatively new bit of flotsam, is named, like all glass floats, for its shape and may be one of the rarer glass floats found washed up on the U.S. Pacific Coast. Pich devotes an entire chapter to it, including the intriguing mystery surrounding the pumpkin’s origin. The sausage float is another specimen altogether. Shaped like sausages, they are old and Japanese, Pich says, and are interchangeable with spherical floats.
At a 2005 beachcombers fair in Ocean Shores, Washington, I was talking with Pich when a man approached Pich’s booth. “Did you get it?” Pich asked him. The man shook his head. “Naw,” he said. “Somebody told the guy that his float was worth probably ten thousand, and when the guy heard it, he clutched onto his float and ran out the door.”
Fakes abound. I bought one myself from a booth at the fair. I had admired the unusual blue cast of the float’s glass, similar to the color of a Bombay Sapphire gin bottle. The booth operator explained that this was a rare Japanese float that he’d found washed up on the Northern California coast. Rare cost me ten dollars. Pich later verified the float was a phony repro, which I had suspected based on the price, but I’d bought it anyway because it reminded me of martinis. Had I read Pich’s book before making the purchase, though, I could have enjoyed the satisfaction of calling the merchant on his dupe.
Master of the floating glass ball, author Walt Pich, with one of his larger specimens.
Norwegians are credited with inventing the glass fishing float sometime before 1840. Credit is sometimes given to Christopher Faye of Bergen, who in 1865 won a gold medal for his invention: blown-glass balls, five or six inches in diameter, for use as fish-net floats. These first creations were small egg-shaped affairs tied to a single fishing line and hook. Glass floats were buoyant and didn’t cost much to produce, but finally the glass blowers’ lungs must have given out because they eventually turned to producing floats in molds made from metal and, much later, plastic. Meanwhile, the glass-float craze spread among the world’s fishermen, and soon float makers began adding their marks, embossing images such as a trademark or an artist’s signature to their creations.
Japan jumped aboard the glass-float bandwagon around 1910, and of course the Chinese had to copy everyone else. During World War I, Canada’s maritime armed forces used glass floats on nets intended to capture enemy submarines. But it was the Japanese who really embraced glass floats and produced millions of them ranging in size from two to twenty inches in diameter, depending on the types and sizes of nets they were intended to support. The Japanese made their floats from the glass of recycled sake bottles, most of which were clear glass, or green or brown glass. Thus the vast majority of Japanese floats found by beachcombers are of those hues. But other recycled glass was used as well, and some floats were produced in shades of aquamarine, cobalt, amethyst, yellow, orange, and, most prized of all, red, which was created by adding gold to the liquid glass. While thousands of beachcombers have over the decades hauled in millions of Japanese glass fish-net floats, mostly along the coasts of Japan, California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska, Walt Pich says an equal number of glass floats remain on shore in Japan, kept in storage, and millions more are bobbing around in the North Pacific.
Around 1920, float makers began producing aluminum and cork floats, which are more durable than glass, therefore more reliable, and which allowed fishermen to attach eye-hooks to reduce loss. By the 1940s, plastic floats were in production, and after World War II plastic became the standard for fish-net floats, boat fenders, and buoys. Few glass floats are manufactured today, though flotsamists have happy thoughts of the millions of glass balls still bobbing and weaving on the ocean currents. Don’t mistake the “art objects” tossed adrift by coastal artists for the real thing.
Sake bottles came to America via the Kuroshio current.
Prince of Tides
Forks isn’t one of those towns you happen upon during a leisurely Sunday drive. No, Forks lies deep in the Pacific Northwest forest, on the far side of the Olympic Peninsula, if not at the end of the world, at the end of U.S. territory. No vacationer or mountain hiker stops long in Forks, no longer than to refuel, read signs about historic logging camps, and ponder the statue of Paul Bunyan. It’s not touristy, and the people of Forks like it that way. They live on the precipice of nowhere for a reason: They like solitude. From Seattle, the last real city before Forks, some 150 treacherous miles distant, the drive to Forks in good weather tops out at just around four hours. The trip involves a ferryboat ride and plenty of hairpin curve time, usually on rain-slick two-lane roads, and if it weren’t for John Anderson, you would never know you’d finally reached Forks. But John Anderson’s fifty-foot flotsam totem hails you on the way in.
Supported by a forty-foot crane buried somewhere inside the sculpture, the tidal totem soars above surrounding evergreens at the edge of the Anderson property. It’s made completely of buoy and fender flotsam he’s collected off Pacific Northwest beaches over the past two decades. The yard surrounding his house on three sides is landscaped with flotsam. Pewter Norwegian ball floats decorate the base of a tree. A stand of crab cages resembles an early Brian Swanso
n sculpture. Old car fenders, rusted anchors, and massive rusted ball floats line the gravel drive. In one garden bed, nothing but washed-up pillow rock grows—not really grows, but the once-melted, now-hardened rocks seem alive and resemble dancing Dr. Seuss characters. Behind the house is a bin of more than thirty thousand plastic rice floats. The yard is only a hint, though, of the truth about John Anderson, and truth is, he owns the West Coast’s, if not the nation’s, largest and most extraordinary flotsam collection.
It fills a warehouse, crammed to the rafters, literally tons of flotsam: old life jackets, rusted retail signs, dozens of messages in bottles, pottery dishware, toys of wood and plastic, over a thousand glass floats including many rare varieties, shipping buoys the size of a Toyota, plastic floats of every description, Japanese wood marker stakes, gnarled driftwood monsters, old buckets, furniture frames, parts of boats and automobiles, and much more. Along one twenty-foot wall, Japanese sake bottles of every size and description occupy floor-to-ceiling shelves, neatly arranged by category. Anderson has been offered five thousand dollars for just one green glass double-doughnut float. He turned the offer down, and keeps that and other especially prized flotsam locked up inside his house about twelve inches from his peacemaker.
Hours of combing through John Anderson’s flotsam collection only skims the surface; you could root around among the treasures for days and still not wrap your head around the sheer size of the collection. And it has drawn attention, not all of it welcome by the Andersons, whose home is a stone’s throw from the flotsam warehouse. Anderson and his collection have been featured in Smithsonian magazine and on several television broadcasts, including the time he discovered remnants of a major container ship spill. Chances are that one day the flotsamist and Boy Scout troop leader, along with his wife, Debbie, who is a member of the county council, and his two sons will be obliged to move either themselves or John’s collection, because the flotsam grapevine has already made Anderson’s collection famous; not only other flotsamists but also the generally curious visit the Anderson place like it’s a shrine.
Entrance to John Anderson’s Flotsam Farm.
Prince of Tides, John Anderson, with floats he salvaged from the Pacific Ocean.
The collection is breathtaking and marvelous, the more so because everything in the massive warehouse came out of the Pacific Ocean and was hauled up from the beach on John Anderson’s back, with the exception of a few massive pieces brought up with help, often his wife’s. Among the pilgrims who visit Anderson are oceanographers who consult him frequently on what he’s found and where and under what weather circumstances. Author and NOAA communications officer Robert Steelquist calls John Anderson the most interesting flotsamist he’s ever known, and I agree. The man who found chow mein noodles washed up in Queets, Washington—and ate them straight from the can—is quiet, humble, and private, and now he’s flummoxed, because the many visitors who show up wanting to see his flotsam collection cut into his personal time. Personally I think the Andersons should open a U.S. equivalent of the Dutch Jutters Museum, hire their two sons to run the place, and take off on a worldwide flotsam tour.
Recently the Andersons’ Norwegian relatives came to visit. Maybe they saw the pewter floats encircling the tree. Maybe they recognized them.
Creative Flotsamists
One idyllic summer day, on a small island in Long Island Sound, young Jay Critchley was beachcombing the strandline when he saw a curious object on the sand. He bent over and picked it up. It had floated in on the tide, a white plastic object somewhat resembling a London bobby’s whistle, yet a bit too flimsy to stop traffic.
“I liked the color and texture,” says performance and fine artist Critchley, decades later recalling his first impressions of the beach whistle, “and so I started collecting them before I knew what they were.”
Critchley had no clue where the beach whistles came from, or even what they were used for before they washed up on beaches in Long Island Sound. When in 1978, Critchley moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, he was amazed at the numbers of beach whistles appearing on Cape Cod beaches. Sometime between his first beach whistle and those Critchley sees today, decades later, washing up on Provincetown beaches, somebody clued him in: Cape Cod beach whistles came from Boston’s sewage system, spilling into the bay, bobbing and floating on the currents, many eventually washing up on local beaches.
There is no way to put this delicately: “Tampon applicators,” explains Critchley. “And in spite of having six sisters, I didn’t recognize what they were.” He adds, “Until Boston fixed its sewage system, PTAs [plastic tampon applicators] were the most numerous objects that floated up on the beaches in New England. Beach cleanups would consistently rank PTAs as the number one item collected, more than bottles and cans. I began fashioning sculptures and wearable fashions.”
Today, Critchley is internationally known for his art, including though not limited to his flotsam art, his outrageous theatrical installations on beaches, and grand satirical performance art aimed at, among other community causes, cleaning up Cape Cod’s beaches. Critchley’s flotsam art first caught my attention and rubbernecked me right into his gallery’s Web site, where panning through his flotsam creations, I alternately laughed, retched, and laughed some more. In the 1980s, Critchley created a life-size Miss Tampon Liberty statue constructed entirely of tampon applicator flotsam and his most controversial flotsam sculpture, “Miss Tampon Pie.” Among Critchley’s inspired art works with “beach whistles,” the most celebrated may be his elaborate Miss Liberty gown, created of three thousand plastic tampon dispensers. Critchley wears the gown “only on sacred occasions,” for example, to the 1985 centennial celebration for the Statue of Liberty. The full-length gown flows around his body, and when he walks or gestures, thousands of white plastic fingers twitch and flutter like a Puli’s dreadlocks. On his head during sacred occasions when he has put on the robe, Critchley wears two lobster claws, the overall effect reminiscent of Native American ceremonial costumes, or a Red Lobster commercial.
Beach whistle collector, artist, and activist Jay Critchley wears his sacred robe at Provincetown (Cape Cod). PHOTO: VINCE DEWITT/Cape Cod Time
In 1983, Critchley created Tampon Applicators Creative Klubs International (TACKI) to advance the collection and creative uses of PTAs. As president, he represents the organization internationally. Critchley says “there are no artificial boundaries with the oceans,” and so he presides over “a vast array of collectors, folk artists, and activists. My goal was to ban the sale and manufacture of PTAs so that my collection would become valuable and allow me to retire in comfort, without relying on Social Security.”
On August 29, 2000, Miss Tampon Liberty returned to the beaches for a “No with the Flow” ceremony in Provincetown, an event lamenting the opening of Boston’s 9.5-mile sewage outfall pipe that jettisons some 360 million gallons per day of Boston’s wastewater sewage into the waters surrounding Cape Cod and Massachusetts Bays. At the time, Critchley, decked out in beach whistle regalia, was quoted as saying, “They’re still dumping, first plastic tampon applicators, now wastewater. This is a tragic and momentous occasion and a threat to our interdependence with all species. We all have a stake in the healthy and fruitful waters that sustain us here.”
With the help of Clean Ocean Action of New Jersey, Critchley created a temporary beach installation called TACKItown. He also promoted legislation at the Massachusetts House of Representatives to ban the sale and manufacture of nonbiodegradable feminine hygiene products, twice appearing in his sacred robe at hearings. Lobbyists from Playtex and Tambrands proved instrumental in defeating the bill.
Forget conch necklaces, painted driftwood beach scenes, seashell picture frames. Like Jay Critchley, John Pritchett is a visual artist whose flotsam art forms a personal bond with Poseidon. Pritchett, an award-winning editorial cartoonist for Honolulu Weekly and for other Hawaii newspapers, has lived in Hawaii for thirty years. Pritchett body surfs, and his favorite beach is Ma
kapuu, at the eastern tip of Oahu. And so it’s no coincidence that when John Pritchett turned to art, he would depict his favorite beach in one of his paintings. But Pritchett’s seascape of Makapuu Beach, a forty-inch by thirty-inch work, was created without paint. Between December 2001 and February 2002, Pritchett collected pieces of plastic debris off Makapuu Beach and glued them onto a board to create the mosaic image. Every piece of plastic was used exactly as it was found on the beach; none were altered, except for washing off the sand.
Long considered Africa’s most prolific and popular shoe, flip-flops commonly wash up on the continent’s coastal beaches. Flip-flop factories in Mombasa, Kenya, produce 20 million colorful pairs a year. On Kenya’s coastal islands of Lamu and Kiwayu, most folks wear pata pata, as they call flip-flops, and special cobblers make a business of repairing them until they can no longer be repaired. When monsoon rains wash trash into the ocean, the pata pata go afloat on the currents. Some stay in the ocean for years, acquiring goose-barnacle coats and hitchhikers like the swimming crab. Each year, about 12 million pairs of discarded flip-flops wash up along East Africa’s coast.
When the unwearable, barnacle-coated pata pata wash up on beaches, instead of dumping the flip-flops back into trash collectors to start the cycle all over again, the islanders got creative. Today on the beaches of Lamu and Kiwayu, people harvest the colorful flip-flop flotsam, carve it into toy boats, dolphins, turtles, mobiles, and other playful objects, which are shipped to Mombasa—where the pata pata originated—and sold at market, providing a living wage for many islanders. Unlike many crafting enterprises pressed upon the poor by do-gooders, the flip-flop phenomenon was sparked and fueled by the poor. Their creativity took flotsam to another level. What constitutes a living wage is still debatable; what constitutes fashion-forward innovators is clear. About one third of today’s haute couture is based on the creations of ethnic peoples, borrowed by designers and mass-producers, yet the original artists rarely reap kudos or royalties for inspiring the Paris runways and Target.
