The best beachcombing and my favorite trash
I like to collect crap, and the best crap is free. Especially when it comes to you by chance and bears the marks of age and use. It’s this extra character that makes the objects heaped up at flea markets and on garbage days so intriguing. Assemblage artist Susan Danis told me that the local junkyard was one of her favorite places on Earth. I can see where she’s coming from. Over my desk I keep the scrap of fabric in this photo, which I cut from a broken lawn chair in the trash outside my building when I lived in Slovakia. Sentimental? Perhaps, but I also like to look at it and wonder what it’s been through. How many bottoms did it endure, and how many spilled bottles of kofola?
The beach is at the top of the list of places to make strange discoveries, and I had the fun of writing a mini-guide to great beachcombing spots on the northern Pacific coast for VIA magazine. It ran with Michael McRae’s story on turning up everything from 17th-century Spanish beeswax to thousands of lost Nike sneakers on the shores of Oregon.
State and national parks tend to have the nicest and most accessible beaches, but you can’t take home much of what you find on them since shells, rocks, and wood are all protected. I think the man-made objects are more interesting anyways: busted fishing tackle, random bottles, stray pieces of scuba gear. On the north coast, it’s popular to look for the glass floats that break free from Japanese fishing nets. They’re tough to snag in Oregon, but from this video it looks like they’re all over Alaska, if you have a plane to get out to remote spots.
The video is slow moving but beautiful. Eagles hang out on the beach, bear prints appear, a dog chases a seal and a fox, and a redhead blushes.
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