GOING HOME

Today it's raining steadily, but I have in my hand the first few pieces of beachglass I collected this season, found on a sunny afternoon at the little beach just down the road from my house - a couple of bits of old stoneware, a tiny piece of an old patternware plate; a bright green chip with a hint of a ridge (I think it might be from a vintage 7-Up bottle), and a nameless piece of clear glass, turned yellow by the action of the sun's UV rays on its chemical composition.

A trip to the big beach near the ferry dock almost always yields more spectacular finds, like old medicine bottle stoppers from the turn of the century before last, and interesting blobs of "bonfire" glass - bottles and other glass items melted in a trash fire, then dumped in the lake, and left to roll around for decades til they're frosted and ready to be storm-tossed onto the beach to lie like uncut gems in the sand - but any walk on a beach is a good one. I put beachcombing in the same category as birdwatching. A leisurely obsession that takes you for a wonderful walk outdoors, with often the reward of seeing something new and amazing to identify.

Here's a favorite poem I copied into my notebook from an issue of New Yorker magazine, sometime in the 70s I think it was - I didn't save the issue. It's like a piece of beachglass itself, a small treasure I've carried with me for decades. Now that we have the Internet, I've tried several times to find out more about the poet, but so far nothing has turned up. If anybody knows anything about her, I'd love to find out more, read more.

Going Home

Tonight when we're back in another land
We shall not empty our shoes of sand
We shan't untangle sea-snarled hair
Nor rinse our souls of salty air

Susan Thurrott

LITTERING FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, I am quite the beachcomber now that I live here on the Lake Erie shore. And one of the things I enjoy most is finding pieces of beachglass. Now, official beachglass experts (or seaglass, as it's more frequently called, even though it can be found on freshwater beaches of the Great Lakes) have studied the subject to great length, depth and breadth, and can tell you all the colors to be found, and how rare or common each color is. They can even say how many bits of glass it might take you to find a certain color, e.g. one is every 10,000 pieces seen and/or collected might produce a piece of orange – the rarest color. I don’t know about some of that info, I found a pretty rare color after just a few walks (and probably only a couple hundred pieces seen). Not that it matters, really. The joy is in the surroundings, playing tag with the waves, feeling the breeze, hearing the gulls…and finding a wave-frosted prize in the sand.

After looking at the chart of beachglass colors I realized that the really spectacular colors are becoming quite rare. For one thing, there’s not as much glass as there used to be. Plastic has replaced much so many of the glass containers of old, and along with that, the colors of glass available today are pretty much clear, brown and green. And then there’s recycling. Soon after that insight, while cupping my day’s collection of deep cobalt blue, bright turquoise, and buttery yellow in my palm, I formed an idea. I decided to haunt yard sales and thrift shops, and buy up as many glass items in red, cobalt and other jewel colors as I could find, and then when I had a big bag filled with them, I’d take them out into the lake and release them into the waves. I know it’s littering, but really, what’s glass but sand anyway. And eventually, if no one finds it, the beachglass will be ground away to nothing. But I like to think that in forty or fifty years, someone else will be walking along the beach and stoop to pick up a beautiful red nugget, be amazed, and wonder how it got there. I wonder about that now, only I know what I find probably went into the lake as someone’s trash. The future person who finds mine won’t know it, but it was put there just for them.