Sanderling with Beach Trash
(Image by Ingrid Valda Taylar)   Details   DMCA

I have my bucket provided by the park

And I have my long-handled pincers

For capturing scraps without bending my knee.

I am picking up trash from the high tide line.

A few days ago the seas were rough,

The flag was red and it stayed red

For the rest of the week.

That was when the weather swept the sea.

And the seaweed is masterful

At holding bits of balloons and ribbon

Nylon rope, bottle caps, partial containers

Pen carcasses, toothbrushes without bristles . . .

Some plastic turns brittle like eggshell

As if waiting for any kind of human contact to disintegrate.

There are spoons and forks from take-out,

And straws that seem designed to last forever.

(Let me dwell on straws for just a minute.

Almost weightless, they roll and float with ease,

Putting up no resistance, allowing

The sea to flow through, as if sipping eternity)

Bottle caps are close runner-ups

For riding out the Apocalypse.

Their work of sealing long forgotten

They seem to be enjoying their retirement,

Contributing points of unnatural color to the beach:

Primary colors and black and white.

It does not escape me that my bucket is made of plastic

As is my bathing suit and T-shirt.

And my shoes and my socks and my crown

Which is a composite of ceramic and plastic

And my hearing aids.

I started out contemptuous of those of us who litter

But I ended up feeling like I was in a haiku:

I choose to pick trash

From the beach without judgment,

My crown of plastic.

.............
This poem plays on the double meaning of crown as a cap of a damaged tooth and the imagined plastic crown of my pseudo superiority to the trash I am picking from the seaweed from my favorite beach. Sure, I am privileged to be able to spend time in Florida and visit my favorite beaches. And I am literally from a "land far away" from this giant conservative paradise. I truly see myself as something of a foreigner down here in this politically backwards state where I obviously don't belong. My closest friend is a banyan tree that I visit every few days and open my heart to. I'm sure there are plenty of nice people in Florida who would like and accept me as I am, but my wife and I are happy just hanging out together at the beach, our choice being the one at John D. MacArthur State Park that you have to cross an estuary to access. The park provides buckets and litter nabbers for anyone who wants to clean up the junk that seems to be getting worse each year. My plastic crown is my pseudo immunity from being counted among those low-lifes who trash the ocean. Sure, I sort and recycle and I like to think that the amount of junk that we contribute to the landfill is minimal compared to what the average person is throwing out. (Americans throw out 4.9 pounds of trash per person every day -- that's nearly 1,800 pounds of materials per American every year. Our contribution is probably a third of this, but that is bad enough.) The thing is, although there are no statistics, my guess is that when there is even a slightly higher surge in the tides (not talking storms here, just an abnormally large surf and an onshore prevailing wind), the saltwater finds stuff that even slobs wouldn't leave behind when they pack up their beach chairs and roll up their towels to evacuate their outposts in the sun. (Also there are those who toss litter off boats for turtles and fish and dolphins to sample -- they will rot in the hottest circle of Hell.) My point is, I think most of the litter that winds up in the sea and in the seaweed is coming from a new source -- hedges and dunes that used to be high and dry, beyond the pale of the surge. Florida is basically a big reef. The highest elevation in FL is 300 feet, a couple of miles from Alabama but most of the state is just a few feet above sea level. When the seas really start to rise within the next decade, there is going to be a lot of litter on the beaches. I sadly predict that at some point even people like me won't see the point. So, how about you? Are you wearing a plastic crown?