All Washed Up
Flotsamologists never know what they’ll uncover on Washington’s stormy shores—and that’s the point.
Two years ago, at the annual Beachcombers’ Fun Fair in Ocean Shores, I met a garbage-truck mechanic from Sumner named Andrae Hart and his wife, Kimberly, and mother, Priscilla. Thirteen years earlier Andrae had suffered a severe head injury, courtesy of a drunk driver, and fallen into a coma. For years after he awakened, his mother told me, “he didn’t find anything he could enjoy or get involved in. Then we took him beachcombing.” Somehow tramping the sands, scanning for a message in a bottle or whatever else the sea felt like spitting up, reconnected him to the world. “Now he does it all the time,” Priscilla says. “He gets up at four in the morning so he can go scour the beaches. His life just revolves around this.” The three Harts followed the storms and flotsam the way Deadheads once followed the Magic Bus. They even talked of selling their house, buying a camper, and becoming full-time beachcombers.
Beachcombing appeals to a raft of instincts and inclinations: to the detective, archaeologist, naturalist, treasure hunter, collector, and, especially, hunter-gatherer in all of us. It is a meditative exercise that will upend your worldview and teach you to savor the foul weather and biting wind that bring big waves and flotsam bonanzas. And so it suits Washington’s coast, which is notoriously deficient in the things people usually go to beaches for: The water’s too cold to swim in without a wet suit, beachfront bars are unheard of, and you’re more likely to get wind-whipped than sunburned.
Beachcombing appeals to the detective, archaeologist, naturalist, treasure hunter, collector, and hunter-gatherer in all of us.
This outwardly quirky pursuit is a draw for many of the 4 million tourists and day-trippers Ocean Shores hosts each year. About 2,000 of the more ardent combers gather early each March for the Fun Fair, the renaissance weekend of beachcombing. This year they’ll hear talks on crows and other beach birds, marine ecosystems, and driftwood and how to tell what tree species and area it came from. They’ll view and perhaps erect astonishing assemblages of fishing floats, floating sneakers, and other gaudy sea wrack, all competing like prize steers for one of the show’s blue ribbons. They’ll walk the tideline with a marine ecologist, learning to read the language of sand and surf. And they’ll scatter along the shoreline for the fair’s high point, the Dash for Trash, a littoral scavenger hunt that doubles as beach cleanup.
Published: March 2009
