Cassandra's House

For the benefit auction Art Houses of Marin for the Ritter Center, a program for the homeless, we created "Cassandra's House" after Cassandra in Greek mythology whose prophetic insights; her warnings and concerns were dismissed or disbelieved. Cassandra had dedicated her life to beauty and was so beautiful herself that Apollo took a liking to her and gave her the gift of prophecy. But, when she spurned Apollo’s amorous advances, he was incensed. Because the gods cannot rescind a gift once given, he cursed her so that no one would believe her prophecies. Hence she was driven mad and wandered the streets of Troy warning of Greeks bearing gifts. She foretold the story of the Trojan Horse but no one would listen. What we are presenting here is no prophecy; what we are presenting is real evidence of what is happening in the ocean—washing onto our shores. Two people gathered the 1,241 pieces of plastic on our house in 2 hours from Kehoe Beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore. The plastic was selected from the tons of plastic on the beach, color-coordinated to accomplish our design.

Valentine's Day at Kehoe Beach

The first warm of spring; fog is hunched a mile offshore, and, no wind. Last week's series of storms passed with waves that brought coastal alerts and mountainous breakers at the Maverick's surfing contest sixty miles south. At Kehoe Beach, turning right to the north, we find the customary tangle of plastic and wrack. For variety we decide to head south across Kehoe Creek, flowing out through the sand, and onto Ten Mile Beach. The beach is blissfully clean here; the big waves have carried much of the plastic back out to sea. It's a great relief to walk and not feel the compulsion to focus down and sort through a bunch of junk. We walk for a few hundred yards and then our preoccupation with getting to work has us turning back north where there's plenty to pick through. Our habitual lean is toward gleaning stuff to tell the plastic debris story. A kind of shopping. Today we decide to make a valentine for our ourselves and our friends. All that red was gathered in fifteen minutes. Happy Valentine's y'all.

Hyperbole

The end result of hyperbole, while poetic and attention grabbing, ultimately leads to skepticism.

Our pictures from Kehoe Beach, Point Reyes National Seashore show no hyperbole is needed. The evidence is in. What washes up on this one beach is repeated everywhere on earth. This picture is from a cove at one end of “Ten Mile Beach” the eponymous strand filled from one end to the other with scenes like this. It’s heartbreaking, and a call to action. Relentless use of disposable plastic must end.

The news of plastic jetsam most igniting the public imagination is the story of the “North Pacific Gyre,” the great “Eastern Garbage Patch.” Its existence had been predicted in 1988 with a report from NOAA (the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency) based on coastal findings off Japan, Alaska and Hawaii. After Charles Moore’s famous Algalita voyage in 1997, an area of plastic debris north of Hawaii was described as “an island bigger than Texas” or, “twice the size of Texas”, or “bigger than Brazil.” Images of a giant “eighth continent” filled the public’s vision—effective images, all. But the press and the blogosphere have climbed on board belying the extent of the mess. There is no Google map that shows the gyre from space, and to those who would discredit the extent of the plastic pollution—if it’s not on Google maps, it doesn’t exist. The end result of hyperbole, while poetic and attention grabbing, ultimately leads to skepticism. Plus, if the Gyre were a densely packed, visible cyclopean floating raft of plastic, it might be possible to clean it up. The reality, gleaned in the summer of 2009 from trips to the Gyre by Project Kaisei, Algalita, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, confirm that it would be better described as a continent-sized bowl of plastic soup, a minestrone of tiny plastic bits. And, it can never be cleaned up. We’ve all watched as waste and water swirls down our drains. The Gyre is a prodigious drain: problem is, there is no planetary sewer pipe.

Kehoe Beach - January 24, 2010

Back in Business

It’s January 19, mid-month. All this late fall and even into the early winter plastic has been scarce. Maybe we’re out of business? A bittersweet feeling of being “fired from our job” mixed with the pleasure of several trips to a clean beach. But the usual phenomena are at work, the California Current sweeping down from the north carries debris down, away from the coast and out into the Great North Pacific Gyre. This cool water gives us the typical summer coastal fogs—our summer air conditioning. Winter brings the weaker Davidson Current up from the south and the beach becomes loaded with plastic washed out from wetlands everywhere, and even drags stuff ashore from the Gyre. We know this by aging, marine growth and labeling.

We had planned for a quick trip, just to inspect for changes in the plastic loading and we are perversely thrilled to see it’s back in the usual tangle of gobs and confetti-like shards. We had planned to be here a little more than an hour. As is typical we don’t pick up everything just the things to enhance our curatorial project. Color, of course, attracts the eye so we gather a full palette of mosaic pieces, and we also grab bottle caps, tiparrelo tips, nurdles, lighters HandiSnack® spreaders. We decide to no longer tally by weight. We’ll count by color and kind when we get home. 1212 is the total reckoning of pieces including 187 nurdles, 51 shotgun waddings, 20 tiparillo tips, 29 pens, 20 oyster tubes, 3 paintbrush handles, 2 toothbrushes, 2 combs, 170 lids. We found 1 girl’s hairclip in black with a poodle design, a mini-toy fire truck, a cervical cap, 5 HandiSnack® sticks and 4 lighters. All of this was in just over an hour of collecting. Sadly, we’re back in business.

Citizens of the Sea

T-Rex

It’s fall. 2009. The tail end of the dry season. We go to Kehoe more as wanderers in a beautiful place, than as the usual collectors. Normally, in the “off” season for plastic we’ll head for the woody mountain region of the park. The towering columns of the old fir trees grow into a cooling parasol, a reprieve from the tired dusty fever of summer. Bear Valley Trail with its tributary trails up to the ridgeline is a favorite. We counted up, that after so long in one place we’ve been on that trail collectively over 600 times. But today we head for Kehoe. The summer fog that turns Kehoe into a refrigerator has lifted.

At its simplest this project has gotten us outside a lot, out and into this broad and nearly wild place. Birds alone count for the allure attractant with 490 species seen in the park. At Kehoe we see swallows nesting in cave cliffs of the Laird Sandstone, Ravens croaking overhead, Gulls of course, Terns and scarlet-legged Oystercatchers, Murres and Cormorants abound. Endangered Snowy Plovers nest here. One wintry weekday we came over the hill to the beach expecting an empty beach, and saw a herd of over 300 birders, all dressed alike in olive weather-wear, binoculars slung, and spotting scopes at the ready. The Bristle-thighed Curlew had been spotted, never seen here before and grist for the listers trophy count. In late spring the air is honeyed with yellow bush Lupine and earlier the cliffs above the beach you can see an archipelago of deep purple Iris mixing perfectly with bright orange Poppies. This is truly an alchemist crucible able to transform despair into uplift. We glad to be a very small part of keeping it that way.

We go not expecting much plastic to have accumulated, just a nice day, sunny, warm with a fairly low afternoon tide when the beach can widen by 100 meters: more real estate to scrounge if there is to be any plastic. From the cliff top we can view the Great Beach, ten miles of it, stretching south disappearing in pale blue surf mist. Our prediction proved right - though the beach was not completely clean of plastic. Random shards, mostly white, and tiny pieces in bright colors. Like gold miners we know nurdles will show up in depressions where heavier sands hold against the wind. We find trails of nurdles picking up 20-30 in each little “vein.” But really, there is little to pick up. Against the soft, buckskin colored Laird Sandstone cliffs, dunes form like drifts on the north side of houses in snow country, a gap forming in rolling wind tubes. There is always plastic to be found there regardless of season. We decide to check and see and then continue our walk. We struggle up the fifteen-foot sliding sand dune, dropping into the hollow. There is a hubcap size chunk of whale or seal blubber rotting into a nauseating stink. We paw through the sand to cover it up so we can stick around for a bit without gagging. In our digging we see a lot of plastic just under the surface.

Now, we are drawn in and on the hunt. We find the usual load of shotgun sabots and tiparillo tips, nurdles, a trio of lighters and two Handi-snack spreaders. Judith finds a sand abraded girl’s hairclip, always a reminder that this stuff belonged to someone, is connected to a human life. Like scraps from the middens of Troy, here parsing some kind of post-modern Linear B to decipher what we find. Then she gives out with a whoop and offers a closed fist extending and opening it in a classical gesture of “lookie what I got” to reveal a bleached white T-Rex. It’s tiny in her palm, an inch and a half long. A plastic T-Rex, Lilliputian, probably come here across the sea given its wear, left to tell us a story of a child’s fascination and dreamy play life using miniature dinosaurs in a drama of eat and be eaten.

The petite thing is made from petroleum fossil oil deposits like most plastic. The Sinclair oil  “Dino” popularized the notion that oil came from dinosaurs and in a crude way of thinking is only true if you think of the time of dinosaurs. It’s said that it would take one T-Rex completely rendered down to make enough gas for one cross-country journey. That’s a lot of dinosaurs. But the irony of finding the thing still hovers over our day. In all the years we’ve been doing this and the toys we’ve found at the beach there are probably a half dozen dinosaurs. A great find for our collection today.