Float

Daisy and I Have a Mug Up

joeannhart — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:30:56 +0000

Thank you Marshall Zeringue for the interview with me and my dog, Daisy, on his site, Coffee With a Canine.

I usually reserve this blog for all things plastic, but Daisy asked for a little limelight, and how could I refuse? Besides, as she pointed out, plastic concerns her as well. Dogs and their owners are a little worried what will happen in communities where single-use plastic bag bans are enacted. What will they use to pick up dog poo? Relax, I tell her, there are so many exceptions to these laws there will still be plenty of plastic to go around for that purpose, which is a pretty silly purpose to begin with. In my neighborhood, dog owners pick up after their dogs then leave the plastic bags of poo by the side of the road. There is even one evil dog owner who tosses the bag into a tree, where it then hangs on a branch for all eternity. All this for a substance that will very quickly decompose on its own if kicked under a bush? Cities are another matter, and Daisy points out that there are biodegradable doggie waste bags at your local pet store. So they claim. But the bags must meet ASTM D6400 specifications, and not many do. Breaking up into teeny fragments does not make plastic biodegradable, it only makes it easier to slip into the oceans and become toxic ‘food’ for the fishes, who then pass these toxins onto us. If they live that long. Having said that, most plastic that meets ASTM D6400 specifications are made from corn, the worst possible choice. It takes up valuable farmland and uses an inordinate amount of oil-based fertilizer and toxic pesticides. When I told Daisy that she wanted to cry. Me too, I said. I gave her a biscuit, and told her we — the humans — would keep trying. We’ll try other things to make plastic polymers from, like algae. Or jellyfish! We are not a particularly good species, like dogs, but we are very clever. If consumers (another word for humans, I tell her) keep demanding something, they’ll get it. In the meantime, I asked if she was okay with a paper poop bag, and she said yes. She’s such a good girl.

Coffee with a Canine

Who is in the photo at right?

This is a photo of me and my dog Daisy. I’m JoeAnn Hart, author of the novels Addled and Float, both of which have all sorts of animals in them, including dogs. We live in Gloucester, Massachusetts, although Daisy is from West Virginia, where she was picked up off the streets when she was around nine months old. I adopted her from Save A Dog in Sudbury, Ma. in 2010, so she’s still young. She’s a messy Cock-a-poo, with a miniature poodle dad, and a Cocker Spaniel grandmother, who slept around, so Daisy’s mom was only half Cocker Spaniel. We only know this because my sister is a vet and had Daisy’s DNA tested.

What’s the occasion for Coffee with a Canine?

I had to drop my husband’s car off to be repaired, and in exchange, he bought me a coffee at Lone Gull. Daisy came along for the ride. She loves the car and all the smells on Main Street, but she has to wear a harness when she goes anywhere with me. Her head is smaller than her neck, so a collar is just a place to hang her license.

What’s brewing?

I’m having a large light roast with milk. Hot, because it’s not ice coffee season quite yet.

Any treats for you or Daisy on this occasion?

I was tempted, because I love Lone Gull’s almond cookies, but resisted. No goodies for either of us. Daisy loves sweets but she puts on weight too easily to indulge her. She finds ways to indulge herself as it is. We think she was raised in a dumpster in the back of a bakery, because she cannot resist frosting. At Christmas we found her on the dining room table with her face in the whipped cream and gingerbread, but that was nothing compared to last summer, when the day after my son’s wedding we found her with all fours in the leftover cake. She is a very well-behaved dog except for this one strange obsession.

How did Daisy get her name? Any nicknames?

Daisy was the name that came with her from Save A Dog. For weeks we played around with other names and none of them fit quite as well. So Daisy she stayed. Sometimes we call her Sausage because of that weight issue. We don’t consider that an insult, and neither does she. It is simply her shape.

How were you and Daisy united?

I had lost my standard poodle, Annie, in 2009. She was 16 years old when she died and I was just too heartbroken to get another right away. When I was ready in the fall of 2010, I started looking at shelters across New England. I knew I wanted a rescue, but I needed a hair breed or mix because of allergies, and I wanted a medium-sized dog this time. It turns out that most dogs at shelters tend to be either very small or very large. I spent a lot of time searching near and far, but every time a candidate popped up, it was already taken by the time I contacted them. In December I decided to wait until late winter, when, unfortunately, many puppies given as Christmas presents are surrendered for adoption. Then, three days before Christmas, I got an email saying Daisy had just arrived at Save A Dog. I drove down there and I fell in love. She was exactly the dog I was looking for. We took her home the day before Christmas.

Who are your dog’s best pet-pals?

She loves other dogs. She adores Gussie, my daughter’s Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, but Gussie doesn’t even look at her when she visits so we can’t call her a pal. Daisy was an only dog until this summer, when my husband got a Golden Doodle puppy, Happy. It was then we realized that Daisy loved dogs, not puppies. Happy hung on her ear all day, like a large fuzzy earring. Now Happy is older and calmer, not an annoying puppy, so they are best friends. They especially like to chase squirrels around the yard together.

What is Daisy’s best quality?

Daisy has amazingly soulful eyes. She always looks as if she’s in deep sympathy with my feelings. Then again, she looks as if she is in deep sympathy with everyone’s feelings.

If Daisy could change one thing about New Englanders, what would it be?

Daisy wishes New Englanders would make more cakes with frosting and leave them unattended. She has very powerful little thighs, so leaving them on tables is just fine with her. She’ll get there.

If Hollywood made a movie about your life in which Daisy could speak, which actors should do her voice?

Jennifer Aniston. Daisy is that sweet.

If Daisy could answer only one question in English, what would you ask her?

I’d ask her what her life was like before we met. What was she doing wandering the streets of West Virginia? I know there are a lot of puppy mills there, so I sometimes think she was tossed in a dumpster when she didn’t turn out to be a perfect Cock-a-Poo. A dumpster behind a bakery.

The Plasticene Era

joeannhart — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:18:27 +0000

“It’s so hopeless,” a young friend said, tossing a plastic water bottle in the trash. “I don’t believe in recycling.”

“Don’t believe?” I said, reaching into the garbage. “I didn’t know it was a religion.”

“It’s a faith. A faith that you’re doing the right thing. A feel-good gesture that masks a larger problem.”

As I dropped the bottle into the recycling receptacle, I felt that familiar spike of serotonin from having done my bit for the environment, and I knew she was right. Self-satisfaction with our little actions can keep us from taking up the larger, more difficult, actions. Recycling is grossly inefficient. Every year, Americans throw away three-hundred pounds of plastic per person, only ten percent of which gets recycled, and poorly recycled at that. Not only is it down-cycled into something like decking material, it uses an inordinate amount of energy in the process, as we truck empty water bottles all over the country. All this so we can re-use a toxic material? When we die, our bodies will decompose into a bit of carbon and methane. Plastic never disappears. It breaks down into smaller bits of polymer, releasing pseudo-estrogens and other hazardous chemicals in the process, until it is the size of a single molecule. This is where the waste stream meets the food chain. The molecules enter the water table under the landfills where they make their way to the sea, to be devoured by fish fooled into thinking it’s plankton. Then we eat the fish.

The modern world runs on plastic — it’s in our cars, computers, hair conditioner, and replacement hips — and there’s no going back. The 2010 worldwide plastics production was three hundred million tons. This is where people, like my young friend begins to feel it is a battle that can’t be won.

We didn’t used to feel so defeated by environmental challenges. In the decade following the first Earth Day in 1970, the personal was political and that attitude turned the polluted tide. In “The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-in Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation” (Hill & Wang), Adam Rome tracks the transformation of the environmental movement over the decades, and its lessening impact, as grassroots campaigns morphed into organizations focused on lobbying. In the 70’s, it was citizen pressure that helped birth the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. Now, we can’t even get Congress to curb climate change, even as the waters rise up around us and the oceans become too acidic for life.

So when I stop buying plastic water bottles, is that just a self-congratulatory waste of time? When I sign a petition for my community to ban single-use plastic bags, am I causing undue strain on local businesses without any societal benefit? No. The immediate environmental payoff might seem slight, but the ultimate reward is the message to corporations. When consumers balk, corporations notice.

Since Congress will not act, we as individuals and communities must, one action at a time, in Manchester-by-the-sea where they banned bags, and Concord, where they banned water bottles, putting pressure on corporations to seek alternative to the immortal plastics of today. A million plastic bags a minute are created, but they don’t need to be made from petroleum-based polymers. We are such a clever species. If we want to make plastic out of algae, or bark, or even jellyfish, we can do it. (not corn, please, it depletes the soil and adds more pesticides to the world) But there must be strong consumer will behind it because scientific research isn’t cheap. It starts with saying no to what we have now. Recycle, yes, but also refuse. Marblehead State Representative Lori Ehlich has introduced House Bill 696, a state-wide ban on single-use plastic bags, which was voted out of the Committee on Environment, Natural Resources, and Agriculture on Earth Day. Those of you in Massachusetts, ask your state representatives to make this happen in 2013, and give corporations a reason to rethink plastic.

Unnatural Selection

joeannhart — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:28:59 +0000

My recent post at the Hothouse Blog.

During my son’s newborn assessment years ago, the pediatrician turned my rosy baby around in his hands like an experienced fruit vendor with a melon. “Look,” he said, as he placed the baby down on his side. “My favorite anomaly.”

Favorite anomaly? Anomaly, anomaly, anomaly. I couldn’t remember what it meant, and certainly not in relation to my baby boy. Atypical? Abnormal? That couldn’t be right. A mother wants a pediatrician to say it is the most normal baby he has even seen in the history of babies.

He tugged on my son’s ear. “There,” he said, “a gill.”

Dear god. A gill. It was only a small pinprick, as if he’d been born with a pierced ear, but this evolutionary tic was too high up on the ear rim for me to pass him off as a very hip baby. To make matters worse, in my family, the distinctive marker of infant beauty is related to how small and flat the ears are, so everyone looks at them first. I kept a tight little cap on him for months.

Scoot on up to the winter of 2013. Super Storm Sandy. Flooding. Powerful ocean surges. One extreme weather event after another, and the Atlantic succeeds in changing the coastline yet again. Adapting to drastic change may mean more than just picking up one’s shell and moving inland, for when a landscape changes, so do we. For most of the past 150 years, since Darwin first laid out the ground rules for natural selection, scientists assumed that humans had stopped evolving. They believed that with technology, medical advances, and culture, humans had become immune to evolutionary pressures. But no. Like all other living things on Earth, humans undergo genetic changes in response to conditions around them, passing beneficial adaptations down to their offspring. We are not exempt from the laws of nature. And the more extreme the pressures, the faster we will latch on to any mutation that might give an extra edge to our survival.

Here’s a happy thought: In the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 55 million years ago, carbon dioxide, probably from volcano spew, entered the atmosphere causing catastrophic fallout. Ocean acidification wiped out many sea creatures or encouraged them to seek their fortunes on land. It was during this time of mass extinction that opportunistic species, like primates, came into their own. With food sources scarce, we were flexible eaters, and none too picky about the neighborhoods we moved into either. Up a tree or in a cave, we made do. If we had to lose a tail, stand upright, or develop opposable thumbs, we did it and never looked back. We changed and we will change again. Of course, if environmental pressures get too extreme, we might not be the same homo sapiens in a few thousand years. We might, in fact, be so different we could not even cross-fertilize with today’s model. Still, there would likely be some version of ‘us.’

Here’s an unhappy thought: Ocean acidification is increasing at ten times the rate that it was during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Ten times. Global warming is a related environmental pressure, caused by our machines expelling carbon emissions into the atmosphere, like a million teeny volcanoes. In the name of expediency, it might be quicker and wiser this time to change our habits rather than leaving our fate to evolution. In many ways, scientists were right about humans having the capacity to outwit natural selection. Culture (such as emission laws) and technology (such as new ways of controlling emissions) can help us adapt before going extinct or evolving into something too weird to contemplate. But will we? Political change can be as slow as evolution, and in the game of life, Mother Nature bats last.

Whales once walked the earth, then returned to the sea. Maybe we will too, if there is a living ocean for us to return to. Where I once thought of my son’s gill as a throwback, I now think of it as nature keeping her options open, hoarding old DNA in case we need it again. In the face of rising waters, having a gill or two in one’s genetic back pocket is going to start looking like a pretty good plan to withstand widespread ecocide. And if we have some acid-tolerance code leftover from the days of monster volcanoes, well then. We’re good to go.

What Would Fitz Think

joeannhart — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 12:49:45 +0000

Gloucester Harbor From Rocky Neck, owned by the Cape Ann Museum,

What would Fitz think? What would the great luminist painter of the 19^th century, Fitz Henry Lane, think of the new wind turbines that now dominate the skyline of his beloved Gloucester? A sailmaker’s son, he grew up in the shadow of ships, but a childhood encounter with deadly nightshade kept him on crutches his whole life. He could only yearn for the sea. After a printing apprenticeship in Boston, he returned to Gloucester and built a stone house, still standing and open to the public, on Duncan’s Point, now known as Harbor Loop. From this vantage point he studied the seaport at the height of the Age of Sail. Friends would row him out into the Harbor in a dory so he could get a closer look at some rigging, or see the land as sailors saw it.

In the painting, Gloucester Harbor From Rocky Neck, owned by the Cape Ann Museum, Lane sees a town marked by a series of church steeples. The citizens had much to pray for, the mortality rate for fisherman being so enormously high. City Hall, with its wall of names of those who have died at sea, had yet to be built, so there is no tower, and we have lost some of those church steeples, but otherwise, the skyline has hardly changed since Lane painted the city in 1844. As if anticipating the erection of the wind turbines, he has Ten Pound Island fortuitously placed to block them out or diminish their impact on the scene. They’re big! Very big. One of the turbines is close to 500 feet tall, and the blades, like rigid sails, are the size of football fields.

But would the turbines really have bothered him? Fitz spent a few years in Boston learning his craft, at a time when urban life was truly offensive. The Industrial Age was spewing coal smoke into the air and the dust rained down upon the streets thick with struggling humanity. It was all very Dickensonian. Even his paintings of Boston Harbor are aggressive, dark, and harsh. My bet is that he would rather paint a modern turbine than a smokestack any day.

The city of Gloucester is projected to save $450,000 a year for its partnership in the wind project. The municipal buildings are now entirely powered by clean energy. Imagine that. Fitz Henry Lane’s father harnessed the wind with canvas, cutting sails for the fleet. Now here we are 150 years later, with no commercial sails in the harbor, and Gloucester is still harnessing the wind. Fitz might deeply mourn the loss of sailing vessels in the harbor, but he would paint the turbines with wonder. He would make them part of the landscape.

From the March JoeAnn Hart Hothouse.org blog

Thank you, State Rep Lori Ehrlich

joeannhart — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 15:39:13 +0000

Marblehead State Representative Ehlich has introduced a state-wide ban on single use plastic bags. House Bill 696. Ask your representatives to make this happen in 2013. http://www.malegislature.gov/Bills/188/House/H696

A Green Launch Party, God Knows I Tried.

joeannhart — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 15:42:15 +0000

Float Launch party guests with paper cups of Ocean Punch.

My new novel, Float, was released in February, so we had a launch party at the Rocky Neck Cultural Center here in Gloucester. The plot of Float swirls around the dangers of plastics in the ocean, hence, no plastics at the party. In fact, I was giving out raffle tickets to anyone who brought in a piece of plastic washed up on the beach, which meant we couldn’t exactly serve drinks in plastic beverage glasses. We drank Blue Ocean punch out of waxed paper cups. The recipe called for coconut-flavored rums, blue curaçao, and Chambord, all of which came in glass bottles, so no problem there. Harder to figure out was the Sprite. Instead of plastic one-liter bottles, I opted for a case of aluminum cans. Aluminum has its own environmental problems, but at least it was not plastic. Thank you to my bartenders, Denise and Margi, for opening all those cans and here’s to wishing you both a speedy recovery on those index fingers.

I don’t drink carbonated beverages, but if I did, I would get one of these nifty Soda Streams for the kitchen, which turns tap water and flavored syrup into soda. Soda Stream is out to challenge the single-use plastic bottle market. Let’s hope this is the way the market is moving. Many of the Float party guests simply walked back out to the beach and picked up a washed-up soda bottle to claim their raffle ticket. Soda Stream machines are also are being hacked all over New York to create fizzy cocktails.

Soda Stream System

Paper plates were a no-brainer for the cocktail nibbles (fried calamari, locally smoked fish, gold fish and Swedish Fish), but I wish I’d known about Easy Island bio-plates, made from naturally fallen Areca palm leaf sheaths. No trees are cut down, no dyes or resins are used, they are aesthetically pleasing, and able to hold liquids for up to 6 hours. They can be composted or used as animal fodder when the party is over. What would Mr. Piggy think? He’d wonder if they came with any Swedish Fish.

The cocktail napkins were paper, the linens were real and washed at home, and the utensils were wooden toothpicks. Where, then, did I go wrong in having a green party for Float? The wine. At the liquor store, I’d chosen Fish Eye (but of course!) which was available in many varieties and two types of containers, glass and box. I chose the white wine in bottles because they needed to be iced, but I bought the red wine in boxes, believing that cardboard was more environmentally friendly than glass. Both are recyclable, but cardboard, I reasoned, could also decompose faster in the landfill. I am not a boxed wine drinker, so it wasn’t until I opened a spigot, did I realize that the box was holding a huge plastic bladder of wine. Plastic.

JoeAnn signing Float, giving out raffle tickets

Sigh. I hope I made up for it with the raffle, in which we collected huge bags of marine debris that we brought to the recycling center. Jay McGloughlin won the Neptune’s Harvest cap, Beebe Nelson won the membership to Maritime Gloucester, Dianne Emmons won the quart of Neptune’s Harvest fertilizer, and Tom Cox won the copy of Float signed by both me and Karen Ristuben, who did the cover art. The best piece of Beach Plastic Award goes to Jen Fahey, who found this lovely plastic vixen on Brace Cove. She was too good to bring to recycling, so she now sits on my desk next to Salacia, a bisque doll from a completely different era, when there were no plastics to worry about.

Beach Babes, a hundred years apart

Watch the Float Launch Party: http://youtu.be/ixUPIS8y2v8

Ode to Float, by Duncan Nelson

joeannhart — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:08:40 +0000

Duncan orating, photo by Tom.Robinson-Cox.com

I DOTE ON MY ROLE IN THE CELEBRATION

OF FLOAT AT ITS ROCKY NECK FLOTATION

O I shall permit no debunkin’

Of a book whose protagonist’s name is “Duncan” –

For that is the very name of the bard on

Whom falls the duty (he hopes you’ll pardon

His doggerel) to deploy his art

In praise of the prose of JoeAnn Hart!

While JoeAnn calls herself “a mean troll,”

She is also very much a “mean troller”

Through “troubled waters.” Her laudable goal

Is the planet’s salvation. We’re here to extol ‘er

For merging bankruptcy, conceptual art,

And plastic plethora into Float:

A book bound to play a part

In getting our collective goat,

As for sure it got hers. O may we pay heed

And pay honor to the goat that just died,

Yea, butt up against the mounting tide

Of pollution afloat on groundswells of greed.

I have already, of course, been Addled,

In a good sense, by your setting your sights

On an uppity country club scene that straddled

A subtext of Food and Animal Rights,

While ringing choice changes on Mother Goose!

Oh what a lot of fun that book was –

It left me aghast, ‘twas so fast and loose!

And tonight, dear JoeAnn, all the buzz

Is on Float, “Number Two”; and looking to “hat tricks,”

Number Three, no doubt, will tell much about

What we’ll need as we deal with Post-Flotsametrics,

Against which, I’ve no doubt, you’ll raise a loud shout!

We toast you, JoeAnn! May the fuss and commotion

You stir up be wide and deep as the ocean,

And on the way, may we find, per your wish

Recyclable uses for jelly fish,

And from similar innovations commence

To float upwards on bubbles of Common Sense!

Duncan Nelson 2/15/13

The crowd, photo by Tom.Robinson-Cox.com

It Takes a Human

joeannhart — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 18:16:42 +0000

We think of a field as a permanent fixture in the landscape, but it’s not. A field never wants to stay a field. If it has any soil at all, it wants to grow up to be a forest. Keeping a field open requires either a herd of grazers or regular mowing to prevent shrubs from getting a toehold, because once shrubs become established, trees can’t be far behind. To prevent this ecological succession, we mow once a year and rotate two donkeys around the property. Abe and Zach don’t make a herd, but they do their part. Watching them in their solar electric enclosure in the back field recently, I thought, you two, you have this bucolic view of pasture butting up against the woods, through which you can see a flashing lighthouse upon the shore, and you never lift your heads from the grass. The donkeys are thinking, here’s this yummy vegetation at her feet and all she can do is look elsewhere.

They’ve got me there. Donkeys, like most animals, live in the moment. Not so humans. We’re always looking around, seeing what else there is, or might be. If we don’t like what we see, we do something about it. We are sculptors of calculated beauty, adjusting the terrain to suit our vision, because a view is not just a pretty picture, it’s a perspective. When I look across the wide expanse of fields, it expands my own heart. High above, the Red-tailed Hawk inspects the bare trees for a nesting site, and I feel that nature is doing well and all is right with the world.

It’s not of course. I know that. The natural world is not a landscape created for my viewing pleasure, but a complex ecosystem in deep water. The ocean that glitters so prettily through the trees is sick and the woodlands aren’t doing so well themselves. But for the time that I am lost in the view, it’s all good. Frederick Law Olmstead, the defining landscape architect of the Victorian Age, creator of Central Park and Boston’s Emerald Necklace, once said that designing a view was a spiritual exercise. Gazing up at a mountain lifts our souls; the vista from the mountaintop makes us feel like gods, masters of all we survey. Oceans stir up our deepest emotions, while a placid lake can calm our minds. A river is a journey untaken, and fills us with sweet longing.

It’s why views add such value to homes. The Realtor’s three rules of desirability are Location, Location, Location. The nicer the home, the better the view. But as Thoreau said, what is the use of a fine house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on? And how easy it is to block out the intolerable. English lords razed crusty peasant villages to the ground in service of the view from the manor house. In the Industrial Age, the rich fenestrated their urban homes with stained glass so they wouldn’t have to look out on the smokestacks and congested streets. Our modern equivalent of stained glass is the TV or computer. We sit inside and look at a screen, our window on the world, and choose what we will be exposed to.

Like the English gentry, we want the world to look like no one else exists. We plant trees to frame a view — or “captured scenery” as the Japanese say — and we cut trees to expand a view. We use trees or earthworks to block out unsightly features, from a utility pole to a power plant to a neighbor’s house. Arborvitae run along a good length of the field. I planted them with my friend Deirdre when I moved here in 1979. They were just fuzzy wisps of plants then, and had to be protected from suffocating bittersweet and quack grass for years. Amazingly, enough survived to create a tall hedge that now blocks out passing cars from our view. Deirdre, however, did not survive. She died this fall. We are so ephemeral. It’s why we admire fixed features, like mountains and oceans, that go on without us.

Because they will. No matter how much damage we do it, the planet will continue, in one form or another. Our unconsidered actions will only make it inhospitable for us. When that happens, we’ll become as extinct as Steller’s Sea Cow, and the earth will heave a sigh of relief that we’re gone. We will have been one of nature’s experiments that hit a dead end, one of our own making. The post-human views could be horrific, or they could be spectacular, but either way, we won’t be there to find out.

As I return to the house, Daisy, the mighty hunter, pounces on voles in the hidden folds of the field, a field created two hundred years ago when Farmer Niles cleared the land of moraine rock, pushed here by the last Ice Age. But as much as a dog delights in open space, Daisy, like the donkeys, does not admire the view. It takes a human to do that. And it will take humans to love views so much they will fight for their survival, as well as our own.

Originally posted on the Newfound Journal Site.

Coastliner is a Hothouse column that ponders the intersection

of humans and nature at the water’s edge.

Car Alarm Jellyfish

joeannhart — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 15:49:01 +0000

Here is a short clip showing the species of jellyfish that was used to trap the famous Giant Squid last week. When the Car Alarm Jellyfish is being attacked, he changes to the color blue and starts flashing, hoping another predator will attack his predator. Alas, that was not the case in this rather chilling video.

http://richardqiu.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/atolla-wyvillei-alarm-jellyfish/

Salacia, the Salty One

joeannhart — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 15:02:42 +0000

What is the liquid equivalent of unearthed? Not unwatered. Dewatered? No. How about dredged? That’s more about muck than water, but for my purposes, it will work on a metaphorical level, as in, to dredge up the past. Gloucester did not feel the full force of Hurricane Sandy this fall, which gouged out New York and New Jersey, remapping their shoreline and reminding us that water may be unpredictable, but so, it seems, is land. Still, we got bruised just being on the sidelines, as massive swells spewed up heaps of seaweed along with the usual flotsam, our floating history. On Raymond’s Beach along the outer harbor, big ticket items included fish bins, net balls, blue tarps, and a beige rug.

As Daisy ran up and down the beach sniffing out seagull wings, I gathered loose debris and moved it beyond the wrack line so it could be collected at a later date. Empty motor oil containers, rubber gloves, water bottles full of brown water, it seemed all I saw was trash. My friend, Jackie, who makes seaglass jewelry, once told me that you can look for seaglass or you can look for sea pottery shards, but you can’t do both at the same time. I was so focused on plastic I couldn’t see anything else, and nearly walked past a pale bisque figure the size of my middle toe.

Smooth as a pebble and blotchy with seaweed stains, this small seafarer had spent a lifetime under the concealing sea, maybe as long as a century, back when bisque dolls were commonplace. She is no longer that staid Victorian, but has undergone a sea-change. Naked, limbless, and marked with great age, she should be in a museum labeled “Salacia, Roman goddess of the sea.” Like other relics from an ancient world, the doll survived because she knew the great trick was to flow with the tide.

What of her past? She may have been left at the beach by a child, or fallen off a boat. Who says it was an accident? She could have been thrown out to sea by some snitty Edwardian toddler, or dumped as municipal garbage into the deep, as was our coastal custom not so long ago. She has holes at her shoulders where wire once allowed for movable arms, but salt ate the copper tendons, releasing first one arm from her body, then the other. The seas rolled her along the ocean floor, until one day she lost her head. Eventually she found peace wedged among the rocks, hidden by swaying underwater plants, with only a dull sheen of sunlight above. In time, her legs disappeared below her knees. No need for them in the place where legless creatures dominate. All the while, tidal sands brushed against her body, healing over the wounds and reducing her to a bare human essence.

Then a storm like Sandy comes along and changes the depth and nature of her sanctuary, shooting her back into the tides. How she materialized on Raymond’s Beach is a mystery. How I saw her is a miracle. Perhaps our eyes are programmed to spot a human form above all else. At any rate, she changed my focus. Seeing her nestled there in the sluice, the beach was no longer just a stretch of land where garbage comes to rest. Freshly washed by the outgoing sea, the wet sand glowed in the autumn light as gulls scoured the blinding waterline for morsels. Suddenly, instead of seeing nothing but garbage, all I saw was loveliness. I named the doll Sandy and took her home. She sits on the high ground of my desk, a lesson from Salacia’s realm: Do not just focus on trash, real or metaphorical, but keep your eyes and heart open for when random beauty comes washing up at your feet.

“Salacia” reposted from my monthly Hothouse blog for Newfound Journal.