Coastal cleanup on Matinicus Island

The clean up crew: (standing, left to right): Eva Murray, Blair Clement, Ray Beaudoin, Robin Tarkleson, Fiona Twombly-Hussey, Lana Cannon, George Tarkleson, Usha Beaudoin; (seated) Maury Colton, Sam Proctor, Susan Sidwell. Susan Kennedy

I've been reading Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano's recent book Flotsametrics, a happy accidental find in the Rockland Library. The book describes the science of worldwide ocean currents, or gyres, that circulate floating objects such as the many thousands of Nike sneakers lost overboard from a container ship in a 1990 storm. Beachcombing becomes more than just the search for another piece of sea glass when you realize that some of the items found in the rockweed may have been cruising the seas for 10,000 miles.

On the other hand, some of them might reflect a more local, uh, problem.

Coastal Cleanup on the Maine Coast Week was September 12-19 this year. I came home one day to find a message from my friend (and Island Institute Fellow) Lana Cannon about a planned beach cleanup for South Sandy Beach. The Matinicus Elementary School students, along with their teacher Heather Wells and others, had already spent the afternoon of September 16 on Markey's Beach, gathering up stranded trash (Matinicus Island is blessed with two really beautiful sand beaches, rare this far east in Maine.)

I called Lana back. "Can you use some rubber gloves? Matinicus Island Rescue has plenty. Do you need trash bags? Matinicus Recycling can supply those, too. Do you think we should have some refreshments? I'll make a batch of doughnuts." That was the easy part. There was still one big question, a bit more difficult. Lana asked me, "Can you handle getting rid of the stuff we pick up?"

On September 19, about a dozen islanders and a couple of visiting friends gathered in the sunshine with work gloves, trash bags, milk crates, band-aids, doughnuts, muck boots and that most precious tool, their valuable time. Nobody needed the band-aids.

Ray Beaudoin and I tested the heft of a derelict refrigerator left smack in the middle of the swimming beach by Hurricane Bill; to our surprise and relief, it wasn't that bad. Doorless and rusty, it had clearly been at sea or at least living outdoors for quite some time. We lugged it across the sand and, carefully, across the slimy bed of rotten seaweed remaining from the storm. We then rolled it up the ledge and up the steep trail to the road-head, where somebody could come with a truck and collect it later.

Our group picked up bleach jugs and beer cans and Red Bull containers and Styrofoam. We collected a useful-looking length of pipe and a tennis ball and a baseball and a half a car battery, and Styrofoam. We collected bits of pot warp (lobster trap rope) and broken, twisted pieces of wire lobster traps, and yet more Styrofoam. This is inevitable unless we choose to take our industry back in time-in a commercial fishing environment these days, there simply is a lot of Styrofoam, and it can hardly defend itself against the hurricane.

I found three shoes-two sneakers and a perfectly good Croc. One of the sneakers was, in fact, a Nike; I examined it, hoping to find it old but unused, meaning it might have circumnavigated the globe. Alas, the top was fairly new but the sole showed signs of wear. Oh well.

According to Ebbesmeyer, certain conditions predispose certain beaches to collecting certain trash. Right-foot shoes and left-foot shoes might even be routed to different waterfronts by the physics of wind and water. I neglected to check and see if these three shoes happened to all be for the same foot. Ebbesmeyer also explains how the conditions sort the trash by weight, and clearly this had happened on our beach. After Hurricane Bill dumped massive quantities of kelp on the beach (a couple of feet thick in places) and scoured out the sand in some areas, the sand came back and covered a lot of the mess. Surely, deep below our feet was trash of a certain density; the ubiquitous blue gloves, for instance, favored by fisherman and usually found all over the place. I did not see even one on this particular beach cleanup. We'd need to come back again, and frequently, at different times of year, to make any real dent in this.

Nobody with any sense is offended by busted-up lobster traps; that cannot be helped, and it comes with the territory. Some of the stuff we picked up, however, indicates an attitude problem somewhere.

Lana took the baseball home to her dog. Maury and Blair took some random stuff back to their studios with art in mind. Somebody took three seal claws to clean up and study. I'll take the refrigerator and get it to Rockland on the ferry sometime, and pay the money to dispose of it as a refrigerator, even though it now barely resembles one; there is certainly not a chance of a puff of Freon. All seem to agree it's worth the disposal fee to get rid of such an eyesore.

Who says we don't care?

Matinicus Island Recycles and the community in general would like to thank the City of Rockland and the Transfer Station crew for allowing us to bring our recycling in. Same goes for that refrigerator.

Eva Murray is a freelance writer who lives on Matinicus Island.