Flotsam and Jetsam

The beach in front of my house is dirty.

I mean really, really dirty. First there's the black sand. Sure, black sand isn't intrinsically dirty, and the fact that it's made up of ancient grains of lava is neat, but I challenge you to look at a beach of black sand and think "sunbathing!" instead of "composting soil." Then there's the waves that vary in color from flat gray to turbid brown. (Personally, when I go to the beach, I like my skin, not the water lapping at my feet, to turn brown.) And then there's the litter.

Litter isn't the right word, though. Litter sounds little. Litter makes me think of newborn kittens and other adorable critters. There are no adorable litters of critters littering my beach. There are, however, decapitated geese.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I went for a walk on the beach last Sunday afternoon. It was overcast and windy, and there wasn't another person in sight. Of course, I'd been on the beach countless times, but somehow never quite processed its astounding filth. Besides dog shit and your average plastic-bags-and-bottles trash, there was a whole array of more savory items: bulging diapers, dead frogs, condoms, the waterlogged body of a goose, and 50 feet down the beach, its waterlogged head.

This was the dirtiest and most fascinating beach I'd ever seen. I stepped on a spoon. Cool, I thought, a spoon--how Little Mermaid-esque. In one 20-foot stretch, I found a dozen fresh carrots strewn about. I found pretty green floor tiles, a baseball hat, toothpaste, a flag, a backpack, a brush, one rubber boot, a blanket, a Halloween mask and a telephone, spiraled cord and all. It was flotsam and jetsam straight out of someone's kitchen. A high-minded person would have felt convicted and started a beach clean-up on the spot.

I am not a high-minded person. I'm a former homeschooler, creative but lazy, and on that abandoned beach it made sense for me to do only one thing: collect all that cool stuff and make something out of it. So like a grungy Ariel, I gathered anything colorful or strange that wasn't too grime-encrusted, and piled it artistically into a beach-side shrine.

Some fishermen joined me on the beach for half an hour; we exchanged friendly hellos. A few neighbors waved to me from the embankment. Two teenage boys walked by and tore down part of my shrine, but that made me smile: teenage boys are supposed to tear things down. One of them--I pegged him to be around 13--sidled up to me.

"The sea is beautiful," he said in Indonesian.
"Very beautiful," I agreed.
"What's your name?"
"Polly."
He switched to English: "Want to have sexy?"

I walked away. He was just a kid, I thought, who didn't know what he was saying. Fog bloomed over the hills, and everyone disappeared indoors as it started raining. I wandered happily up and down the ugly beach, feeling close to Indonesia: its trash charmed me, its rain warmed me. I turned around, and saw the boy kneeling at the water's edge, a few yards away. He scooted toward me, calling "Hey, mister, look, mister!", his arm pumping wildly, and I realized: he's masturbating. He's masturbating at me.

I whirled around and walked straight back to my house, through a swampy area where the water was knee-high and the mud sucked my flip-flops from my feet. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the boy sprint away; I didn't stop. At the spigot outside my house I rinsed off the mud grafittied to my legs. I went inside, got in the shower and scrubbed my skin till it was blotchy and red.

I'd like to think I gave the boy a look of disdain--a look that said "What's that supposed to do, little boy, scare me?"--before I marched away. But my face was too busy with shock and revulsion to affect nonchalance. Two days later, even after laughing it off a little, I still feel the same: How shocking, that something that dirty would happen on the beach in front of my house.