Catch…What a Whale Shouldn’t Have to Eat

There’s a local blog (with universal appeal) you should check out. A Rockporter goes to the beach every day collecting trash and other detritus that washes up. She then organizes this trash – sometimes by color, sometimes by theme, sometimes by another method – and documents each find with a photo.

It’s a bit shocking (as well as visually fascinating) to see both the kinds of things that wash up and the volume of things that wash up. Of course we all know, theoretically anyway, that a bunch of trash litters the beach after every tide. But gone, more or less, are the days of poetic trash, like beach glass. In fact, finding beautiful beach glass juxtaposed against plastic bottle caps on the sand only heightens the awareness of how ugly and permanent our modern version of beach glass is in its plastic persistence. The irony of seeing water bottles littering the beach, when these bottles no doubt originated with health-conscious and hydration-minded people, would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

And if you’d rather not view the blog from an environmentalist’s perspective, you can enjoy the images for the sense of color and visual interest they retain. Just another example of the artistic wealth on Cape Ann, where residents are capable of creating beauty from piles of trash.

The blog: Catch…What a Whale Shouldn’t Have to Eat