Stories by the sea

At first sight it looks like a rubbish dump. But in fact all of the objects have been cleaned, ordered and meticulously labelled.
It is after all a museum, even if all the exhibits are what others might consider trash.
Beachcomber John Anderson from Forks, in the state of Washington in the United States’ northwestern corner, has been collecting everything he has found washed up on a Pacific Ocean beach for the past 50 years and has now opened his own museum.
“When my father was a young man he actually found a dinosaur bone. I was so impressed that I’ve been combing the beach since I was eight,” says the 61-year-old former plumber.
Back then he didn’t find anything quite so spectacular, but he says his father told him to start simple.
“Lighters! I looked for them and sometimes I found five on one day.”
They became the basis of his collection, which now fills a hall in Forks, 200 kilometres west of Seattle.
The lighters are lined up beside sunglasses, bags and pens. There’s a whole heap of shoes, sorted according to whether they’re sandals, trainers or walking shoes.
He’s got around two dozen dolls’ heads, which gaze eerily at the visitors from their shelf.
“In the 1970s they lost a whole container of Raggedy Ann dolls,” he says. “Well, I found the heads!”
In 1983 a container holding camera bags was lost, 11 years later one with ice hockey gloves.
His wife doesn’t object to his hobby, as long as he doesn’t bring it home.
Lots of the objects have their own stories, sometimes tragic ones.
“The Japanese tsunami of 2011 arrived here a few years later,” he says of the disaster which killed 20,00 people and caused a nuclear meltdown at Fukushima.
Millions of objects were swallowed up by the sea in the tsunami, caused by the Tohoku earthquake, and months later much of it turned up on the other side of the Pacific.
He found a pedal car, a big teddy bear, figurines and shoes, lots of shoes.
“In this part of my exhibition I only have things I can definitely trace back to the tsunami. I wish I could know the story behind each of them,” he says.
With other finds, the story wasn’t too hard to figure out.
“I’ve found messages in bottles about a dozen times. None of them are really old, but one was at least six years.”
That one came from a German, who’d thrown the bottle with a request for a letter into the sea during a cruise — Anderson wrote straight away.
But he never heard back.
“Maybe he was too busy,” he says.
Others did reply however. “When I return a message in a bottle to a child I sometimes get these,” he says, showing off children’s pictures of boats and fish. “Isn’t that beautiful?”
Anderson’s most unusual objects are a piece of a Boeing 727, a part from a rocket and several bowling balls.
“I have no idea how you can lose a bowling ball or how it would come to be washed up. But over the years I found several,” he says.
He’s also found a fossilised whale bone and a mammoth’s tooth. Not quite a dinosaur bone, but close enough. —DPA
An American newspaper further reports that in 1973, Anderson alternated working as a logger and a plumber with then local plumber Chuck Archer, finally buying Archer’s plumbing business in 1989 when Archer retired.
Anderson admits the profession of plumber has its allure; every day is something different and there always is a challenge and sometimes a surprise.
His most memorable plumbing story is the time he was called to a local drinking establishment to unclog a toilet. The problem was much to his surprise a set of false teeth.
After removing the obstruction, he was showing the set of dentures to the owner when a woman came through the door and said, “I have been looking for those, I borrowed them from my sister and I have got to get them back to her.”
As the two men stood there speechless, the woman grabbed the misplaced molars and headed out the door.
Anderson finally found his voice and hollered after her, “Be sure to boil them.”
It was around 1976 when Anderson began bringing things home from the beach.
Today, he has amassed tonnes of items combed off of local beaches.
A trip to his home in Forks tells it all, a tower of colourful floats is a centrepiece in his yard.
The driveway is lined with various rusted iron-work from shipwrecks of the past — like the 1903 wreck of the Prince Arthur — fossils and pillow rocks.
A look inside his home reveals beautiful glass floats and a notebook full of “messages in a bottle,” some of which Anderson has answered.
In another building are 25,000 floats in a container that reaches the ceiling, buoys of all kinds and athletic shoes.
A few years ago when a container ship went down, shoes washed up on local beaches and Anderson and many of his beach-combing friend exchanged lefts and rights and sizes until they got matching pairs and wore them.
A grey whale scull, which is huge, stands at the top of a second floor of even more items, such as a Boeing 727 engine spinner cone, saki bottles, deep sea glass spheres used for various experimental equipment and other debris.
Anderson’s love of beach-combing also has taken him to Florida and Texas.
And then there is the time he saved a Seattle area Boy Scout Troop from drowning while he was beach-combing at Rialto Beach.
Like plumbing, beach-combing is different every time, too — you never know what you are going to find.
Anderson’s most memorable beach-combing discovery includes teeth as well; actually a tooth, one big tooth, the tooth of a mammoth, but the mammoth did not want it back.
When Anderson started collecting tsunami debris from the Fukushima disaster, his “hobby” caught the attention of National Public Radio which did a story on him and Toronto filmmakers who featured him in a documentary called Lost and Found.
Anderson’s hopes to one day display his many treasures in his own beachcomber’s museum is no longer a pipe dream, plastic or galvanised.