November 13, 2020

Clean-up at the Golden Gardens by the “Clean Beach Team”, November 12th, 2020

It was a good day to be at the beach, this morning! No rain, few people and just enough trash to keep us 8 Team members busy for an hour and a half!

We received words of gratitude from several beach-goers and two crew from Seattle Parks grounds maintenance, including an enthusiastic Sean Hermes, director of the grounds crew.  He is hooking us up with the Parks Volunteer Coordinator so we can match our volunteer efforts to the actual parks crews’ needs for help.  They gave us a ga-jillion hefty garbage bags, so you won’t have to BYOB  (Bring Your Own Bags) for the next decade… or at least for the next several outings, anyway.

Many interesting things were found, today:  a bouquet of yellow roses, barely de-petaled from the tides; a cremation-urn tag from the cremated remains of a beloved pet; a boogie board minus its boogie; a pair of adult undies… (uh, and we’ll just let that go without further comment); a couple of nice cloth shopping bags (we threw them away, just in case...);  a broken beer bottle tangled up with a fishing line gone bad (an enormous fish must have gotten away, angering the fisherman!); some water toys; and what appeared to be a homeless encampment among the sand dune bushes.

A propos to this last:  I was informed that, during this time of pandemic chaos, the parks are currently not actively removing encampments. This will change when the crisis ends. Thank you for understanding this and accepting that it is what it is. We simply moved on and silently wished the (absent) campers well.

Thank you, one and all, for a successful beach clean-up! It is a bit like an organized “treasure hunt”: you never know what you’ll find, which probably intrigues the brain, fooling you into thinking that picking up trash is a blast! I am delighted that YOU think so, too.

We will be picking a day during Thanksgiving week to go out to clean up a beach, based on the weather forecast and tides. If you feel like getting outside for a bonafide treasure hunt, and giving thanks for your ability to do so–to be mobile, to be able to help the environment and people’s enjoyment of it–then please join us for our next Day At The Beach!

Until then, may you enjoy the next two weeks in good health!

Best wishes,

Claudia & Ron Green