I was walking on the beach one morning when I happened to walk upon the sand-raker-man with his tracter between the Williams Pier and the Casino. He was raking up the washed up seagrass and sand into a pile there next to the Williams Pier. Now, I had been picking up trash for some weeks on that little strip of beach and had collected much from that pile made in the mornings. You can well imagine I had some questions. So, I flagged the tractor man down.
“What are we doing this for?”
“We’re raking up all the seagrass and sand.”
“What do we do with it?”
“Put it in that pile over there.”
“I see. What do we do with the pile”
“The water comes back in and takes it back out.”
“So, we pile it all there and then the tide just comes back in and gets it.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, what about all the trash that’s raked up with the seagrass and sand?”
“There’s no trash. It’s just seagrass and sand.”
“Seriously?”
I collect trash at that beach and not a day passes that I don’t get a minimum of half a grocery bag of refuse, somedays two full bags: cigarette butts and those plastic filter tips, underwear, diapers, soda bottles and cans, potato chip bags, ziplock bags, shoes, shirts, styro to go cups and boxes, hundreds and hundreds of straws, plastic boat bits, plastic bottle caps, sixpack plastic ring packaging - how'd we like to live our lives with that around our neck. Not so much, right, so why would we think other creatures would get a thrill out of it. We throw trash down like we're doing everyone a favor.
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I get a lot of this trash from that nice neat clean looking seagrass and sand pile that gets raked up to one end of that strip or the other in the mornings. If left, it gets carried back out and compiles with the next day's accumulated waste and so on and so forth. The system seems to be, bury it in the sand along with our heads and the problem is solved. Am I the only one who doesn't see any benefits to this system?