The Disappointing Case of the Castaway Lego Men: NO REAL/THAN/YOU ARE

Stories about marvelous flotsam tend to drift into my in-box, which can make reading email resemble a sedentary form of beachcombing--not as pleasurable as the extravagant, outdoorsy kind, but fun nonetheless. This morning brings a doozie. According to BoingBoing, an 8-foot tall castaway Lego man recently washed up in Florida. When exactly, the blog post doesn't say. It turns out this is, at least, the second such sighting. An earlier specimen--same size, different color shirt--washed up on a Dutch beach at Zandvoort.

Florida's specimen is marked No. 9, so one wonders if there are 7 other Lego men out there, drifting on the waves. Did a shipload of these dudes tumble overboard? 

Appears not.  The castaways also bear a maker's mark identifying them as the work of a Dutch artists' collective called Ego Leonard. Why do I find this disappointing? What seemed a fabulous accident suddenly has the feel of a guerrilla marketing campaign. 

It is with disappointment that I share the greeting, presumably in the voice of a giant Lego man, posted on the Ego Leonard web site:

I would like to introduce myself:

My name is Ego Leonard and according to you I come from the virtual world. A world that for me represents happiness, solidarity, all green and blossoming, with no rules or limitations. 

Lately however, my world has been flooded with fortune-hunters and people drunk with power. And many new encounters in the virtual world have triggered my curiosity about your way of life.

I am here to discover and learn about your world and thoughts. 

Show me all the beautiful things that are there to admire and experience in your world. Let’s become friends, share your story with me, take me with you on a journey through beautiful meadows, words, sounds and gestures.

Seaside Gothic: Wreckers and Robert Louis Stevenson

In England, the term for flotsam hunting is wrecking, a word that retains a trace of its piratical history. In The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas, False Lights and Plundered Shipwrecks, Bella Bathurst reports that British shipowners of the age of sail lost 10 to 20 percent of their revenues to shipwrecks. That's a lot of wrecks, and on more dangerous stretches of coastline, villagers happily welcomed the booty that washed ashore with the cadavers of the drowned. In some cases wreckers were known to lure ships onto the rocks. Bathurst begins The Wreckers with a spooky bit of family history recorded by Robert Louis Stevenson, son of a lighthouse engineer:

The Best Beachcombing in Manhattan

There is one decent beachcombing spot in Manhattan, if you like your flotsam local: a 100-foot-long wedge of sand beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. You can only walk the beach if you’re willing to trespass, squeezing through a narrow opening in the balustrade. It’s not the sort of beach most people dream about. You wouldn’t want to sunbathe there, or walk barefoot. But I like it. It’s one of those accidental places that make the city feel a little wild.

A dozen years ago, I gather, this beach didn’t exist, making it the perfect beach for New York, capital of change and chance. It came into being when tides began depositing sediment behind a little pier built not long ago as a kind of scenic underlook, a good place to take snapshots guaranteed to resemble postcards, the great bridge looming in the background. At the northern end of the beach are the remains of a derelict pier, concrete posts topped by tentacles of twisted rebar. The sand at the southern end of the beach is silty. At the northern end it’s gravelly. A trellis supporting FDR Drive rises out of the gravel, and on the steel of the trellis some latter-day Hart Crane has spray-painted a couplet: 

DN UNDER THE BRIDGE

BIG CITY OF DREAMS.

In the Northeast U.S., Fewer Riddles on the Sand

In the vicinity of the insular city where I live, there aren't really any good beaches for beachcombing. In general, so far as beachcombing goes, the Atlantic Northeast compares poorly to the the Pacific Northwest. The Gulf Stream is largely to blame. Just look at it.

It firehoses up the eastern seaboard and then, right around Cape Hatteras, turns east and goes shooting across the Atlantic carrying long-haul flotsam with it (the beachcombing in Cornwall, England, is supposedly superb).  Here in the Northeast, except for the rare donation from the southbound Labrador Current (which originates in the Arctic) or from an errant eddy, the wrack on our shores tends to be local. Here in the Northeast beachcombing tends to be practiced by amateur naturalists on the lookout for seashells, pebbles, and the like, whereas in regions with plentiful flotsam and jetsam, beachcombing is more like amateur archeology. There is no Atlantic counterpart to Amos Wood's Beachcombing the Pacific.