SHI SHI BEACH, Olympic National Park — Celebrated beachcomber John Anderson slowly tilts forward while gulping mouthfuls of air as his burly 6-foot-3, 265-pound frame teeters under the weight of the day’s bounty. He grumbles about the heavy haul while resting periodically along a squishy trail above the beach.
But oh, lord — the one-time Forks logger is as stubborn as a bull moose. Anderson, 71, insists on ferrying 50 pounds of debris off popular Shi Shi Beach on a dull mid-December day of cymbal-crashing swells.
Lifelong Forks friend Jack Tuttle, also 71, lugs more goods in his overloaded aluminum-framed backpack.
“John’s the beachcomber,” Tuttle tells me. “I’m just the pack mule.”
Anderson has spent the past five decades scouring beaches to collect trash and treasures that land on the Washington shoreline by the sheer forces of ocean currents, wind and geophysical fluid dynamics.
He has curated 46 years’ of pickings in John’s Beachcombing Museum, a two-level warehouse on his Forks property (open summers only) that memorializes a family pastime he has taken to the extreme.
“John is a different breed of beachcomber,” says Deacon Ritterbush, author of “A Beachcomber’s Odyssey: Treasures from a Collected Past.”
Anderson embodies the spiritual connection to the raw 2,337-mile Washington shoreline, which stretches from Cape Disappointment at the mouth of the Columbia River to Cape Flattery, and from the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the intertidal and estuarine areas of the Salish Sea.
The sandy, rocky outposts are a beachcomber’s paradise because the marine mosaic creates a natural seine to trap whatever happens to float past.
THE BACKCOUNTRY WOODSMEN from the West End arrive at the deserted strand for their weekly outing after the 10½-foot high tide had scattered detritus against Shi Shi’s sheer bluffs. Anderson quickly veers off the flat sand to tramp through a jumble of logs and tideland grasses as we inch toward the famous Point of the Arches sea stacks.
He wears a red-checkered flannel shirt, ball cap, stained rain pants, rain shell and scuffed Keen boots.
The physical demands have taken a toll over the years, as Anderson exhibits while grunting his way to his Ford FX4 rig at the trailhead. He has suffered broken ribs and wrists and sprained ankles while scrambling amid rocks and sodden logs.
Anderson once got knocked out when tripping on a ridge at dusk. Two basketball-size glass balls with nets swung around and hit his head before a 46-inch buoy smacked him in the nose. He regained consciousness in the dark forest and bushwhacked to his car.
“People always ask, ‘How many miles do you walk?’ ” he says. “I don’t count miles. I count two rebuilt ankles, two new hips and a back surgery.”
Anderson plans to keep beachcombing until his body gives out. “What else is there to do?” he says at home. “Sit in front of the TV until I die?”
That won’t do. Anderson always finds something interesting on the beach.
LAST JUNE, Anderson encountered a fully charged unexploded smoke bomb that he returned to U.S. Navy officials. In the past, he has snagged nuclear sub locator beacons, Navy submarine mines and a center spinner cone from a Boeing 747 jet engine.
“The ocean is nothing more than a giant subway system that everything rides on,” says Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a renowned Seattle oceanographer and co-author of “Flotsametrics and the Floating World.”
Ebbesmeyer, one of Anderson’s confidants, gained beachcombing cred for creating ocean current models that predicted where items from container spills would wash ashore.
The scientist who coined the term “the Great Pacific Garbage Patch” tracked 61,000 pairs of Nikes that a freighter lost in 1990 midway between Seattle and Seoul. It gave new meaning to sneaker waves.
Two years later, the ship Evergreen Ever Laurel hit a violent storm on its way to Tacoma and lost 12 containers, including one filled with 28,800 bath toys and rubber ducks. Ebbesmeyer, now 81, dubbed that one the Friendly Floatees Spill.
Then there were the 34,000 ice hockey gloves that went overboard in 1994 after the evacuation of the Hyundai Seattle because of an engine fire.
Perhaps nothing intrigued the public more in the past two decades than reports of sneakers with human feet inside found along the Salish Sea coastline.
ANDERSON HAS COLLECTED flotsam from almost every noteworthy West Coast beachcombing episode. When word got out about the Nike freighter, “Me and a buddy beachcombed hard for a week,” Anderson says.
They gathered about 1,000 pairs and outfitted their family and friends. “Except me,” Anderson adds. “I wear size 15, and they only went to 13.”
Three years ago, a spill 1,200 miles south of Hawaii led to a cache of goodies arriving at Anderson’s doorstep: Yeti ice chests, children’s playmats, volleyballs, footballs, children’s bicycle helmets, taekwondo gear, Crocs shoes and vacuum cleaner hoses.
Laws vary from state to state, country to country, but Anderson says beachcombing generally is guided by the principle of “finders keepers.”
His Forks museum off U.S. 101 houses buckets of debris lost at sea, like the scores of Saki and Suntory whiskey bottles he has found. Anderson says his oddest discovery is a bottle of Habu sake, an Okinawan rice liquor with a dead pit viper inside.
He posts “Do Not Touch” signs on almost every display.
ANDERSON GREW UP in Forks, the rainiest town in the Lower 48. He and his five brothers spent their free time on the beach camping, fishing and enjoying outdoor activities. When not beachcombing, Anderson likes to fish and hunt; he has mounted dozens of animal heads and antlers on walls in his cavernous garage and anteroom.
His home and museum sit on a triangular property sandwiched between two clear-cuts, where his parents owned a wrecking yard and towing company. Each of their six sons received 1 acre of the land, and four of the brothers, including John, still live there. Anderson constructed a private street to his museum and named it Andersonville Road.
Like many of his friends in the early 1970s, he began logging after graduating from Forks High School. Anderson switched to plumbing when measures to protect the spotted owl slowed the timber business.
He briefly returned to the woods until escaping death three times in one day. “I never went back to logging again,” Anderson says while sipping from a can of Busch Light.
By then, beachcombing consumed his life. He started at 22, when a friend took him to Clallam Bay to comb through debris. Anderson got hooked after finding 12 Japanese glass floats.
He met his wife, Deb, around the same time. They beachcombed together and then introduced their sons to the activity. Thousands of discoveries later, his acreage has sprouted garden towers of dangling buoys and other treasures from the sea.
After retiring in 2015, Anderson turned his plumber’s shop into a stocked-to-the-rafters museum arranged to account for each find. Some items date to the 16th century.
Anderson created a shrine to commemorate the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in 2011 that resulted in the deaths of nearly 20,000 people and sent 5 million tons of trash into the ocean. Within two years, Anderson began finding the chattels on the West Coast. He collaborated with Japanese officials to return as many items as possible.
Anderson preserved the rest in his museum. During the summer, beachcombers worldwide descend upon the gallery the way certain fans of vampires and werewolves seek their favorite “Twilight” spots in and around Forks.
Anderson entertained 4,250 visitors last year. With a $5 admission fee, he says he makes enough to pay for electricity, insurance and gas for trips to his favorite beaches.
WHILE BIG-TICKET items that get beached after shipping accidents garner attention, almost nothing excites Cascadian treasure hunters like glass fishing floats.
The ephemeral fixtures of the sea originated in Norway in the 1840s to keep fishing nets, drop lines and longlines afloat. In the 1900s, they became linked to Japanese fishing fleets.
Amos L. Wood, of Mercer Island, popularized the pursuit of the glass balls with his 1967 book, “Beachcombing for Japanese Floats.” By then, the Japanese had replaced glass floats with plastic and Styrofoam buoy balls. Now, it’s rare to find them.
“The competition is so keen,” says Alan Rammer, another Washington beachcombing devotee. “Unless you’re there as it’s thrown to your feet, your chances of finding one are pretty slim.”
Like other floating debris, the aquamarine spheres reach the West Coast on the Kuroshio Current and, more significantly, the North Pacific subtropical gyre, a vast circular system of ocean currents.
The Kuroshio begins near the Philippines, flows past Taiwan and then carries some 100 million cubic meters of seawater every second past Japan before spitting out its freight onto the West Coast shoreline.
Nature’s trans-Pacific conveyor belt delivers debris to different locales depending on wind, currents and the direction a beach faces.
Parker MacCready, a University of Washington oceanographer, says one of the most tangible illustrations of this oceanic phenomenon is how onshore winds push objects into the surf zone. The baggage is flung onto the sand once in the nearshore, where waves break.
How it becomes distributed is a fascinating sidebar to this story of transport. It involves what is known as wave climate, or the characteristics of groundswells hitting a particular beach. “That’s going to drop a certain size of interesting stuff in one place and move it away from another,” MacCready says. “The wave climate is just sorting them out constantly.”
Some established Washington beachcombing locales are Glass Beach in Port Townsend, the Olympic National Park beaches, Copalis Beach in Ocean Shores and the Long Beach Peninsula.
Rammer, a retired Aberdeen marine biologist and educator, says late winter is optimal for beachcombing because debris arrives after storms. Rammer describes the currents at Ocean Shores as resembling a serpent “wiggling and waggling along the coast.” He says the prime hunting grounds change daily, depending on the “wiggles of the currents and the winds.”
Rammer took me to Copalis Beach on the Winter Solstice — a biting day of roaring storm surf — to illustrate what he means.
Shortly before we reached the beach, he explained that finding velella velella jellyfish, commonly known as sailors by the wind, signals good tidings at Ocean Shores. All we saw were the outer casings of tubeworms.
BEACHCOMBING HAS BEEN in Rammer’s blood since his youth in John Steinbeck country near the Monterey, Calif., coastline.
Rammer discovered glass floats in 1970 on a family vacation in Hawaii.
He befriended Wood during his first year at the University of Washington. Wood gave Rammer his notes on glass floats for safekeeping; Wood died in 1989.
By then, Rammer had helped launch a beachcomber festival in Ocean Shores, which will mark its 39th edition March 1-2 at the city convention center. Anderson has attended every festival, now known as the Beachcombers and Glass Float Expo.
In the meantime, the city of Westport, Grays Harbor County, has been releasing authentic Japanese glass floats along city beaches since November to promote offseason tourism. Officials say they hope to release 1,000 buoy balls by April 30.
Rammer, whose beachcombing is now limited by a spinal condition, discovered the coveted glass buoys were not the only cargo worth scavenging in Washington.
Fragments of maritime history get lodged in the damp strands of silica like lost socks in a dryer.
Since 1800, an estimated 2,000 ships have sunk off the coast, making the route one of the graveyards of the Pacific.
“The Pacific is a raw, almost feral ocean,” says author Ritterbush, also known as Dr. Beachcomb. “You don’t know what to expect with it.”
Two decades ago, Rammer’s schoolkids found six diamond rings on a field trip in Ocean City, Grays Harbor County. A jeweler dated one rose gold ring to 1890-1910. “The stories these things tell,” says Rammer, a onetime National Marine Educator of the Year. “You think about some poor woman who died in a shipwreck, and now her ring is found in the 21st century.”
Another field trip yielded an 1896 silver dollar. Rammer figured someone dropped it in the dunes until he found more coins in the ensuing months. Rammer says research showed that a vessel carrying payroll in silver dollars and $20 gold pieces was lost after leaving San Francisco in 1896.
Rammer and his friends suspect chests of gold and silver coins from the ship might be buried near the Green Lantern Pub on Copalis Beach.
MOST BEACHCOMBERS are not as intentional as Rammer or, especially, as Anderson. Combing for most is an excuse to stroll along at a leisurely pace to inspect seashells and polished pebbles.
“It is a portal to everything wonderful in life,” says Ritterbush, who lives in Hawaii. “It costs nothing, and you wear junk clothes. You’re just slopping it in nature.”
Some folks canvass the beach for driftwood, beaver-sculpted sticks, agates and serpentine stones. Others hunt for clay babies — concretions of hardened, compact sedimentary rock that sometimes look like little ducks, bunnies or humans. “I’ve never seen them anywhere else, but that’s Washington,” Ritterbush says.
Casual beachcombers often sprinkle their gardens with the natural trinkets they cart off the sand.
BUT NOT THE old salts who have designed elaborate marine motifs at their Washington homes.
Like Anderson, Rammer, 73, sedulously has assembled hundreds of showpieces, although he now unloads one item for every new object he brings home. He recently sold a glass float for $6,500 and has another appraised for $10,000.
Rammer, who never married or had children, is cataloging every piece to prepare his niece and nephew for when it’s time to sell the collection.
Anderson’s two sons told him not to worry about the future. So he keeps patrolling local beaches for potential museum pieces.
An inventory of the day’s finds on Shi Shi Beach:
1 crab trap float
1 thick glass bottle
1 fish gaff
1 lighter
1 polyform boat fender
1 twisted driftwood stick
1 WDFW plastic crab buoy permit
2 orange crab bait containers
2 Styrofoam buoys
3 Styrofoam float balls
3 plastic sand toys
4 perpendicular foam floats
12 plastic bottle caps
Anderson retrieves one more potential display piece on the back end of the 8-mile trek. It is a boat ladder lying on top of driftwood.
“Stairway to heaven,” Anderson declares while lashing the trophy to his pack.
A half smile emerges on his face as another forgotten item is found on a secluded beach where junk goes to die.
Elliott Almond of Bellingham is a three-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize who spent more than 50 years at the Los Angeles Times, The Seattle Times and The Mercury News of San Jose, Calif. Almond is the author of “Surfing: Mastering Waves From Basic to Intermediate.” Reach him at elliottalmond4@gmail.com. Dean Rutz is a Seattle Times staff photographer: drutz@seattletimes.com.
