Good news, bad news

We like to look for salted sea glass while walking along the ocean - you know, the clear, brown, green, and rarely blue pieces of broken glass etched "soft" by years of salt water, sand, and wave action. Over the years we've found lots of it, mostly on the Outer Banks of North Carolina or at Long Beach Island along the Jersey shore. This year, and the past several, the search has been tougher and the pickings slimmer. Finds are getting so rare that there is hardly enough positive feedback to keep looking. That's the bad news.

But, this is good news for the environment. Most salted sea glass was produced when barge after barge of trash was hauled out to sea, mostly from coastal cities such as New York, and dumped. Along with the bottles and jars of various colors, was all sorts of other trash that didn't create pretty things to find at the high tide line. Who really knows what poisons and environmental hazards were in that witches' brew? Along with less salted sea glass, we're also seeing less trash and other crap than we used to see as a kids - one of us walking the Jersey shore and the other in the surf at Kill Devil Hills.

We'll keep walking along the ocean and celebrating our increasingly rare finds of salted sea glass. Yesterday we found three, but two were quite large in the world of salted sea glass - well-worn green piece almost the size of a matchbook cover and an even bigger piece of clear glass whose former life, judging by partial letters still visible, was probably as a mason jar. It wasn't quite as soft or salted as we'd like, but hey, it was good enough for us when finds are so rare.

So, we'll keep walking the sand, looking for glass, watching the birds and people, rejoicing in our occasional find, and giving thanks for a somewhat cleaner environment.