![]() ![]() Ordinarily, flotsam is soon lost to human memory. Objects like these have been falling into the sea and washing up on the shores since the dawn of navigation - for billions of years longer, if you count driftwood, volcanic pumice and all the other natural materials that float upon the waves. Seventeen years and many thousands of shoes, bath toys, hockey gloves, human corpses, ancient treasures and other floating objects later, I’m still looking. “Isn’t this the sort of thing you study?” she asked, assuming as ever that her son the oceanographer knew everything about the sea. The details as to how they’d gotten there were sketchy, verging on nonexistent, and that piqued my mother’s curiosity. ![]() ![]() A lively market had developed beach dwellers held swap meets to assemble matching pairs of the remarkably wearable shoes, laundered and bleached to remove the sea’s traces. It reported a strange phenomenon: Hundreds of Nike sneakers, brand-new save for some seaweed and barnacles, were washing up along the Pacific coasts of British Columbia, Washington and, especially, Oregon, Nike’s home state. My mother, who loved serving as my personal clipping service, had extracted a wire story from the local paper. One year later, in early June 1991, I stopped by my parents’ house in Seattle, as I did every week or two for lunch and the latest news. ![]()
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