Amy Meissner
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What we found, 2.

6/16/2015

7 Comments

 
This is our sixth year of boating in Prince William Sound, Alaska. For my youngest, this is all she's ever known. My son's Scandinavian name, Pelle, is our variation on the word "pelagic."
We are terrible fishermen and never catch a thing.

But we've found some things.

Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2

We found that when an eight-year-old boy stands at the terminus of a glacial stream surveying the styrofoam situation and tells you his "heart is breaking for all the animals," you'd better believe him.
And you'd better rise to the occasion -- as an adult with an industrial grade Hefty sack -- to help him do something about it.

Even though you didn't make that mess,
even though it isn't fair that you're cleaning it up,
we've found that somebody still needs to do the work.

And small hands count.

Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2
Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2

We found the insurmountable,

Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2
Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2

and reluctantly agreed to abandon it for someone else. 
Someone bigger, 
stronger.
And found that there would be another seemingly insurmountable task yet to come,
and that the bigger stronger person was in fact, in our midst.

Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2
Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2
Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2

We found consensus in the term "seal killer"

Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2
Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2
Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2

and "poison meal."

Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2
Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2

And we're all in agreement that the styrofoam packing peanut is the worst thing ever invented. Ever.

Some of us sought and found risk,

Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2

and solitude 

Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2

and joy.

Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2
Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2
Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2

We found new things, dammit, that we now have to be afraid of finding,

Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2

and things that weren't so interesting before, but suddenly are now.

Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2

We found that one could speculate all day, 
but in the end,
it's best to just believe in the presence of fairies

Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2

and in aliens who need to be obliterated by laser beams.

Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2

We found that we can leave a place better than the way we discovered it.

Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2

And if we pour enough of our hearts into something, the most humble of gifts will feel like a great reward.

Amy Meissner, Prince William Sound, Alaska. From the post What we found, 2. www.amymeissner.com/blog/what-we-found-2

On this particular weekend, we hauled nearly 400 pounds of net, rope, garbage and beach-sorted recycling out of the Sound. If we did this every weekend for our entire lives, it still wouldn't make a dent in the thousands of miles of exposed Alaskan shoreline ... much of it remote and inaccessible. And it keeps coming -- the Pacific Gyre keeps spitting debris our way, Tsunami detritus is slowly entering these waters. But the thing that is changing is the way my children see the world -- I hear them screaming up and down the beach and into the shoreline woods: "Mama! Wait till you see what I FOUND!"

They are lookers, seekers, doers. Askers of the painful questions. 
The living questions, like, "Wait ... don't we burn diesel to get out here?"

Crap. Yes, yes we do.

And while I don't have the solution to the larger problem, I do have a garbage sack ready for the one right in front of us.
 
*  *  *

If this family passion seems intriguing to you, please check out the earlier posts What we found and The traveling eye 5: holding, as well as others located under the side bar category of Beach Work.

It's a thing we do.
7 Comments
Mo Crow link
6/16/2015 03:44:29 am

Good grief Amy, 400 pounds of rubbish collected by one small family in one weekend in one of the most remote areas of the world ... all the detritis in the Pacific Gyre needs to be collected & recycled... that is a huge task but picking up the rubbish wherever we are is what each of us can do to help with cleaning up & looking after our beautiful home (((Gaia)))

Reply
Amy Meissner link
6/17/2015 01:14:55 pm

Hi Mo--
It was sort of an over-the-top weekend of garbage hauling. Last weekend was a fraction of this (one large sack of recyclables, 2 sacks of trash ... including an ENORMOUS glass lightbulb, intact, some deflated bumpers that my son refuses to throw away and crusty rope). My beautiful rusty stakes that I pried from a log? Left behind on accident. Damn. The ones that got away.
XO
Amy

Reply
Olga link
6/16/2015 05:26:45 am

In this way perhaps your children will become scientists who help to solve the problem of the plastics which do not disappear, but simply become smaller and smaller elements swirling around like plankton, and like plankton enter the food chain - eventually polluting the world's insides as well as outside. I hope so.

Reply
Amy Meissner link
6/17/2015 01:16:48 pm

Oh, Olga,
I hope so too. I try not to heap the world on their shoulders with my words but we're looking right at it and it's so clear that a solution needs to be found. They'll be part of it. They already are.
XO
Amy

Reply
velma
6/17/2015 06:28:40 am

these lessons you are teaching your kids (while they, of course, are teaching you right back) will stay with them. always. i know this to be true. good mom, good dad.

Reply
Amy Meissner link
6/17/2015 01:18:08 pm

Thank you Velma. So much about teaching is the openness to being taught. Such a good reminder--
XO
Amy

Reply
Ingrid
6/26/2015 01:58:26 pm

As I was raising you and your 3 sisters I often wondered "Am I doing this right and what will I really pass on from my child hood on the farm in Sweden and what will each of you take with you when you are on your own"? It is quite an undertaking to haul all that stuff from a remote beach, but it looks good when it is done.
I think of you and your family in that cool fresh air and all that "green stuff" when Ii am here in the desert tackling the tumble weeds, (we are not friends). It is not realistic to have and acre in the desert landscaped with lush green grass, but what does grow with out water can be mowed or chopped off to look neat and tidy, and that becomes my reward to look at every day.

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    Amy Meissner, textile artist. Photo credit Brian Adams, 2013. www.amymeissner.com

    Amy Meissner

    Artist in Anchorage, Alaska, sometimes blogging about the collision of history, family & art, with the understanding  that none exists without the other.
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