Trail Mix: Taking a green walk to keep ocean blue

It's easy to forget, given life's competing trivial pursuits, how fortunate most of us are to be within a day's drive of a magical force some people never see: a wild ocean beach, just as it must have looked for millennia.

Well, almost.

Many a comber of Washington's wild beaches can relate to The Big Disappointment: strolling for blissful miles up the coast, and into the mind's past, on pristine coastline, only to literally stumble upon some jarring reminder of the present. Like a spare tire. Or worse.

"It's why a lot of people go out there to begin with," says David Lindau. "Not just to be on a beach, to be on a wilderness beach, with no signs of humanity. Then you find the refrigerator."

You can react to that Frost King encounter in two ways. Slink away in disgust, never to return and blog from home, with little hope for mankind. Or go home, sweet talk a few friends, come back and cart the damn thing out.

Lindau, a coordinator of the annual Washington Coast Cleanup, hopes most people will choose the latter revenge two weeks from Saturday.

The Cleanup has been going on for many years, with various organizers. Two years ago, it merged into a unified assault by an umbrella group of citizens and environmental organizations, the Washington Clean Coast Alliance. They need help.

The work is a decidedly simple, low-tech process: Volunteers, who sign up in advance at www.coastsavers.org, meet at a prearranged checkpoint on Saturday, April 18. There, a few people can help coordinate the cleanup effort, but most actually conduct it by hiking some distance up the beach, corralling as much trash as possible, then lugging it back to collection barrels, Dumpster s, trucks and trailers, which volunteers haul off for recycling or disposal.

As one might imagine, this annual aggressive beachcombing yields all sorts of fascinating, uh, treasure — 23 tons of it last year, alone: Anything from Japanese fishing floats (sure, you can keep those) to busted-up old crab pots to tennis shoes (feet, hopefully, not included) to dead whales.

The most common items, however, are painfully mundane: plastic drink bottles, plastic bags, plastic cups, plastic this, plastic that.

Did we mention plastic? It's the one thing dumped into the ocean that tends to stick around. By now, most people have read about the fabled Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an alleged Texas-sized wad of plastic debris bobbing along merrily out in the Pacific. It's real and it's an important eye-opener.

"People get all excited and worked up and interested in that, but that's not channeled into anything like action," Lindau says. "We're trying to get people to come out and do something about it."

It's a global problem. The world is using oceans as its Dumpsters, and ocean currents put us at the doorstep of everyplace else on the Pacific Rim. Here, most trash found is stuff that floats ashore, not trash dumped there by visitors, as is the case in Oregon and California.

But doing something locally, no matter how seemingly small, absolutely makes a difference, Lindau says. People leave their area of clean beach that day with an intense pride.

"You walk away saying, 'That's something I accomplished. I did that.' That's an awesome feeling."

Last years's Coast Cleanup drew about 1,100 volunteers — up from about 800 the year before. But this year, only about 500 helpers have preregistered — perhaps because, for most, getting to the coast involves a spendy fill-up or two of gas.

Organizers hope some of you will consider it a worthy investment in something that makes us, and the place we live, unique as people.

They're looking for another 1,000 souls who care about the ocean and its inhabitants. A relative few good men, women and children. For one day. No special skills or equipment required.

Just some pride of ocean ownership. And the motivation to back up a lot of green talk with a little green walk.

A lot of you have it in you. Isn't it time to let it out?

Ron Judd: 206-464-8280 or at rjudd@seattletimes.com