Beach shoes

#33 Look what the sea's washed in

This morning I took my usual swim in the pool and on my first lap I thought about a comment made by a good friend. She said how much she was enjoying reading about the nature I was discovering here in Cayman. It made me smile, and I realised how much I was enjoying discovering the nature here too, and how nice it has been to share it.

There is also no escaping the fact that when you arrive on a Caribbean Island in summer, you are thrown into the reality of hurricane season. Having seen two big ones hit Mexico and Florida in recent weeks, I know Nature is raw and real. It’s like she’s walking past our back door with a sledge hammer, and each time there is another warning, everyone hopes she isn’t going to come knocking for them. With the sea temperatures rising, it is a case of when, and where, and how badly, not whether. After watching Beryl track across the Caribbean at the beginning of July, starting the season, early and hard, I’ve tried to stop watching. There has been a rustling about Disturbance 1 which has been lurking out in the South Caribbean Sea for a bit. There’s a 60% chance of development in the next two days, and 80% chance of development in seven, but I’m determined to stop looking. Hurricane season runs until the end of November, but next Friday Pirates Week comes to town, and there is no place for a hurricane amongst the celebrations. That part of nature can stay dialled down, thank you very much.

Every other part of Nature astounds me in all of her ways. The smell of salty sea that hits me as I walk to the car, the white noise of the waves, the lizard frozen on the porch when it sees me in the morning, white cranes wading in the mangrove swamp, and the beautiful sunset that spreads itself generously across my back window, and differs every day. I am offered up glimmer after glimmer (Deb Dana, 2018), helping me through the toughest of days. This morning as I was swimming, I realised that I have not found any bugs in the pool for a while. I was glad about that too.

Before finishing the same lap, I spotted a creature bent upside down in the water- a bee or a wasp struggling to stay afloat. This pool has no big leaved trees around it, so there were no tools to assist the rescue. My hands scooped the water around the, I’ll call it a bee, and raised it from the pool’s surface. The bee wasn’t there. I tried again, the waves I was creating adding extra challenge to the task, scooping and gently lifting, until finally I managed to get the bee from the water. It had been upended, but it was out. I tried to nudge it the right way up and away from the direction of the poolside puddle, and whilst its little legs struggled, suddenly it was whisked away on a gust of wind. It tumbled over and over itself, past one, two, three chairs and loungers, finally getting caught on the leg of the fourth. Poor bee- this was not the rescue I had hoped for.

I continued my swim, enjoying the sight of the little hermit crabs on the edge of the pool. Usually they are so shy, shooting back inside their shells when they hear or feel the rumble of my arrival, but these ones were stretched out long, and spindly, showing their full selves. They looked suctioned in at the bottom like mussels, and I realised that I had no idea how they stayed attached. My attention was taken again by a grey mark on the pool edge- another moth dunked and dipped by the waves made by the wind, and my swimming. I stopped and put my hand out, and the legs gripped my finger with their spines. My efforts to put it down on the poolside were unsuccessful, and each time I repositioned my fingers, encouraging the moth to walk off, each time it repositioned itself on the fingers. I stood and paused, looking at, or into the big black eye of the moth, and then the camouflage of the wings. I did not want to damage them by touching the moth and pulling it away.

Give me a moth in my bathroom on a dark night the UK and I'll want it gone because for some reason it gives me the creeps. Give me a huge moth in the bright sunlight of a Caribbean morning, and I could gaze at it for hours. I wished I had a pen and paper to make a sketch (or my camera!), but instead I took it in with my eyes, and wondered at the simple beauty of nature all around me. All around us all.

I’ve been on this island for two months now. It’s exactly two months today that I got on the plane and came to a place I’d never been before. Two months since I saw my first Caribbean islands from the sky- and the beauty of nature that was new to me filled me with wonder. Two months and the hermit crabs and lizards are a normal part of my landscape, but I never want to lose the wonder. I never want to stop wanting to rescue the moths from the pool. I’d rather I didn’t have to. It is a tiny example of the impact we’re having on nature, and the harm that comes through our lifestyle. How many pools, how many moths, how many swimmers have to keep pulling them out of the water?!

Be careful with your thoughts!

Last week, concerned about my abysmal step count, I went for a walk as the sun rose, keen to avoid the heat of the sun. I went to the beach, and walked along at a gentle speed, stopping to pick up items I thought I might be able to copy in paint. I’ve been gifted a set of acrylics, and wanted inspiration for Caribbean cards to post home. Instead of taking photos of all the beautiful things, I took pictures of the errant items I keep seeing on the beach- shoes and flipflops.

Montage of the 20/22 shoes I saw whilst walking less than a mile on the beach

All of these were on less than a mile of beach. Where on earth do they come from?

Solving the mystery

I’ve had two conversations with people about this. One person has been here about three years, and the other over twenty, receiving their Cayman Island Citizenship this week. Both said the same thing to me, and both I found equally difficult to believe.

‘They’ve fallen off cruise ships’.

‘Really?’ I asked the latter, incredulous.

‘The wind takes them and the sea brings them to shore,’ I’m told. But I’m reluctant to be told.

‘Look at what I found today. How does a trainer get blown off someone’s foot?’, I ask, in disbelief.

There is no answer, and I’m left perplexed. It’s like a grotesque GCSE maths question-

If Jo comes across 22 shoes on one mile of Cayman Island coastline, how many shoes are there in the sea?

I imagine the answer to be horrifying.

Another friend sent me the following BBC article this week, informing me that Mathematicians have finally disproven the thought experiment known as the ‘infinite monkey theorem’.

‘I, for one will sleep better knowing this mystery is now solved,’ he said.

Quite.

I have to assume there is an underlying worth in disproving this theorem which has benefits to society, because why are we not instead calculating the question of the infinite flipflop problem, and working with STEM colleagues to solve it? Is there a huge shoe-berg floating out at sea, alongside the sargassum I wrote about last week?

The obvious solution is to stop throwing flip flops into the sea, but again, I hope that industries are not doing that with their unwanted products- the shoes I found are a variety of shapes and sizes, so it seems unlikely. Surely neither is there a cliff at the end of a continent where there is a local practice of lobbing a shoe into the ocean for good luck- or the modern equivalent of the message in the bottle.

But joking aside, what do we do with all this rubbish now that it is there? We can’t pluck out every shoe that has made it into the sea, like we can pluck the creatures from the pool. How many seas, how many shoes, how many people pulling them out of the water, how many creatures dying because of our discarded crap? How do we protect our precious Nature?

I clearly don’t have the answers, but I have been told that there is a flip flop tree down in South Sounds. This is a piece of art made from the shoes that have been found on the beach. It happens that today I’m off to South Sounds to meet the lady who rented me my first Cayman home. It’s the first time we’ll have met face to face, and I’m looking forward to it. Whilst I’m down that way, I’m going to try and find the flip flop tree.

If I had a hammer and some nails, I could clear a stretch of beach and add a few more.

Whatever the ‘infinite monkey theorem’ mathematicians next decide to prove or disprove, we’re definitely gonna need a bigger tree.

Thank you for reading. If you like what I’m writing, I’d be so grateful if you could hit the heart button and / or subscribe or write a comment. I’m interested in your reflections, it lets me know that you enjoy what I write, and helps others to find it.