The Unraveling of a Business and a Way of Life

Continuing to dismantle my once thriving beachcombing business, I am now getting down to the dregs at the bottom of the barrel.

As I turn these last bits into suitable items to sell on eBay, I can't help but reflect on the massive amount of work I put into getting this to actually be a workable way to make a living.

Orange sea glass — the rarest and most valuable

In that sense, I miss it. In more than one sense I am sad that I'm ending this particular chapter.

"But if you like it so much why are you stopping?"

Truthfully, it's not by choice. I find myself in the unenviable position of simply having lost my raw materials. The source of what made this all possible, in the first place.

Once upon a time I used to take 6-8 hour walks on a beach — it was generally 15-20 miles per outing, three or four days a week — and I was able to locate all kinds of interesting things that I would subsequently be able to turn around and sell to jewelers and artists pretty much all around the world.

The unfortunate thing that happened to my little cottage industry was that there were several articles written in the nearby metropolis of Seattle (3 million people) running in the Sunday paper talking about "a couple of people (there were actually about three or four of us) who had carved out their little niche livings" in our town picking up these things. And selling them.

In that typical way of human greed huge hordes of people (who actually had little love of beachcombing, but who just smelled MONEY) descended on our location, literally approaching it as if they were going to start an industry!

I remember a Memorial Day many years ago — shortly after one of the articles ran in the Seattle Times Sunday supplement — walking down one of my usual remote beach locations (where I might normally see one or two other people in the course of an 8 hour day) and there were literally hundreds of people on the beach, many of them equipped like they were literally starting a strip mining operation with rakes and shovels and giant coolers being carried by two people to take out their loot, in bulk.

I remember looking at it and just having that sinking feeling and turning around and going home without even going to the beach.

There goes the neighborhood...

Of course I did go back out again during what I had hoped was not so busy a time... but it was always much more crowded out there from that point forward. There was even one woman from Seattle who started organizing tours and drove people over to our area in a minibus to go out and do this, as a weekend excursion.

That marked the beginning of the end, and after about 3-4 years there was — for all intents and purposes — nothing left and even the online community forums at once were brimming with stories of "how amazing it was to go on our beaches" were now seeing posts of "whatever happened to the beaches? we went there because we read about it and found absolutely nothing, what's up with that?"

Well, what's UP with that is human greed.

Alas, I was carving out my little niche living from a non-renewable resource in the sense that the sea glass, old pottery and other bits and pieces I was picking up was the result of garbage that had been thrown on the beach some 50-100 years earlier. While there was definitely enough out there to support a small cottage industry of four to six local people for many many years, there was definitely not enough to support hordes of tourists grabbing everything they could get their hands on.

Sadly this sort of outcome is not unique to my little cottage industry, it seems to be a pervasive factor in the entire human experience. Wherever people think that there is a buck to be made they flock in like vultures to try to get at that buck and then afterwards leave nothing but devastation and destruction... much like locusts take over a vegetable patch and strip it.

It's a bit like the "clear cutting" of the old growth forests it took 300-400 years to grow... you cut them down and then you complain that "there are no trees to have a picnic under." Well what do you expect?

And so I now have fewer than 20 of my storage bins to finish sorting and selling out of the original close to 100. I'm sad to see it go, and I'm also a little apprehensive because yet another income stream has been pulled out into nothingness and will end comletely, very soon.

But that is life, isn't it? The best things in life tend to get plundered till they are no longer "the best things in life."

Thanks for stopping by and have a great weekend!

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Created at 2025.04.12 01:17 PDT
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