I wondered if OSCURS would work as well with inanimate drifters as it did with swimming fish subtract the fish’s swim speed and you should have flotsam. With this data in hand, I thought of OSCURS, the Ocean Surface Current Simulator program that my fellow UW graduate Jim Ingraham, ’70, had developed at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to calculate the effects of ocean currents on salmon migration. I had something that’s very rare with spontaneous flotsam (as opposed to determinate drift markers): both point A, when and where an object starts to drift, and point B, when and where it washes up.
The first beachcombers’ reports of sneakers washing up - ”forerunners,” as one reporter called them-were equally specific. With the information Nike provided, I could determine conclusively whether any shoe that washed up had fallen off the Hansa. The Great Sneaker Spill would have proved one more curiosity in the annals of beachcombing if my mother hadn’t asked her question, and if I hadn’t been ready to see the research doors that it opened. 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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