She Sells Seashells by the Seashore
We collect things. Even though Lisa and I dream of being minimalists, a visit to our house would quickly dismiss any notion of that idea. Our collecting is almost always tied to travel, and usually it is something we find on the ground. When we trekked in Nepal, for instance, we became obsessed with rocks. The leftovers of glaciers past, we discovered wonderfully shaped and textured rocks layered with beautifully contrasting sediment layers, and if we were lucky, fossils. Our son, who was 3 at the time, got into the spirit of the hunt, and before long we were adding several stones a day to our collection. It wasn’t until a few days into the trek that it donned on us that our collection might be adding considerable weight to our packs that the sherpa guides who were accompanying us were carrying! Never to complain and always the most gracious of hosts, our Tibetan guide and Sherpas got into the spirit of our obsession coming to our tent at the end of each day with broad smiles and open hands filled with the day’s mineral booty.
So it was a given that on our recent trip to the Gulf Islands in southern Florida we would end up collecting shells… lots of shells. We stayed on a tiny island called North Captiva, just north of Sanibel and Captiva Island. With no cars, shops or real town to speak of, North Captiva is a nature-lover’s paradise, and home to one of the best shelling beaches in the world. On the first day, my son and I were walking down the beach, when I spotted an old broken conch shell.
“Hey look, a star fish,” I exclaimed, picking up the shell to show my son.
“Um, Dad, that star fish looks an awful lot like an octopus!”
And so it was. She was clinging to the shell, washed up on the beach. We ran back to the rest of the family, filled a big ziplock bag with seawater and made an instant saltwater aquarium to check out our new friend. It wasn’t until we put the broken shell in the water so the octopus could get back into her home that we realized she was not alone.
Like tiny specs of sand, 30 or 40 tiny baby octopi came swimming out of the pores in the shell. Totally cool doesn’t even begin to get at the experience. We felt the powerful suctions of the octopus, watched the babies bump around the mini-aquarium and took many pictures - then released the whole family, with their wonderful shell home, back into ocean.
That started our many exploratory missions on the pristine beaches for unique shells that were not inhabited by the locals. The kids got into it, and at the end of each day, we got our collection bags, rinsed out the shells and sorted them by type - OK so we’re a little obsessed!
Each night, we juried out shells not worthy of our specimen collections, relegating them to the craft table, where we turned the unsuspecting treasures of nature into wonderfully tacky creatures. The Clam Band was my personal favorite, but Sea Man was also a big hit with the kids.
Like all great trips, we got home, unpacked and surveyed our prizes. The house is still under full-scale remodel (we’re down to the kitchen, 1 bathroom and 2 bedrooms), so we packed our shells away for a future permanant shell installation that promises to be awesome. I’ll let you know about it as soon as we get to it!
Until then, if you find yourself near a beach, go collect some of your own shells. You never know what great find awaits you!