Dead Horse Bay: Shoes + Bones
Like my first-ever visit to Dead Horse Bay, I returned home from my most recent trip with a backpack full of horse bones. Because I collect bones, I now consider this the mark of a very successful day. I mentioned in my first post that we found a lot of pieces that we considered keeping, but in the end we came back with only a few things. It's just as rewarding for me to take photographs of the treasures without needing to keep every cool thing we find, which my small apartment definitely appreciates.
My favorite part about Dead Horse Bay is the variety of things that you find. Everything is constantly getting churned up and spit out in different places, so it's a new experience every time you visit. In addition to the bottles, we saw tubes of paint, an iron, a record, bits of printed china, tires, a ceramic cow foot, a plastic duck toy, a bathroom scale, a tube of toothpaste, rusty keys (inside of a wallet), a cash register, roll of film, can opener, toilet seat and of course, a kitchen (or bathroom) sink.
At a place like DHB you start to notice similar types of items when you start seeing them over and over, and this time it was forks. I guess I didn't really see that many of them, in comparison to bottles, bones or shoes, but for some reason they really stuck out to me.
The second most prevalent type of trash at DHB (after bottles, before bones) is shoes. I haven't been able to find a good explanation as to why there are so many—maybe shoes take a particularly long time to decompose? There's something so sad about the shoes—the "old soles"—strewn about without their mates. They make me obsessively wonder who once wore them and what stories they would tell if they could.
The only things that came home with me (in addition to the bones and one jar) was the plastic duck toy and a few broken bottle bits. We talked about the duck ("Look at his jaunty little hat") while we ate our picnic lunch and I couldn't bear to throw him back. Now he sits in my pencil cup at work, where I can look at him daily and daydream about my next trip to Dead Horse Bay.