The Center of the World

On Long Island in the Bahamas, we discovered how truely international our world has become. We hiked across the island from our Salt Pond anchorage to see the Atlantic beach. Storms and ocean currents passing by have made this beach a repository of the world's garbage. Dotting the beaches were thousands of pounds of trash. In just minutes we located a vacuum sealed coffee packet called, in English, "Slimming Coffee", with a picture of a sexy, slender lady, and directions and information in an asian script. There were water purifiers written in Spanish, body mosturizing lotion in French, and a plastic container sporting a picture of a smiling African family, and writting which  seemed to have French, African, English infuence and appeared to give directions to protect a family (famnia)  from cholera (kolera) by mixing with 5 gallons of water.

Shoes, no two alike and very few intact, mingled with pieces of laundry baskets, fishing net, broken styrofoam floats, and bottles. I never realized how many people are walking around the world with a single flip flop, the other having dropped off their boat or washed away with the tide 10,000 miles away. Some where , far away, a child cried out and pointed to the ocean as his whiffle ball floated away in the ocean. It is here, we have seen it, and seen also the myriad of unidentifiable plastic pieces, parts of containers of one sort or another, a necessity once, but then discarded, either thoughtlessly or by accident into that vast ocean, the Atlantic, and deposited as flotsam and jetsam on the isolated beaches of the outlying islands of the tropics, thousands of miles away.