Flashback to 2019 Coastal Cleanup Day

In September 2019, Witches Healing the Earth joined millions in participation all over the globe to clean shores, beaches, and riverbeds for International Coastal Cleanup Day. My family joined the Alliance for the Great Lakes in cleaning up the shores of Lake Michigan.

Saturday, September 21, 2019 was a brisk sunny day in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, but the forecast called for clouds rolling in the late afternoon. My family and I woke and got all our housework done early so we could participate in International Coastal Cleanup Day. My partner Nathan used his volunteer hours at work to help us clean the shores of the Deland Park area, a popular summer hangout for Sheboyganites.

I wouldn’t classify Sheboygan as clean in general, as we have barely-passing to failing air quality scores. A large portion of our population works long, hard hours in the manufacturing industry, sparing little time to care about things like, you know, the earth. (Especially when a significant source of pollution is their livelihood—the factories.) However, there is a vibrant pocket of environmentally-conscious citizens who care about causes like International Coastal Cleanup Day.

While I experienced many culture shock instances after moving back to Sheboygan after living for a decade in Madison, Wisconsin—a city full of tree-hugging hippies like myself—one of the more overwhelming things I had to get used to was the vast difference in lifestyle.

Holding onto this resentment of separation, International Coastal Cleanup Day was my opportunity to feel a connection to the land here, which I hadn’t since we’d moved back in late 2017. I also hoped to meet others whose values aligned with my own. So far, aside from the one friend I had in Sheboygan, the only people I’d met had interests far outside of my own (think football and tractor pulls).

I’d been feeling the pull to care more intently and intensely about earth since the beginning of the year and had been trying to figure out how to spend my own work volunteer hours. (My HR representative quickly informed me that, because International Coastal Cleanup Day was on a Saturday, I couldn’t use volunteer hours since I don’t work Saturdays. I opted into cleaning the shores anyway, and later used my volunteer hours to help out a local theater company, because the Arts are also important to me.)

After eating breakfast and packing some food and supplies for the day, Nathan, our daughter Nozomi, and I drove to the meetup site: Peace Park.

Peace Park is a triangular plot of land flanked by 3rd Street, the scenic lake-running Broughton Drive, and Michigan Avenue. It’s overlooked by a structure I’ve heard colloquially referenced as “Peace House,” but I’m not sure if that’s its official name. Right across the street from the park is Lake Michigan, and the iconic red lighthouse is within view.

One thing that speaks to me most closely about Peace Park is that it will incorporate the Sister City Gardens, honoring sister cities Esslington, Germany, and Tsubame, Japan. (For those of you who don’t know, I’m part Japanese—my grandmother immigrated from Japan in the 1960s. It’s a big part of my identity.) Another bonus is that I suspect that much of the Peace Park team are part of that environmentally-conscious pocket I mentioned earlier. I hope so, at least.

Nathan parked the car along the Broughton Drive curb, and we started gathering our tools. We each had heavy-duty work gloves and our water bottles. The team we registered to work with said they would provide new gloves and garbage bags, but we brought extra along in case.

Peace Park was empty except for a lone woman at a picnic table. We were exactly on time, which in Sheboygan means you’re late, so I thought perhaps the team had already devised a game plan and broke for the cleanup. We approached, and she said we were right on time, as she handed us a clipboard to sign in. She reminded me a bit of a Madisonian, which put me at ease. I miss that city, dearly.

The woman gave us a clipboard, a checklist, and a pencil and explained that we were to record every piece of trash we collected for further analysis on what type of litter is most common. She also informed us that our waste would be weighed and recorded once the event was over.

After taking some trash bags and rubber gloves for sanitation purposes, we trekked back

down the hill to the beach. Nathan opened a trash bag and looped the extras in the strap of his backpack. Along the way, we saw runners and walkers, and I remember feeling so proud of my family, dressed in our warm sweatshirts, wearing our work gloves, and carrying trash bags. A few people greeted us with a smile as they passed and asked, “Cleanin’ up the beach today?” and we responded, “Yes, we are!” with big beaming smiles.

We were about a quarter of the way between the summer-bustling Deland Park and the more relaxed North Point Park and were traveling south toward Deland Park. I could tell by the curious shapes in the sand from the trash pickers that other volunteers had already swept this area. We didn’t bring trash pickers; we just had our hands.

Being as prepared as I thought we were, I wasn’t. I had forgotten to bring a hairband, and the wind was picking up. I tried to tuck my long hair into my sweatshirt, but the wind kept pulling it out to play with it. We alternated jobs between the three of us—one of us would hold the trash bag open because the wind was so forceful, that job required two hands; the next person would dig for trash in the sand and under the beach wrack; the third person would tally on the sheet whatever item was collected. “Cigarette butt.” “Large Styrofoam piece.” “Small plastic piece.” “Bottlecap.” “Small plastic piece.” “Cigarette butt.” “Styrofoam cup.” “Chair leg cap.” “Small foam piece.” “Small plastic piece.” “Plastic piece.” “Plastic piece.”

There were so many plastic pieces that “Plastic piece” became an ongoing inside joke. To this day, if I drop something on the floor, and it’s made of plastic, Nathan will pick it up, hand it to me, and say, “Plastic piece.”

We kept on course, despite others before us having gathered a majority of the larger, easy to-spot trash items. Occasionally, we would switch jobs. “My knees hurt from kneeling. Can we trade jobs, and I’ll tally?”

Sheboygan has a heroin problem. A couple weeks earlier, the three of us had taken a bike ride to the southern beach, Lake View Park. It’s a rockier beach featuring a narrower shoreline, with trees overhanging jutting rocks and jetties extending out into the lake. Because the shoreline is so much tighter and the land higher, the jetties protect the land from erosion and landslides by the tides of Lake Michigan, which can at times get pretty vicious.

We had carried our bikes down to the hidden shoreline to listen to the waves lapping against the rocks—an experience not had at the sandier beach stretches like Deland Park—and look for sea glass and shells for my altar and offerings. Among the organic debris, Nathan found a needle and syringe. I asked if he thought it was a heroin needle. The needle cap had read, “insulin,” but Nathan commented, “I feel like diabetics would be more responsible with their needles.”

Given the local heroin epidemic and the fact that the beach is very secluded, I’m gathering it was for illegal injectable drugs. Needle-less to say, our time volunteering was spent moving very carefully, and I advised Nozomi to be very careful about what trash items she was handling.

Our trash bag was quickly swollen with forgotten artifacts, and we waved open a new one. Nathan left Nozomi and me on the beach to run the full bag up to Peace Park to be weighed.

Nozomi and I wandered away from the upper shore, and I diverged to walk closer to the waterline. As I did, I noticed a piece of fabric sticking out from the sand. I pulled it, but it was buried deep under sand soaked heavy with the recent high tide.

“Nozomi, help me!” I yelled to her over the rush of waves. She was distracted by drawing shapes in the sand with her foot. I couldn’t blame her—she was 10 and had spent several hours performing physical labor.

She called back, “What?”

“I found a blanket or something!”

For the next five minutes, the two of us pulled and dug and pulled and dug. I imagined it was a picnic blanket neglected from the 4th of July two months earlier. We were within the boundaries of Deland Park now, which is a hot spot for Sheboygan Independence Day gatherings. Thousands of Sheboyganites and their friends dig deep pits in the sand, build fires, and sit in circles, eating and drinking the entire day and night away at Deland Park while their children splash in the 3rd largest American Great Lake.

We were still struggling to pull this mass of wet fabric out from the sand when Nathan came back and asked what we were doing. Several tugs from him and the fabric was freed. It was incredibly dense. We shoved it in the new garbage bag, and Nathan proudly mused aloud that we would have the heaviest collection of the day.

Within twenty minutes of finding the giant wet blanket and after collecting a few more items, we looked back at our progress. Aside from the gnarled beach wrack (were we supposed to pick that up?), the beach was sparkling. Just in time too, as the sky had grown full with dark blue-gray clouds.

Exhausted, we heaved our garbage and supplies back toward the street, passing a photographer and her clients set up on the beach along the way. Engagement photos, I presumed. Lake Michigan is a rightfully popular backdrop for special occasion photos here.

As we approached the picnic table at Peace Park with our last offering of trash, the woman looked at us smiling and said, “Wow, what is that?” She put it on the scale.

“Yours is a record-breaker! 26 pounds!”

Nathan jokingly asked if we won anything.

Our reward, aside from the hard-to-beat feel-good factor, was a trip to the Weather Center coffeehouse for smoothies.

My biggest realization of the day was that plastic is terrible, and Styrofoam is insidious. Foam breaks down into tiny pieces, so when you’re trying to clean it up from natural areas, it’s impossible to get it all. Styrofoam takes 500 years to decompose; plastic takes 1,000 years to decompose.

If you’re going to spend time in nature, please take all your belongings and all your trash.

A few months later, we received word from Alliance for the Great Lakes on the progress of all the volunteers.

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Charlie Nichols is the founder of WHE and a staff contributor. Charlie studied Journalism & Mass Communication, Marketing, and Psychology at Madison College in Madison, Wisconsin. She has practiced witchcraft for over two decades and is a certified spiritual empowerment coach, a certified ethical psychic, and a certified crystal healer. Charlie lives on the shores of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin, USA with her partner, daughter, and animal companions.