Flotsam & Jetsam

For the second time in the past month there was a big deposit of bamboo on the west facing beach in La Jolla this morning. The last time this happened a friend told me it was debris from the Asian tsunami. My step-daughter, a marine biologist specializing in ocean currents, said she doubted it could have come that far that fast, if at all.

I have been fascinated since I was a small boy, at what washes up on beaches. My family had a house on Fire Island, a barrier island off Long Island, NY, and during WWII remnants of sunken ships would appear on the beach.

The ocean is the earth's blood stream. (A scientist once told me that sea water is close enough to human blood plasma that if someone had lost a lot of their blood volume you could keep them alive for a period by transfusing them with sea water until you could get blood.) What appears there tells us more than we sometimes want to know about what we are putting into our planet's life blood.

Who out there can tell me where this bamboo is coming from?