Sandy Souvenirs - Thirteen Years in the Making
August 28 2020
It took thirteen years to prepare this project, which began on Block Island in the summer of 2007, and finished this year in the US Virgin Islands. I'm not entirely certain where the inspiration came from, but once it began it turned into a quest that continued around the world, for 4,697 days and across all four hemispheres. It wasn't always easy, on one occasion, after scanning our luggage, an x-ray revealed to excited Turkish baggage inspectors a suspicious bag of powder stuffed deep inside my shoe. I had entirely forgotten the sand was there, which made the officials seem all the more eager, while giving me an annoying air of innocence, perhaps like an unsuspecting drug mule. When the bag was eventually opened it was unanimously agreed to be the worst quality cocaine they had ever seen. In Indonesia, an encounter with wild saliva-dripping Komodo dragons not only came close to dramatically interrupting the project, but very nearly our entire voyage. And while not as exciting, we almost forgot to gather a little of the Galapagos - try sailing back from Tahiti, no easy task.
From Block Island to Bora Bora, Columbia to The Cook Islands, Thailand to Turkey, Greece to Guadeloupe... over the last month we've decanted tiny Ziploc bags into tubes, labeling each one with the location and the date of our arrival. We've visited 42 countries on our world voyage, but only gathered sand (a small salt shakers' worth per location) from the countries we raised from Dream Time. The winner of the whitest, finest sand goes to Bora Bora, gathered from under the keel at the bottom of the world famous lagoon declared by Captain Cook in 1769 to be the 'pearl of the Pacific'. The blackest sand came from a remote, surf-swept beach in Cape Verde after a two-hour hike that began long before the sunrise. The reddest is from the center of Australia near a sunbaked Uluru, with New Caledonia rating a close second, which is not surprising considering 65 million years ago they shared the same continent. On an epic and humbling time line we have collected evidence of our changing world - from grainy volcanic ash recently and violently spewed from the bowels of Mount Etna, to the soft powdery discharge from schools of busy, coral-gnawing parrot fish contributing to the shoreline of a remote tropical atoll.
We have yet to close-the-loop, New York was our starting line, so we may actually have an opportunity to add a few more souvenirs to the collection before we officially tie the knot. But for now, at least, as we attempt to settle back into land life during a time of such uncertainty and confusion, there's a small comfort to be had organizing grains of sand, one country at a time, and at least, in our own way, creating a little order to our changing world. |
