Driftwood and Me

Driftwood And Me

When I woke up this morning, driftwood was on my mind.  I can't say why, maybe I was feeling windburned from the beach yesterday, struggling to keep beach umbrellas upright in a stiff breeze.  

I went to google to learn some things about it, and found myself tossed upon the waves in much the same way the very subject itself is.  (When I write my first allegory, driftwood will play an important part.)  But back to my journey of discovery on driftwood.  I was bounced from page to page as I started looking.  I was sent to Wikipedia, of course.  There I learned that driftwood is "wood that has been washed onto a shore or beach of a sea, lake, or river by the action of winds, tides or waves. It is a form of marine debris or tide wrack."

Sounds simple enough, but I also learned it isn't just created for our amusement--as in art, or aquariums, or as a nuisance where it sometimes completely covers a beach.
  

It also forms an important part of the food chain for sea creatures.  It seems that gribblesi, shipworms and other bacteria climb aboard and consume the insides, decomposing it and turning them into nutrients for the smallest of fish, who in turn are gobbled up by bigger fish, and so on, ad nauseam.  Or maybe not "ad nauseam," I've enjoyed some pretty tasty seafood around here, and it doesn't taste like bark to me--not to be confused with the cuisine of certain Asian countries who have been known to eat certain kinds of animals we treat as pets, but that's another story.  

Back to driftwood,   While the majority of driftwood is said to have formed as trees, roots and storm-damaged limbs are washed from our shores into the sea, a fairly large proportion is formed from flotsam and jetsam, from man-made wooden objects.  Jetsam and flotsam are two distinctly different things--jetsam sounds like the country cousin-- the result of deliberately discarded wood used as dunnage, while flotsam is the more dignified-sounding one.  Flotsam is the result of shipwrecked or storm damaged wooden boats and ships.  I can imagine large groups of driftwood floating on the seas.  If they are anything like humans, they are labeling each other and "making statements" about themselves by studying their heritage.  Imagine the "Daughters of the Sunken Ships of the American Revolution" or the "Sons of the Shipwrecked Colonials."  Then, think of all those who would consider themselves superior because they were organically-grown and formed, then washed into the sea as opposed to being sawed, hammered and planed into a man-made object.  If they are anything like humans, I now know why driftwood looks so haggard and torn when it land on the shore--all that time sniping at each other about whose heritage is better than whose.  Don't even get me started on the competition about the sort of passengers they allow on board--"Don't you know those Gribbles smell so much better than those old Shipworms, or, mercy-me, those stinky bacteria!" 

Anyway, it was a long trip just wading through Wikipedia on driftwood.  I soon found myself tossed among a sea of other entries--take this one for example:  Norse mythology has it that the first humans were formed by the gods not from clay or the rib of the opposite gender, noooo...They were formed out of driftwood and called "Ask" and "Embria" (note the "A" and "E" like "Adam" and "Eve."  Hmm, some connection there--but get this, they were formed out of the best kind of trees for driftwood--Ash and Elms, yes, "A" and "E" again; I am not making this up.      

It turns out there's a new novel (2014) entitled Driftwood, and a folk music group of the same name.  Look them up on YouTube, they are really pretty good.  In the process of exploring that link, I found the Driftwood band performing a song also covered by the Chieftains.  From there I arrived at a collection of recordings made by the Chieftains (a traditional Irish Band) and some of the better-known ladies of country and folk music (Martina McBride, Emmylou Harris, Alison Krause, et al.).  

Shortly after that I floated my way to a site that offered a guide to making my own driftwood--it's a lot of work, and can take months.  Finally I surfaced in familiar territory.  I washed up on Amazon which offered to sell me a piece for just $16.09--with free "shipping," no less.  I bought one.  It arrives in two days (how they know it will wash up that soon I don't know.  I can't wait.