Unusual Occupations: Once Upon a Time, I Beach Combed for a Living! No, I'm not Kidding...

There are certain things in life it seems like I have "always" done. 

Beach combing would be one of those things. I suppose it's pretty natural for most little kids to be excited about the beach and rocks and sea shells and dead crabs and things... and I was certainly no different. There are pictures of me, as a three-year old, with my little red bucket, gathering things on the beach.

For several years, this was my "office!"

If you've been watching these pages for a significant length of time, you've probably seen some of my "color challenge" posts featuring macro photography of beach glass. 

As it turned out, beach glass became the heart of how I ended up becoming a "professional" beach comber.

Dialing Black the Clock to 2006

In the late summer of 2006, I packed up my life and moved across the country from Austin, Texas to Port Townsend, Washington. I won't get into the numerous details and reasons that prompted the move, but I can reveal that the promise of living near the ocean again was a strong motivator.

In and of itself, the move was actually pretty out of character for me. 

I tend to be pretty "security oriented," and this was actually a huge leap of faith. I knew nobody here-- except a handful of "web friends,"-- I had no job waiting for me, no real prospects for work, no planned place to live. In one of life's strange twists, my ex and I made the move together: two people, two dogs and four cats and all their possessions stowed in a converted school bus towing a trailer with a car. 

My first ten weeks here were spent living in the bus, in a campground. But that part is not entirely relevant... except for one thing:

The campground was in a state park and pretty much beachfront.

Daily Beach Meditations

Being by the ocean again, I immediately took to taking long daily walks on the beach-- "beach mediations," as I came to think of them.

Now, we all have our "thing;" some people love the mountains; the forests; the city; these are the places where we somehow feel "more whole" than elsewhere. There are seldom any good or logical or tangible reasons we can point to-- it's simply a feeling; we feel better.

Within days, I started fell the weight of 20-odd years of poor decisions and a long series of failures start to leave my system. Even my blood pressure-- which was high enough for "concern," at the time-- dropped some 30 points.

As part of my daily beach meditations, I resumed one of my favorite pastimes: beach combing. Or, in essence, looking for, and picking up, "interesting stuff" on the beach. Turned out, this was an interesting beach with lots of driftwood, shells, beach glass, old pottery, rocks and other cool stuff. 

And, as I walked in silence, I kept thinking to myself "Wouldn't it be COOL if there were some way I could get paid for this?"

I wouldn't exactly say it was setting an intention, nor would I call it a "prayer;" but maybe it was a vague sort of "wish" I sent out to the Cosmos.

A Day at the Arts and Crafts Market

I might have been in town for 4-5 weeks when I happened upon a large outdoor arts and crafts market-- turned out it was an annual event here in our town that had been going for some 40 years.

At one of the booths, I got to talking with an artist who created jewelry and small decorative items with "found objects" from the beach. This was somewhat at the leading edge of the "upcycled materials" movement and she shared as how there were now 100s of artisans using "bits and pieces" from the beach in their art. And, in particular, sea glass.

Whereas this made perfect sense to me, what I did not realize-- till about a week later-- was that there was already a fairly large (and rapidly growing) online market place for "beach combed items" that jewelers were willing to buy from beach combers around the world.

I went down a rabbit hole of research and discovered there were active "categories" for beach glass on both eBay and arts/crafts marketplace Etsy. Which was quite interesting to me... given my daily beach walks!

But Why Would Someone BUY Junk off the Beach?

Like I did at first, you might be wondering why anyone would be willing to buy found objects from the beach? Wouldn't you just go out and find it, yourself? As it turned out, the answers were many and complex.

Of course, the most obvious answer was that these artists lived everywhere, including the middle of the country, a thousand miles from the nearest beach.

A different case was offered by an artist in an online forum who told me that her time "producing" was far more valuable than the time/money should could save by spending 5-6 hours a day looking for stuff.

And then there was the issue of "quality" and "scarcity." 

It turned out that sea glass and pottery was almost like a variation on semi-precious gemstones; there were "rough" to "jewelry grade" qualities; there we colors ranging from common to extremely rare and a wild range of pricing running from cents to $100+ for a single small item. 

Off and Running...

I started pretty slowly, just to test this whole idea and it true out to be true! At first, I just made a few dollars to fund the occasional grocery run. 

Slowly I got better organized and started to understand what artists were really looking for, and gradually I started building a clientele. 

It turned out that my move to this town had been inadvertently fortuitous, and I had landed in an area with some of the most sought-after beach treasures on the planet. Not only had this been a busy commercial port with active waterfront businesses since the 1850s, there has also been a seaside dump active till the 1960's, meaning there was plenty of "supply."

Over the next few years, I set out to become what I typically aim for: not the "cheapest" or the "fastest," but the one with the best quality and the most expertise. At its peak, my little venture-- "North Beach Treasures"-- was pretty well known in its niche, and I had over 700 customers around the world.

And in some strange way, my old dreams of "Wouldn't it be COOL if there were some way I could get paid for this?" had become a reality! No, I was by no means "getting rich," but I was definitely making a comfortable living from simply being little more than a beach bum with a sense of enterprise.

All Good Things Must Come to an End Get Outsourced

"The Good Times" lasted for about three years. 

Like is true of so many things in life, as some as people start to notice that "money can be made" at something, flocks of what I call "exploiters" move in. 

At first, "new players" come into the marketplace, trying to "mass scale" something that depends on an individual's effort and expertise. Discovering this to be a hard nut to crack, the exploiters turned elsewhere... using the fact that beach combing can be done ANYwhere, and turning to various developing nations (mostly in South East Asia) where (at the time) offering someone $100 a month to pick up old glass on their beach was really a "big deal." They would then have their wares shipped in and offer them for 1/4th of the price people like me had been selling them for.

Of course, it didn't take long for the beach combing "helpers" to figure out that they could go their own way rather than sell to "rich Americans," which drove the markets yet another notch lower.

Within about 18 months, the "value" of what I was doing had shrunk by 75-80%, so I packed it in and went on to do something else.

Reprise...

I still walk on the beach and do my beach meditations, simply for the enjoyment of it. And I still pick up interesting things I find along the way-- mostly for my own collection of windowsill jars.

However, I will always have the memories of spending three years as a full-time beach comber-- a claim not a lot of people could make... let alone believe to be "a real thing!"

My beach combing adventure marked the third time (in about 15 years) that a "profession" I was involved with "burned itself out" as a result of people trying to "industry scale" a cottage industry, and the third time I lost a way of life to a variation of "outsourcing." 

Some things simply don't function on a large scale; yet those who'd insist on trying to prove otherwise will often lay an entire marketplace or industry to waste in their attempts to extract every shred of profit available. Having seen this happen dozens of times across a wide spectrum is one of the reasons that make me worry about the future of Steemit, as well. But that's a different story, for another time!

How About You? Have you had any truly unusual or unlikely jobs/professions? Would you ever have thought it were possibly to make a living from beach combing? If you had the freedom to, what sort of profession would you like to try? Leave a comment-- share your experiences-- be part of the conversation!

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Created at 180304 23:20 PST