DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Sand dollars are black. I had no idea.

I mean the live ones, not the sterile, dead shells in the wicker basket at the gift shop. The live ones are fuzzy, too.

The shoreline near Comox is home to a colony of sand dollars. I’ve never seen anything like it: hundreds of sand dollars, strewn around the rocks. Most were dead, as far as I could tell.

We picked up a few. Frankly they’re not as nice as the sterile dead ones in the gift shop — these are stained yellow and green from seaweed. We were told these would bleach out after a few weeks in the sun. I hope so. I’ve never made a list of “100 things I want to do before I die,” but “find a whole sand dollar on the beach” would have been one of them. Seriously.

We saw tiny crabs, too. The big ones were long gone — at low tide, all the locals swarm the sandbar with nets and hip-waders. Crabs are free food. I got the sense that there is an under-employment problem in the area: jobs exist, but don’t pay too well. Our B&B hosts supplement their rental income by tending gardens and smoking salmon.

Inland from the sandbar, the beach exposed by the low tide had dried into a crust of seaweed and sand-dollar shells. It was other-worldly, a sort of smeary green that crunched underfoot. Actually it looked like a chemical spill, even though it was completely natural.

We picked our way across it, attempting to crush as little of the native fauna as possible. Every few steps, we’d hear a squirting sound and see a geyser of water erupt nearby. Our hosts explained that these are the result of Geoduck clams retracting their necks in response to the threat implied by our approach. Had we dug into the sand at the site of those eruptions, we’d have found a big clam ripe for the chowder pot. Assuming we weren’t already choking on sea-meat, three meals a day.