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We arrived about 2 hours early for the fireworks in Eastsound, on Orcas Island, knowing that we had to be a little early to get good blanket space on the grass of the small park. We picked out a good spot, then I headed down to the beach, garbage bag and work gloves in hand, to see if I could gather a full trash bag-full of garbage.

Lots of kids were playing on the beach -- which is a combination of sand and rocks and driftwood. They were playing pirates, or something like that, swinging around driftwood swords. My own son, who is 10, joined in, as did my daughter, was is 7. I think all of us parents were thinking the same thing: we shouldn't let them do this, but if they're just _careful_ (!) it will all be okay. I think each set of parents was all just praying that it would not be their _own_ kid who got whacked in the head first and ended the whole thing.

So, turning my back on the pirate attack, I started gathering garbage. I was a little self-conscious at first, but I thought, I love Orcas Island. Why shouldn't I make it a better place?

And in the process, I found there were a number of things that interested me and surprised me.

First, rather than finding lots of big pieces of garbage, I found that there were probably a million, or more, little tiny pieces of colorful plastic all over the place. I guess most of the big stuff gets picked up. But what's left is all the little junk that will just sort of stay there forever. It'll never break down, and it's just too small to gather it all up.

But I made a dent anyway. I gathered what I could and kept dropping it into my garbage bag. There were some areas I did manage to clear of the tiny colorful plastic. There were dozens of shell casings, like from a rifle or something, and dozens of little cigarette holders -- and not all in one place, either. It was kind of odd.

Here are two more things I found interesting: first, some of the little pieces of plastic were actually sort of pretty. If they were shells, or stones, I would have been delighted. Second, some of the stuff on the beach I couldn't at first figure out whether it was natural or man-made. Sometimes the patterns in nature are symmetrical, or a shell just happens to break at a right angle. And sometimes the man-made stuff looks like a curve of shell. Here's another thing: once you start, it's hard to stop.

My son and daughter brought me pieces of garbage from time to time and my wife was working with me. After about 20 minutes, a gentleman who looked about 60 joined in with me. He started picking up garbage too and we chatted about Orcas. He'd been coming here from Northern California for about 30 years, just because he loved the place. He brought up the garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean -- the one that's the size of Texas. We talked about how our own little effort compared to such a big problem, and how it compared to other catastrophes such as the oil spill in the Gulf. But there we both were, picking up the garbage anyway, making our own place in the world -- the beach we both loved -- a little bit nicer.

Really, if all the kids who were pretend-sword fighting joined us for 15 minutes, we would have had the place cleared in no-time!

My wife said afterwards that that wasn't so hard, and that we should always carry a garbage bag with us and do little cleanups from time to time. Maybe we will!

After about 40 minutes of work, we still had not gotten a full garbage bag, which is the good news. Yes, there was still a ton of plastic (maybe literally???) all over the beach, but we had collected, we estimated, about 3 or 4 pounds worth of the little stuff, which had to have made a difference to the wildlife living there.