At the Santa Monica pier, a group of taskers gathered before dawn.



Though we would all participate in the task, everyone except me had turned up with a slightly different priority: cleaning up the environment on Coastal Cleanup Day while getting in a dive. Actually, since my usual dive-buddy and fellow tasker the Selkie has temporarily abandoned me for the Big Apple, I was the only person present who knew that we were actually performing pure Urban Archeology.

A good first step for archeologists looking at any settlement, be it a village or a temporary camp, is the midden. And a decent argument can be made as to the Pacific Ocean being the midden of Los Angeles. Los Angeles now has a fully functional, impressive, and odiferous sewer system, as I discovered forcefully on a field trip for Microbiology. But for a long time, vast quantities of sewage were simply pumped into the ocean, or have since been carried there via storm drains. The pier is particularly interesting because of the things people intentionally throw off it – the predive briefing led me to expect voodoo dolls, guns, prom dresses, and (potentially) dead bodies.

Things we found:

Evidence of a mysterious "Ralph". Who is this Ralph? Why do they want little circles of glass?

My first catch.

An implement of some kind...


Evidence of a primitive cult! Models are made of fish with hooks in them, and thrown into the ocean to pray for that image to become reality!


A mangled message. The nutrition facts were intact but the product not so. We must only guess what has 7% of one's daily fat allowance and 10% of folate.


A very obscure voodoo doll?


A bizarre purple thing, with settings of "Spin" or "Off". An archeologist might have pegged it as a children's toy, but it is in fact a corroded purple dildo.


The haul was fairly impressive, but should have been much more so, considering we had the manpower (and womanpower) of some fifty divers to draw on.


And one dog.
>

I can only excuse it based on the waves.

About half the divers were turned off by the difficulty of getting through alarming surf wearing sixty-odd pounds of gear. Only the experienced and the stupid made it past the wave zone. My partner and I were perfect representatives of both types, respectively.



My partner. I paired up with a tall, ramrod-straight gentleman with a military-style, silvery buzz-cut, a military-style, immaculately-trimmed, silvery mustache, and personalized gear obviously designed for perfect efficiency. Our dive-buddy-get-to-know-you conversation got off to a slightly rocky start when he noted the large green “War Is Not the Answer” sign on the back of my car. Once we got past the surf, though, I stopped feeling awkward about our divergent political convictions and became extremely glad that I had such an experienced buddy. This guy dived with disabled veterans and knew how to dive blind. This was excellent, as, in fact, we were diving blind.


The waves had stirred up so much sediment that visibility was about six inches. I lost my partner three times, twice when we drifted slightly apart and once when a dive-team collided with us, and in the confusion (like a bad romantic plot) the two couples switched partners. Even more than that, the surge from the waves kept pulling us back and forth, a few feet every few seconds. Staying still was impossible. We had to sway with the powerful surge, creeping along on the bottom searching for anything within a few inches of our masks. Without my partner’s apparently preternatural skills of navigation and multitasking I would have been completely out of my depth (metaphorically, as dives go it was very shallow). I found half my trash because it literally hit me in the face.

My partner and I did find some things personally – about a tenth of the total loot. We gave up, eventually, when we cut some navigation too close and I collided blindly with one of the pier pillars. Archeology is not without its dangers.

We surfaced and made our way through the surf zone. Surface support helped us out and started distributing sunscreen, water, and mysterious and inexplicable cocktail sausages. I made a beeline for the camera in my peacenik Volvo and snapped as many pictures as I could before the trash got taken away for categorization. I did get interviewed by a newsperson with outstretched mike, but it remains to be seen whether I will actually Make the News.