Word: flotsamizing
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...Rokaya, one of 44 survivors, floated at sea for 20 hours, clinging to flotsam and catching raindrops on her outstretched tongue to slake her thirst before a fishing boat rescued her. Some 370 others perished in the disaster, disappearing under the waves along with what had been their hope for a new life, a battered 19-m Sumatran fishing vessel they had been told would ferry them the 36 hours from Tanjungkarang in Sumatra to Australia's Christmas Island. Most of the refugees on this trip were Iraqis like Rokaya, but the passenger list was a roll call...
...best, however, not to look down. The jade-green water that laps the shores is slimy to the touch, glinting with an oily iridescence and dotted with tourist flotsam and jetsam of which carrier bags and lumps of polystyrene are among the least noxious. The fisherfolk who invite visitors aboard their sampan settlements with offers of rice wine or bamboo bongs also sell coral and shells stolen from the few reefs that remain. And the grenades and dynamite sticks that you see stored in the cabins below give a blunt indication of the level of respect the fishermen...
...shouldn't be surprised if they see Micron PC computer monitors bobbing in the surf. In January 2000, a ship carrying the monitors from Thailand to Seattle ran into a typhoon, which swept about 2,000 units overboard. They're now showing up on Pacific Coast beaches, along with flotsam from other recent spills: an estimated 10,000 Tweety & Sylvester bath mats, 34,000 hockey gloves and 18,000 Nike Cross Trainers. Seattle oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who tracks cargo spills with a worldwide network of beachcombers, says, "The North Atlantic and North Pacific oceans are 25% rougher than they were...
...crazy," he says. "You're not sharing the storytelling lifting with someone you can react off of. It's almost like making a silent movie; you have to tell every aspect of the story physically, being totally alone." Well, not totally alone. The castaway adopts a piece of flotsam--a volleyball he names Wilson, for its manufacturer--as his best friend and foil. (Strangely enough, Wilson has the surname of Hanks' wife Rita, although, barring major script revisions, they never get that close.) "I've worked with kids and dogs," says Hanks. "Now I can add volleyballs...
...There are no cell phones, no plastic bags, just rigor mortis on bare ground, and each shot is a primordial scene in which you recognize what the late 20th century had in common with, say, the darkest moments of the 6th. Sometimes his pictures include unnerving bits of modern flotsam. In a Rwandan refugee camp in Zaire a young man lies dead in a heap of used plastic intravenous bags. Elsewhere in the camp the corpses are pushed into piles by bulldozers. In Chechnya a man's body leans against a wall while a neighbor helps himself to a carton...