Glass House

I went up to Five-Mile today to look at the beaver dam that was blocking the water flow (apparently some of it was just removed recently and water is flowing again down Big Chico Creek). While I was watching hopefully for beaver life, I saw two large dogs playing in the water. They were having great fun retrieving the tennis ball their owners were tossing into the water for them. I have a dog who is a retrieving machine too. A while ago we got tired of throwing the balls for her freehand so we bought a “Chuck-It” to do the work for us. With that wonderful device you can throw a ball much further, and much more easily, than freehand. This makes you willing to throw it much longer. Thinking about that reminded me of the time we took her on a vacation to the beach and threw the ball into the waves over and over until finally she got so tired that she didn’t go after it that one last time and it floated off. I noticed the couple I was watching lost their dog’s ball too and were looking downstream in hopes of finding it. They didn’t. And all this thinking finally led me around to thoughts of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
I just learned about this phenomenon last week while reading the San Francisco Chronicle. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is 1000 miles off the California Coast on the way to Hawaii. They say its size is larger than the state of Texas and that its total mass equals 3.5 million tons. Some of the garbage in it extends under the ocean’s surface to a depth of 300 feet. It mostly made up of plastic. I think this garbage patch is misnamed. It should probably be called the Horrible Pacific Garbage Patch or the Utterly Disgusting Pacific Garbage Patch instead.
So what does this have to do with dogs and balls? Well, that ball we lost in the surf wasn’t the first one that went missing. As a matter of fact we now buy our dog’s tennis balls by the dozen because they get lost so fast. I bet the couple I saw today does too. So I started wondering, how much of the Great, Horrible, Utterly Disgusting Pacific Garbage Patch (GHUDPGP) is made up of our missing tennis balls? I think I’ll go back to throwing sticks. They make my hands dirty and are harder to throw (you can’t use a Chuck-It) but it might be worth it if the GHUDPGP doesn’t accumulate any new tennis balls.