By Lee Cataluna
Advertiser Columnist

There's a beach on Kaua'i known as Glass Beach for an obvious reason. It's covered with beach glass. COVERED. During certain times of the year, depending on tides and surf, it's even more covered. The story is that the beach used to be a rubbish dump back in the old, old days. The glass from castor-oil bottles and saimin bowls is worn smooth by the sand and surf. There's a fair amount of new rubbish, too, and that stuff definitely isn't cool and collectable, but that's beside the point.

The beach used to be kind of a secret spot favored by fishermen and a few artsy/craftsy types — anglers and people with glue guns. A nice mix. It's not a swimming beach because of the rocks and all the junk in the water, (engine blocks and such) and it isn't even picturesque, situated as it is between an electrical power plant and an old cemetery. Not too long ago, you could go there and be the only family on the beach. Then it got listed in a bunch of tourist guide books, and now the place is covered, COVERED with people. But that is also beside the point.

So we're sitting at said beach sifting through said glass, picking up enough little shiny pieces to line the bottom of a sandwich-sized Zip-Loc bag, when a voice stabs through wind: "You're not supposed to take that home!"

I look up and the person standing there, with one hand on her hip staring out at no one in particular but side-eyeing us-guys in specific, is someone who obviously found the beach through some guide book. She had a look of righteous indignation, as if she had just busted someone parked illegally in a handicap stall.

My first thought was to start up on a history lecture of gathering rights and Native Hawaiians, and then I realized, wait, this is BEACH GLASS, not limu kohu or kahelelani shells.

A second thought was to explain that we weren't taking very much. Heck, some people come by with buckets and shovels and take home enough to pave a driveway. But then I thought, this is essentially rubbish. It's broken glass. What does it matter who takes how much? If anything, anyone who takes glass off the beach is actually helping to clean it up.

I thought of emptying the Zip-Loc bag right there onto the sand just to make her go away and, of course, scooping it all up again as soon as she was gone. But that wasn't even the point, either.

The point was that on this beach, this former dump where one man's trash is turned into another's treasure by time and tide, that this person with good intentions and notions of conservation, delivered her pronouncement about what should and shouldn't be done on the beach that SHE had discovered, and then walked away in a huff, dropping her cigarette on the sand. As the ladies shopping up the road at 'Ele'ele Big Save like to say, "If you going say something, make sure you know what you saying."

Reach Lee Cataluna at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.