A new chapter in life

By Steve Rosse

I spent twenty-five years doing a boring job in a cubicle in a windowless room in the basement of a hospital, and every single day of it I was sustained by a dream of retirement in Thailand. I had a vision of myself spending my last years in a hammock on a beach, drinking fizzy drinks from a coconut shell.

I retired two years ago, found a deserted beach, hung my hammock, and mixed a drink. I was bored with that in about ten minutes.

Thailand is famous for its nightlife, but my sleepy little village on the beach has none of that. No malls, no movie theaters or bowling alleys, no bars or discos. I’m 66 years old; I’m in bed by 9 p.m. anyway.

I bought a bicycle. I had not been on a bicycle in 50 years, but it turned out my bicycle ride to the beach was more fun than the hammock. My beach, Turtle Beach, is 13 kilometers (eight miles) long. It’s a protected turtle nesting site and national park, as there has never been much development. Most of the beach looks like it would have looked a million years ago—except for all the plastic trash that washes up during the southwest monsoon.

There is a single road: flat, straight, and almost completely without traffic, ten kilometers long, that parallels the beach. This road is never more than 50 meters from the high tide mark.

Eventually I was riding the bike 20 kilometers every day, ten out and ten back, and walking another four or five kilometers on the beach picking up trash. I’d take a couple of bags of trash home in a backpack every day and put it in the bin. It was healthy exercise in a beautiful place, and gathering a little bit of the trash gave me a daily sense of accomplishment.

Then one day I found a pawn. Just a plastic pawn from a chess board, but I put it on a shelf and said, “I’m going to make a chess board with the pieces I find on the beach.”

And so I became a beachcomber.

I began to make what the graduate students call “assemblage art installations.” I’d glue trash to other trash and hang it on the wall. I discovered immediately that Thai people won’t look at trash. Thai people are my only audience, and they like shiny, colorful things that look brand new.

There are types of trash that I find routinely on my beach. Old flip-flops is one type; there are literally millions of them out there. But Thais won’t even wear their shoes into the house; they certainly don’t want to look at dirty old shoes hung on the wall and labeled “art.”

But there are two other types of trash that are very common: old cigarette lighters and water bottle caps. These things are immensely strong and survive for years in the sea without losing their luster. I bought a plastic pool toy in the shape of a turtle. I covered it with Papier-mâché and then bedazzled it with cigarette lighters and voilà! It was “na raak,” or “lovely.” My neighbors smiled at it and gave me a thumbs up.

There is a Turtle Festival every year where the local Research Center releases juvenile turtles into the sea. There is a parade on the first day of this festival and local civic groups like the Rotary and Lions Club will make big turtle floats for the parade. I put my rhinestone reptile on the back of a pickup truck, and I was the first foreigner to ever march in the Turtle Parade.

I got attention, praise, and exercise. I was in heaven.

I have made eight turtles since then. I give them to local businesses: a coffee shop, restaurants, and little grocery stores. Two of my turtles have been put on display in the Visitors Center of the Haad Thai Mueang National Park. I’ve lost 25 pounds in two years, and my sleep and digestion have improved considerably. On Boxing Day in 2022, I grabbed the wrong brake lever and did a face plant in the middle of the road. In the emergency room, they put five stitches in my face. The next day I was back on the bike and back on the road. The only break in my routine came after hernia repair surgery on my sixty-sixth birthday. I took two weeks off to recover and got right back on the bike.

I currently have 5,000 old cigarette lighters in my backyard, waiting to be drained of their butane, cleaned, and glued to big rubber turtles. I’ve got about 10,000 water bottle lids. All of them in brilliant, lovely colors. All of them shiny and bright like new. You really have to look closely at my turtles to see that they’re made of trash. My Thai audience seems to like them a lot.

I will never “clean” this beach. Thousands of tons of waste wash up on Turtle Beach at every high tide in the rainy season. My two little bags of trash, carried in a backpack ten kilometers home each morning, will never make any noticeable dent in that.

I’m not “raising awareness” of anything. If you don’t know what a mess we’ve made of things by now, nothing I say or do will convince you.

My Fabergé turtles are not “art.” They may not even be craft. They’re just something that amuses an old man in his retirement. I’m not improving the world any more than I would have if I’d stayed in my hammock.

I find no Japanese glass net floats, no buttons, petrified wood, ambergris, or coins. No broken china, no musket balls, no clay pipe stems. Nobody has ever lived on my beach except a few families of Muslim fishermen. I find ghost nets and lures. But most of what litters Turtle Beach is made of plastic and was probably washed into a storm drain in Yangon, Kuala Lumpur, or Madras in the last year. I see labels in Hindi, Chinese, Korean, Burmese, and Thai. And millions of shoes and plastic bags.

It’s just trash. Rubbish. Garbage.

But I’ve got 21 pieces on my chess board, with eleven yet to find. I’m determined to finish that chess board, and every day when I’m walking on my magnificent empty beach, staring at the ground by my feet, it’s chess pieces I’m looking for. I come home with cigarette lighters, of course, and water bottle lids, and net floats, toys, lures, and every plastic bag I see, because turtles will mistake those for jellyfish and eat them. But a white rook is the holy grail of my crusade. Or a queen. Either color.

I have been happier in the past two years than I’ve ever been in my life. Every day I can walk past the coffee shop and see one of my turtles out front; on the weekends, hipsters drive in from three provinces to take selfies with my turtles.

And, of course, like every other human being on Earth, I now have a YouTube channel. It’s called “Beachcombing on Turtle Beach,” where you can see my beachcombing adventures and more of my art.

The name of this town in Thai is “Thai Mueang,” which means “End of the Tin Mine.” This is the end of the line for Steve Rosse. I’ve had two STEMI heart attacks, and I’ve got seven stents in my coronary arteries. I still smoke a pack a day. This little village and its beach are where the curtain will come down on Act III of my life.

After all the struggle, after being a son and a dad and a taxpayer and a voter, after all the arguments and lost loves and departed friends, gathering trash and making shiny turtles out of it will be the last thing I ever do.

I intend to do this every single day until they carry me off this beach in a black plastic bag. I’ll end up just another piece of flotsam on the beach, but inside that bag I’ll have a big grin on my face.

This article appeared in Beachcombing Magazine Volume 45 November/December 2024.