Extreme Beachcombing - What the tide keeps, and what it gives back.

I watched Extreme Beachcombing last night, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. It’s one of those small, perfect films that sneaks up on you — quiet, deliberate, full of texture — until you realise it’s saying something enormous about the world and what we leave behind.

John Anderson, the retired plumber at its centre, has spent nearly half a century walking the wild, rain-lashed beaches of the Pacific Northwest, gathering everything the tide spits out. A man who’s made an entire life out of other people’s losses. The film, made by Ryan Pinkard and Christian Klintholm, doesn’t try to romanticise him or tidy up the edges. It just listens. And in that listening, you hear something honest — not about the sea, but about us.

There’s a line early on that sticks: “Everything I’ve got is treasure until I take it off the shelf and put it in the dumpster. Then it’s trash.” It’s such a simple truth. We’re the ones who decide when something stops mattering. When a thing — or a person — is no longer useful. And maybe that’s why his museum feels so human. Every broken buoy, every melted toy, every half-legible label from Japan after the tsunami — it’s all been given back its dignity.

It made me think about our own beaches here in New Brighton. What washes up, what gets left, what we ignore. The same plastic bottles and fishing floats, the same ordinary evidence of extraordinary waste. But also the same poetry, if you stop long enough to look. We like to imagine that what we throw away disappears, that it drifts somewhere out of sight — but the sea has a way of returning the favour. It keeps the receipts.

Watching Anderson move through his collection — these decades of tides and stories — I thought about the way we walk our beaches after a storm, scanning the sand for colour. Not because we need anything, but because finding something feels like proof that the world is still talking back. Maybe that’s what his work is really about: conversation.

Between land and sea, use and discard, life and decay. A dialogue carried by waves.

There’s beauty in the repetition too. The quiet routine of walking, bending, collecting. It’s not so far from photography, really — the same act of noticing, of rescuing fragments from oblivion. The same unspoken belief that small things matter.

I love how the film never shouts. It’s patient. It lets the colours breathe — the reds of buoys, the green glass floats, the weathered wood. The sound of his boots on wet gravel. The camera doesn’t just look; it listens. There’s a kind of reverence to it, a respect for the rhythm of tides and the stubbornness of people who keep showing up.

By the end, it feels less like a portrait of a man and more like a hymn to persistence. To finding meaning in what’s been discarded. To staying curious, even when the world looks like a mess.

Out on our own breakwater, I thought of him today — of those Washington storms, of his museum built from wreckage — and I realised it’s all connected. Different oceans, same current.

Mankind’s trash is one man’s treasure. And maybe that’s the closest thing we’ve got to hope.