Ebbesmeyer sometimes alerts his followers to hazardous finds—an ominous aluminum cylinder floating north of Guam—and splendid encounters—a 90-foot beer tank bobbing off Scotland. He gives the scoop on weather balloons, too:Almost a thousand are scattered worldwide each day, bearing miniaturized electronic weather stations known as radiosondes. But 100,000 balloons and sondes annually end up in the ocean, to scientists' chagrin. "Sondes signify our throwaway society," Ebbesmeyer says, figuring they have left a billion bits of Styrofoam on Earth's 382,000 miles of shoreline.
And, of course, Ebbesmeyer investigates floating sneakers, having made a big splash solving the Great Nike Shoe Spill of 2003. Global media tied up his phone line after he reported the spill from three shipping containers in the Pacific. One of his beachcombing correspondents had alerted him to the discovery of unmatched Nikes on the Washington coast near Queets and sent along the bar-code numbers. Ebbesmeyer broke down the code to determine the footwear was new. He e-mailed Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., and heard from exec Dave Newman. "Three containers went overboard in December 2002 off the northern California coast," Newman confirmed, about 35 miles off Cape Mendocino, Calif. Generally, Newman said, 5,500 pairs fit in a standard 40-foot ocean container. That was enough to outfit 16,500 high-school hoopsters, at $100 a pair.
Kevin P. Casey
Ebbesmeyer at Golden
Gardens, with beach detritus:
“It’s not something you can
bring up at dinner.”
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Evidence in hand, Ebbesmeyer called up an Alaska science writer he knew, and the story broke on the front page of the Anchorage Daily News: Free shoes! Moochers stormed the beaches, and though no one was counting, scads of the shoes were found on the West Coast tides—with one catch: Nike forgot to tie the laces. Beachcombers would have to find matching mates on their own.
It was with that background that Ebbesmeyer approached the Seven-Foot Mystery.
Like all sneaker brands, plastic-and-rubber Nikes float soles to the sky, with or without a decaying human foot, and can bob great distances. In the 2003 Nike spill, they went almost 2,000 miles in 72 days, Ebbesmeyer deduced, from California to Rose Spit at the top of the Queen Charlotte Islands, B.C., near the Alaska border. Others curled around and went off to Hawaii, perhaps Japan.
Some surprisingly heavy objects ride the surf almost as well. "I'm constantly amazed at what floats and what doesn't," Ebbesmeyer says, thumbing through a small spiral notebook he keeps. "On the beach I came across a bowling ball once. 'What's this doing here?', I thought, and pitched it into the ocean. It floats!"
Bodies, however, decompose in a comparatively short time, or can be partially or wholly dismembered by currents or eaten by marine life. "The head separates easily after a time in water," Ebbesmeyer says, starting to shrug. "It's just sitting here atop our spines." He tilts his head as if making it fall off.
The head that washed up in Oregon belonged to a headless body that washed up at Westport, Wash., the result of natural decomposition, separation, and tides, he says. Ebbesmeyer gave a legal deposition on currents in that 1995 case, in which an Oregon woman named Linda Jean Stangel, 23, was convicted of manslaughter for pushing her boyfriend, David Wahl, 27, off a beach cliff.
But feet in particular detach naturally, below the ankle, and most important, through the aid and protection of sneakers, are more likely to drift off and be discovered—to the shock and suspicions of many. Examinations of the six feet found in Canada gave no indication of foul play, says Terry Foster, a spokesperson for the B.C. Coroners Service. "In all cases, these remains appear to have naturally separated from the body," since no tool or trauma marks were found on the feet. That was also the case with the U.S. foot found near Pysht, Clallam County officials say. Yet the feet became serially linked by the media reports, and the assumption grew that they were related by a criminal cause of death.
The discoveries puzzled Ebbesmeyer in the beginning, too. But not today.
"It was baffling at the start—four right feet," he says. That seemed to defy the odds, feeding suspicions of a serial killer leaving a calling card. "But then we started getting lefts and matches. And it began to look more commonplace." With the seventh foot last month, he's convinced there's no widespread foul play. Actually, considering that thousands of people have been reported missing in B.C. and Washington, "I'm surprised we haven't found more body parts," Ebbesmeyer says. "We're dealing with only a few people here, in an arbitrary period of time, and it's routine for some to have fallen in the water and been there long enough for the feet to disarticulate and float away."
No one can yet say how victims in the Seven-Foot Mystery might have died—understandably, given the lack of evidence. But Ebbesmeyer typically finds such cases lead back to sunken craft, missing swimmers, and other accident victims whose bodies were never recovered. B.C. authorities have been focusing in that area as well, attempting to match the feet's DNA with drowning, boating, and aircraft accident victims, including five who died in a 2005 B.C. float-plane crash.
