Sewing for the Shoreline (Part 3: Living with Sargasso)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRGifH7SrIY

Summer means sargasso when you live in the Caribbean. In the heat of summer, hauling sargasso off the beach repeatedly started feeling less like a solution and more like a ritual of surrender.

No matter how much we removed, more would arrive. Day after day. All summer long.

Some days it came in thin scattered ribbons floating near the shoreline. Other days entire mats drifted toward the coast so thick and heavy they felt almost alive. I would watch them from my porch like an invading army. During summer, we would wake up each morning to find the beach transformed again overnight.

And so I started wondering whether there was a way to slow it down before it reached the shore.

That question eventually led me to a sewing machine. I've sewn some pretty massive projects in my time. (Shout out to my old Sat Nam Fest sewing mates who spent hours making our stage backdrops over the years! I miss you ladies!!)

If someone had told me those stage designs were training me for my next career - sewing giant experimental barriers to place in the Caribbean Sea, I probably would have laughed.

But here I am.

When you live closely with a problem long enough, eventually you stop waiting for perfect solutions and simply start trying things.

The first versions of the sargasso fence were rough experiments. Nets, webbing, floats, ropes, stitching patterns — every iteration taught me something new about force, tension, weight, and water movement. We started collecting plastic bottles from the recycling center and I sewed tubes of netting to put inside the top of the fence so it would float in the water. That has worked beautifully.

But each version failed in some unique way.

Sometimes the material itself wasn’t strong enough. Sometimes the holes were too big and trapped sargasso. Sometimes they were too small and the weight of the collected sargasso became too heavy. Sometimes the movement of the waves created forces I had completely underestimated. The ocean has a very efficient way of revealing weaknesses in your designs.

Still, each failure taught me something.

Over time, I've had a few helpers on the project.

Kunti has talked through each idea with me. She has sorted endless bottle caps and bottles. My mother gave up a week of her visit here to sew sections together. A friend joined in as well. At various moments, the process has looked less like marine engineering and more like a strange coastal sewing circle — giant pieces of netting stretched across tables while we tried to imagine how fabric and rope might hold back an entire moving ecosystem.

There is something both absurd and beautiful about that image to me.

People often talk about environmental issues in massive, abstract terms. Climate change. Ocean collapse. Ecological crisis. The scale of it all can feel overwhelming and paralyzing.

But daily life here often feels much smaller and more immediate than that.

It looks like stitching webbing late at night.

Dragging heavy wet seaweed under the sun.

Testing another design.

Watching it fail.

Trying again anyway.

I’m now on the fifth iteration of the fence.

And honestly, I still don’t know exactly what the final answer will look like.

But each time we get a little better.

Maybe living on a changing coastline means accepting that adaptation itself becomes part of daily life. Continuous learning.

The ocean keeps moving.

The sargasso keeps arriving.

And so we keep experimenting.

The fence itself matters less than the mindset behind it. What I’m really resisting is helplessness.

There is a particular kind of despair that can emerge when environmental problems begin feeling too large, too global, too unstoppable for individual action to matter. But I don’t think I'm capable of resignation. I've always been impossibly stubborn.

Sometimes the most meaningful thing we can do is participate.

Observe carefully.

Work with our hands.

Learn from failure.

Stay in relationship with the place we inhabit.

Even imperfectly.

Especially imperfectly.

The truth is, the sea will probably continue teaching us humility for a very long time. I am halfway through the current version.

185 meters of fence.

That's 200 yards.

That's 600 feet.

Yes.

I am sewing it. And when we open up again in the fall, it will be so amazing to see the joy of every guest as they experience our beautiful shoreline.

Each new version of the fence feels, in its own small way, is like a conversation with the coastline.

Currently, an unfinished one.

In this video, I was planning to document that this third version of the fence which was a plastic webbed net had large holes that the sargasso was getting stuck in. This is what led to my design of the floating barrier that will sit outside the net, stopping the sargasso from hitting the net above the water line. But those birds just took my breath away. I had to get videos of the fence another time....