I’ve always found something grounding about walking along the coastline — the endless pull of the tide, the smell of salt and kelp, the distant cry of gulls. The Western Cape has a way of making you feel small in the best possible sense. Standing where the Atlantic meets the sand, you can almost believe that the ocean forgives everything.
But lately, it feels harder to hold on to that illusion.
When I walk the beaches near Kommetjie, Blouberg or Strand these days, I notice two kinds of treasures scattered along the shore. There are the shells — smooth, iridescent, small marvels of nature that have survived the sea’s churn. And then there’s the other kind: the plastic bottle caps, chip packets, cigarette butts, fishing line, and broken toys washed up by the same tide.
Most of us reach for the first kind. We pocket a shell, admire its pattern, maybe take it home to remind us of the day. But we leave the other kind where it lies. Somehow, we’ve convinced ourselves that the sea will take care of it — that the waves will swallow what we’d rather not see.
It doesn’t. It returns it all to us, one tide at a time.
I’ve started to notice how easily beauty blinds us. We step over a plastic fork to pick up a seashell. We tell ourselves it’s not our rubbish. But in a way, it is. The coastline doesn’t belong to anyone and so it belongs to all of us — which means the neglect does too.
I sometimes bring a small bag with me now. Not for shells, but for the things that don’t belong — a bottle here, a chip packet there. It’s not much, but it changes the way I see the beach. It turns the walk from something I take from the place into something I give back.
It also makes me think about how easy it would be if everyone did the same. If every beachgoer on the Western Cape’s coast — from Hermanus to Paternoster — picked up one piece of rubbish for every shell they admired, the difference would be visible within a single summer. The beaches wouldn’t just look cleaner; they’d breathe easier.
The Western Cape’s coastline is a gift — a living, changing space that has carried stories long before us. It deserves more than our photographs and footprints. It deserves our attention, our care, our willingness to bend down not just for what’s beautiful, but for what’s broken.
Next time I walk that familiar stretch of sand, I’ll still look at shells — but I’ll keep an eye out for the other things too. Because maybe the real treasure isn’t what we take home, but what we choose to leave behind in better shape than we found it.