In Hawaii, She Sees Sea Glass On the Seashore

But we spent little of our time looking up, the four of us scouring the beach like a quartet of crones, our backs curved and necks bent, we parents sporting sticks to help navigate the slippery rocks. The whole time we were there, we saw only two other people. We didn't talk, except to shout out discoveries: "Here's a big one!" "Here's a blue one!" "Aqua!" We found so much that, after we took photographs of parts of our collection, we left some pieces for future beachcombers. We didn't want to be greedy.

Stella Burgess, who is the Hawaiian cultural specialist at the Grand Hyatt Kauai Resort and Spa and one of the go-to people for information about Kauai, remembers when "everyone on the western end on Kauai would dump rubbish" on the outcropping next to Glass Beach. They would burn the trash and toss it into the ocean. The ocean then tumbled and threw back the trash, some of it rounded and sparkling.

"Nobody really paid attention to the glass," she says. "It just kept building on top of each other . . . . The whole beach was glass."

When she was younger, the glass was at least six inches deep. Folks used to go down there with five-gallon buckets and scoop it up to use in retaining walls and driveways. (Now there is a law that prohibits taking more than one gallon of beach sand per day for personal use.) As beach glass has become popular for jewelry and other crafts, artisans have found the beach and have raked it over.

On a visit this past summer, Burgess says, "it wasn't like I remembered it."

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While "sea glass" can be made in tumblers and acid baths, enthusiasts prefer the real thing. And Hawaiian sea glass is prized because of its unusual colors and shapes.

"Hawaiian beach glass in unique in that you can find more blues, and that's considered one of the more precious colors, if you can consider beach glass precious," says Sharon Umbaugh, a Sea Glass Association board member. She moved to the Big Island seven years ago from Ohio and sells sea glass on eBay and through her Web site, http://www.tropicalglass.com/.

In addition, Hawaiian sea glass is usually "smooth and rounded, a bit like jelly beans, as opposed to the East Coast, where it's flat and ragged," Umbaugh says. "That's one of the reasons why it's so attractive and makes such beautiful jewelry, as opposed to the ones that are more shardy looking."

Umbaugh visited Glass Beach about six years ago. "It's a phenomenon, that beach, because it is really all beach glass," she says. "You can actually just scoop up handfuls of glass, and I've not seen it anywhere else." While Glass Beach may be unusual, she says, there are good sea glass sites all over the islands, although "any serious collector won't reveal their sources."

"There's a certain art to knowing where to look," Umbaugh says, but "on a good day for me, the ocean will just throw it at my feet."

Collector Hilda Morales also has a knack for finding sea glass. "You always have to be following the tides and the wind," she says. "If you see a lot of driftwood, a lot of coral, stop."

Morales, who lives on the northern side of Kauai, visits Glass Beach occasionally and remembers when you could scoop up the glass by the bucketful. Now it's more variable, she says. "Either you're lucky and you find bigger pieces, or you find tons of little pieces," she says. "I take everything."

Her collection, she says, is taking over her house. But sea glass has attracted her since she was a little girl in Acapulco, Mexico, where her mother called the bits of glass "mermaid tears."

I understand the draw. My older daughter, Rachel, and I made one more quick trip to Glass Beach later in the week. My younger daughter was sick, and I was thrilled to find a piece for her the size of a quarter and her current favorite color, aqua. When we got back to Maryland, the aqua piece went on display in Sara's room, and I filled a six-inch-tall triangular glass vase with my other finds in layers: the whites, then the pottery, then the blues and greens.

I knew I hadn't found anything too unusual; according to LaMotte's book, the rarest colors are orange, red, turquoise, yellow, black, teal and gray.

But LaMotte was kind enough to look at photographs of my collection that I e-mailed to him and had some encouraging words. The white pieces with tints of lavender, gray or pink could be pre-1930s glass, he wrote; I'd picked up some "neat pieces" of ceramic; and I'd collected some "tough to find" deep aqua colors.

That made me wish Kauai weren't 5,000 miles away, because by the time I get to Glass Beach again, there may be nothing left but sea and shore. What's happening at Glass Beach, it turns out, perfectly illustrates what's happening with sea glass itself, as customs change and both trash and treasure disappear in the relentless crush of time.

Elizabeth Chang last wrote for the Travel section about swimming with dolphins.