Overnight at Ocean City, a Degraded Beach Undergoes a Restoration

"I don't know if you ever saw that commercial," Dustin Gilbert is telling me. "The one with the Indian crying by the side of the road? Indians would fill the ocean if they saw how dirty people are here."

Dustin has ample opportunity to ponder humanity's filthy habits. He's the public works maintenance supervisor for Ocean City. We're standing in the shadow of the Trimper's Ferris wheel, if it were casting a shadow, which it isn't, because it's after dark.

"I think it's just laziness, to be honest with you," Dustin, 52, says of some tourists' trashy ways. He has worked for the city as an engineer for years. But this is his first summer in this particular job, and he's still coming to terms with it.

"There are spots [on the beach] where you see there was a camp-out of people, a little circle, and their cups and cans and bottles are just sitting right there where they never picked them up. And five feet away is a trash can. That's what's amazed me: the general nature of people, how people just don't really care, it seems like."

And so, every night from 8:30 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. during the tourist season, Dustin and his crew clean Ocean City's 10 miles of beach to get it ready for the next day's assault. Central to every evening's campaign are a squadron of New Holland tractors that pull machines to scrape trash off the sand.

Three of the tractors -- their massive rear tires almost as tall as man -- spit and snarl in the municipal works parking lot, the headlights on top making them look like vehicles from a "Star Wars" movie.

The oldest sand cleaners are modified potato pickers pulled behind tractors. A blade cuts into the top four inches of sand and dumps it on a sifter. The sand falls through the screen, back to the beach, and the trash tumbles into a hopper. Ocean City still has a few of those 40-year-old sand sanitizers, but they're being replaced by lime green contraptions called Barber sand rakes.

At a few minutes before 9 p.m. -- delayed a half-hour by a balky hopper -- the tractors move out. Dustin and I follow in his truck.

The beach at Ocean City is as much a creation of man as it is of nature. Winter storms throw sand up against the seawall. Waves gnaw at the breaker line, steepening the beach. Before the first tourists arrived in May, Dustin's crews moved the sand around and flattened it by dragging huge oak timbers. This makes it easier for the tractors to perform their nocturnal grooming ritual.

I didn't believe it when someone told me that more than 100 abandoned beach chairs are collected every night, but now I see them: twisted, fractured, piled up against trash barrels or left in shattered heaps on the sand. This is an inevitable end result of cheap merchandise and obese Americans.

The headlights of Dustin's truck sweep across the beach, revealing a shirtless young man with a pointy beard and several piercings dragging something behind him. It's a bunch of beach chairs wrapped in a broken beach umbrella.

"You taking the chairs to recycle?" Dustin asks him.