One of the things I wanted to include in my book is Finders Keepers, a community art event and public treasure hunt in Lincoln City, Oregon. Every year for the last two decades, local artists have created hundreds of hand-blown glass floats and hidden them for beachcombers to find and take home—the name says it all: you find it, you keep it. The glass orbs are reminiscent of the old Japanese fishing floats that once drifted the Pacific regularly and washed ashore in the thousands (and are now an extremely rare catch)—beach “trash” of incredible beauty.
Finders Keepers was once limited to the offseason, to try to draw winter tourists to the region. It’s grown so popular (and even inspired knock-off projects like Tacoma’s own Monkeyshines tradition) that they’ve recently extended it to a year-round event. But that doesn’t mean that the floats are easy to find. I got absurdly lucky once—above is my treasure from a solo trip a few years ago—but with seven miles of shoreline within the town limits, searching for glass really is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
Last year some San Francisco friends invited the Tailor and me to meet them for a long winter weekend in Lincoln City, so we could all comb the beach together. No dice, as it turned out, but the best part is that the treasure is always secondary to the hunt itself.
Our friends, though, had a brilliant idea: if we couldn’t find glass floats on the beach, why not make a few of our own?
I had never blown glass before, but since I live in a glassblowing capital, I’d always wanted to try it.
And I have to say, it’s every bit as mesmerizing to do as it is to watch. There’s something so satisfying about playing with molten glass, and trying to guess how the finished product will turn out.
We each topped off our floats with a medallion stamped with the place and year, and left them in the studio’s kiln overnight to complete the annealing (slow-cooling) process. (That part is crucial—years of searching for Monkeyshines in Tacoma has taught me that if glass isn’t annealed properly, the piece can explode into a zillion shards, even weeks later!)
The next morning we picked up our finished products, and left Lincoln City with the perfect travel souvenirs and friendship mementos.
As a bonus, I left with plenty of first-hand knowledge to use as book fodder, as well as a head (and sketchbook, and camera) full of imagery to inspire the illustration.
Well, now that it’s been a whole year since I first showed you these, and the secret no longer needs keeping, I can tell you about what I did today. Today is the start of the lunar new year, and here in Tacoma we have a tradition that proves how wonderful this town is, year after year. The tradition is called “Monkeyshines,” a public treasure hunt through the city that falls on (or around) the first day of Chinese new year each year. The name comes from the Year of the Monkey on the Chinese zodiac cycle, exactly twelve years ago, when an anonymous artist going by the name “Ms. Monkey” created a few hundred colorful hand-blown glass floats, each one stamped with a monkey design, and hid them all over the city. Anyone who found one could take it home with them, and since only Ms. Monkey’s inner circle knew about it, it came as a complete surprise to those lucky few who found treasure that year. Over the years the tradition has grown and the secret has spread like wildfire, with more and more beautiful pieces of glass art being hidden around Tacoma with each cycle of the zodiac. Since the only rule is “take only one,” many people have taken to rehiding the ones they find, or contributing their own handmade treasures to the hunt. Not that it’s easy to find multiple Monkeyshines—or even one! Even now that there are thousands of treasures hidden each year, it’s still like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. I’d never been lucky myself, coming up empty-handed year after year.
2015, the Year of the Ram, completed the 12-year zodiac cycle that started with that first treasure hunt. Ms. Monkey approached me (no, I won’t tell you who she is!) and asked if I would contribute some “Monkeyshines” of my own to the cause. I jumped at the chance: even though I’d never found a glass float myself, I loved the hunt, and by then I’d amassed a mental database of potential hidey-holes. By then I was more excited about the prospect of hiding treasure than of finding it. Besides, even though my work has been moving away from letterpress printing in recent years, it was fun to do a printing project again.
So I whipped up a little medallion design, and hand-carved it in linoleum.
Then I threw it onto my tiny tabletop press, and set to work.
I printed close to 500 medallions (until I ran out of paper and the block started to break down!), and then hand-assembled them in the style of my other letterpress ornaments.
And then came the fun part: hiding them all over Tacoma.
Since there were so many medallions, and I had to go out of town over Chinese new year, I enlisted friends to help, and staggered my own distribution over several weeks. Together we managed to canvass almost the entire city map, hitting both well-traveled areas and less-visited neighborhoods.
The hiding was, indeed, the best part. I loved walking inconspicuously at weird hours, my hands stuffed in my pockets and posing as a searcher, waiting until the coast was clear to pop another medallion into one of Tacoma’s nooks and crannies. Sometimes I’d hang around and wait nearby until someone came by and discovered what I’d left behind. It was a thrill every time.
I saved this pictured for last because it echoes this year’s odyssey, when my chance finally came. Fast forward to this morning, and it’s the Year of the Monkey all over again. Since it’s now become a tradition as ingrained as Christmas, there was no question that I’d resume the hunt. A friend came to pick me up at 4:30 am, and after a quick swig of coffee, we set out.
And in less than an hour, in my eighth year of searching, I finally found my first glass Monkeyshine! Just like the previous picture, it was in the mouth of a fish sculpture—this one in the middle of a fountain downtown. Luckily for me, there was only about an inch of water in the fountain, so all I had to do was climb in and step right up. And yes, if the fountain had been full of water, I would have gone in anyway, 35-degree weather be darned. I wouldn’t have been the only one—tales of people braving murky koi ponds and polar-plunging into the Bay have become the stuff of legend around here. For some things it’s worth getting soaked and dirty!
My friend is still searching for his Monkeyshine—we spent the rest of the morning hunting on his behalf, but even if he doesn’t find one this year, we made sure to pay it forward by hiding a few small monkey-themed treasures ourselves.
So now I’m back home, refreshed after a nap and a hot cuppa tea, admiring the Monkeyshine that’s serendipitously in my favorite color. SO many thanks to Ms. Monkey, all her fellow ‘Shiners, all the friends and friendly strangers I hunted with this morning, and my art-loving city. Thank you for making this happen year after year, for making my year so far, and for bringing us all together for a chance to play explorer in our own hometown. Gung hay fat choy!
Today is the beginning of the lunar new year, and you’ll have to forgive me, because I’m about to get cryptic. (Some day, I hope, I’ll explain.) For everyone out there who doesn’t happen to live in Tacoma: happy Year of the Sheep! You can stop reading now.
And for those Tacomans in the know: remember this image, and happy hunting!
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