<blockquote>Come-from-aways think it’s the tides that brings the wreckage in, but any local child will tell you the truth of the matter. You can have fifty fine days in a row and the beaches will be clean and empty, except for the usual haul of rockweed, driftwood, and old plastic bottles. Fifty fine days, and then there’ll come a thick, foggy night of the sort we do so well around here, and the next morning there it’ll be—a rocket engine from an alien spaceship, or a cracked satellite dish as big as a bus, half-buried in the sand down on Bartlett’s Beach.</blockquote>
