Arts + Sciences

IF A FREIGHTER STEAMING out of Okinawa takes a big typhoon swell starboard and dumps a container full of Hot Wheels into the Pacific, there are about eleventy billion beaches where those packages of little cars might wash ashore. Ideally for ex-plumber John Anderson, one of them will be along the wind-battered shores of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where, if there’s an interesting piece of beach detritus wedged under driftwood or tangled in a clump of rotting seagrass, he will find it. I mean, he has a museum to stock.

It’s John’s Beachcombing Museum, to be precise and to the point. The space formerly was his plumbing shop, but now it serves as the country’s first beachcombing museum. If you enter without noticing the charmingly hand-painted sign on the door, you might think you’ve just walked