I grew up on Lake Michigan — the first place that ever felt like it was mine.
I would take the boat out and drop anchor off Oval Beach, or off Holland State Park, cut the engine, and just lie on the sunpad with music playing. No phone. No plans. Not a care in the world.
For a few hours the water held everything and asked for nothing back. That was my happy place — the one I quietly measured every other place against.
And every single time, I ended up scooping plastic out of the water.
Pop bottles. Water bottles. Sunscreen bottles. Balloons that had drifted in from somewhere far away. It never stopped, and after a while it stopped surprising me.
I’d reach over the side, pull out whatever had floated up to the boat, and set it on the deck to deal with later. It became a reflex. You don’t grow up on a body of water and then learn to look away from what’s floating in it.
And then I started noticing my own.
I’d scoop the bottles out, and then spray sunscreen off the swim platform and watch the film it left spread across the top of the water. The same residue sat slick on the teak deck, under my feet.
I had just cleaned someone else’s plastic out of the lake — and there I was, leaving my own slick on the water I loved. I couldn’t unsee it after that.
There is no water clean enough to be spared.
And this was a freshwater lake, far from any ocean.
When I traveled, the same thing followed me. I found the same plastic in the Bahamas, out in the Exumas, in some of the clearest water on earth — water so bright it doesn’t look real.
Turtles and rays gliding under the swim platform, and a thin sheen of sunscreen sitting on the surface above them. That was when it stopped being a Lake Michigan problem and became the whole picture.
Sunscreen is one of the only things a doctor tells you to wear every day, for the rest of your life.
And almost all of it comes wrapped in plastic and rinses chemicals straight into the water the moment you get in. I did not want to make another one of those. I didn’t want to add one more bottle to the pile I’d spent years pulling out of the lake.
I wanted to build the one you can wear at the water’s edge without leaving anything behind. No plastic to wash up on a beach. No slick on the surface. Nothing for the water to carry away.