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Five years ago, Sean Ironstag got on a friend’s yacht without knowing where they were going or how long they’d be gone. “It turned out we went straight out into the middle of the ocean,” he remembers. About a week later, they dropped anchor and went for a swim. “And when I came out,” he says, “it looked like my body was covered in glitter.”
It was a moment that would transform his life. Recently, the 35-year-old explained how he’d gotten there. The story is very much a personal mythology, romantic and larger than life: a teenage runaway from an abusive home in Houston, Texas, he moved to New York City, where he became an errand boy at a Brooklyn bar, sleeping on a cot in the back. He was taught to trade commodities by an older trader who let the underage Ironstag use his license.
Eventually he went stir-crazy and started globetrotting. In the Middle East, he says he fell in with a group of people he calls “freedom fighters”—former contract military who were going around inciting and aiding revolution. “A lot of them were ex-mercenaries who had seen the system from the inside and hadn’t liked what they had seen,” he says. “When I met them they were going around to areas that were on the verge of revolution. We got to see some really amazing things happen.”
He says that from there he found himself in South Africa, where he had an epiphany. “I realized that anything that ends in bloodshed on either end is a fucking tragedy,” he says, “So I got out. It really clicked something inside me. I wanted to find out how to do things better.” He wanted a peaceful, global revolution. He returned to the United States. The year was 2011; he had just turned 30.
He crashed in Los Angeles, living off the good graces of another friend in finance, undergoing an existential crisis. His friend invited him on a yachting “adventure,” and soon he found himself in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, covered in what looked like glitter.
It wasn’t glitter. He’d been swimming in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, first discovered in 1997 by Charles Moore, a sailor taking a shortcut from Hawaii to Los Angeles. Moore later described his discovery in National History magazine, writing, “As I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic.” More than a decade later, the GPGP had only grown, and Ironstag, unwittingly, was swimming in the middle of it.
It was a moment that would transform his life. Recently, the 35-year-old explained how he’d gotten there. The story is very much a personal mythology, romantic and larger than life: a teenage runaway from an abusive home in Houston, Texas, he moved to New York City, where he became an errand boy at a Brooklyn bar, sleeping on a cot in the back. He was taught to trade commodities by an older trader who let the underage Ironstag use his license.
Eventually he went stir-crazy and started globetrotting. In the Middle East, he says he fell in with a group of people he calls “freedom fighters”—former contract military who were going around inciting and aiding revolution. “A lot of them were ex-mercenaries who had seen the system from the inside and hadn’t liked what they had seen,” he says. “When I met them they were going around to areas that were on the verge of revolution. We got to see some really amazing things happen.”
He says that from there he found himself in South Africa, where he had an epiphany. “I realized that anything that ends in bloodshed on either end is a fucking tragedy,” he says, “So I got out. It really clicked something inside me. I wanted to find out how to do things better.” He wanted a peaceful, global revolution. He returned to the United States. The year was 2011; he had just turned 30.
He crashed in Los Angeles, living off the good graces of another friend in finance, undergoing an existential crisis. His friend invited him on a yachting “adventure,” and soon he found himself in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, covered in what looked like glitter.
It wasn’t glitter. He’d been swimming in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, first discovered in 1997 by Charles Moore, a sailor taking a shortcut from Hawaii to Los Angeles. Moore later described his discovery in National History magazine, writing, “As I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic.” More than a decade later, the GPGP had only grown, and Ironstag, unwittingly, was swimming in the middle of it.
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