Some people get so hooked on searching the beach for treasures that it turns into their hobby. Or something even more serious.

Take Gail Browne, for example. She is one of many artists and collectors who have succumbed to the lure of the sands in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The fisherman's village is a summer resort and a world-famous art colony where generations of painters have come to capture the elusive Cape Cod light.

Browne and her friend Amy Heller, a fellow artist who has been combing the beaches since she was a child, are inspired in their work by the natural beauty of Cape Cod as well as the treasures they uncover on its beaches, then display in their homes. The two women collaborated on a 2020 book that shares their beachcombing experiences as well as those of four other artist-collectors: 'Lost and Found: Time, Tide, and Treasures.' And last October, the Cape Cod Museum of Art also staged an exhibition about them.

Browne likes to approach the shoreline an hour before low tide, the time seasoned beachcombers believe to be the best for scanning around seaweed, rocks, and shells for a glint of man-made artifacts.

The thousands of relics she has uncovered so far are like portals into the past: 1700s English transferware shards, fishermen’s pipes, 19th-century clay marbles, a bronze oil lamp. You name it.

These pieces of strangers’ homes and lives also artfully fill shelves, tables, and windowsills in her nearby townhouse, reflecting her own memories and stories.

"I have an obsession,” Browne, 74, told The Washington Post. “When I’m walking on the beach, I just can’t take my eyes off the ground.”

Some territories are more generous than others, and Provincetown is one of those places.

Its harbor basically served as the town dump until the 1930s. "Everyone threw their junk into the harbor. It was pretty nasty," Browne said. "It all settled down, and what didn’t rot stayed behind and got covered up. Tides and wind shift it, and that uncovers it."

Provincetown's period as a major whaling and fishing center has also contributed to these riches of the deep.

As you can see, all of these relics are beautiful on their own, but when massed into bowls or jars, or displayed on shelves, the objects can become the focal point of a room, and a history lesson for anyone who will listen.

No wonder collecting things from the sand has a long history. But the first appearance of the word "beachcombers" in print was in Herman Melville's Omoo (1847). The text described Europeans living in South Pacific islands, "combing" the beach and nearby water for flotsam, jetsam, or anything else they could use or trade.

However, the act itself must've been around since the dawn of time, whether gathering essential resources such as wood or simply picking up unfamiliar objects out of curiosity.

In the Scottish Outer Hebrides, for example, tropical drift seeds, or sea beans, that originate in the Americas and are carried across the Atlantic in ocean currents, were admired for their supposed magical properties and handed down through generations as family heirlooms.

Unfortunately, in recent decades, the flotsam and jetsam of our beach strandlines have become dominated by plastic litter, from bottles to bags and fishing nets to everyday items such as cigarette lighters, toothbrushes, and printer cartridges.

Marine trash is a global problem of unimaginable scale and consequence, both to the animals that live in the sea and to ourselves. So if you do venture out to comb a beach, a good habit to develop would be to pick up one or two not-so-pleasant finds as well.