WORKING -- Sifting through the odds and ends

Story by Alex Coolman; photo by Don Leach

HE IS ...

The man who finds what you lost.

TOP OF THE HEAP

Among the people who do maintenance work for the city of Newport Beach,

there is, of course, a hierarchy. The people who toil to repair the

roads, sweating all day over a pounding jackhammer and sucking up asphalt

fumes, are somewhere near the bottom of this hierarchy.

Near the top, on the other hand, is 49-year-old Phil O’Brien, an

equipment operator. He has the happy job of operating the tractor that

slowly grazes the beach in the morning to render it pristine.

Does he enjoy what he does? Yes, indeed. He’s been doing it for 18 years.

Executing a graceful turn as he nears the jetty at Corona del Mar State

Beach, O’Brien points out one of the main job benefits.

“Just look around. It’s gorgeous.”

FINDING THE LOST: PART ONE

At this time of year, O’Brien starts work at 5 a.m., the better to finish

before hordes of tourists and schoolchildren show up to mess up the sand

all over again.

But no matter how early he starts, he still sees people on the beach from

time to time. Something about the loneliness and the wide-open horizon

seems to attract people who are, to put it gently, a little lost.

There was the naked guy who was crawling on all fours like a dog. There

were the bleary-eyed teenagers staggering around after a particularly

intoxicating prom. And then there was the lady who was sprawled out on

the sand like a despondent porpoise, looking like she was quite possibly

dead.

“I got out of the cleaner and I went over there,” O’Brien recalled. He

touched the unfortunate woman gingerly on the arm.

“She jumped up and she screamed at me and ran away,” O’Brien said. “It

scared the heck out of me. I almost had a heart attack.”

FINDING THE LOST: PART TWO

But clearing the beach of human debris is not O’Brien’s primary

assignment. The main quarry for the man and his yellow John Deere tractor

is much smaller: pieces of seaweed, Styrofoam, orange peels, rocks and

other miscellaneous odds and ends that could impair a beachgoer’s

aesthetic appreciation of the sand.

All this junk is sucked up into a machine called a “sanitizer,” which is

essentially just an enormous mechanical filter. From there, assuming

nothing crucial has been swept up with the garbage, the load gets taken

to the dump.

But crucial objects, just like people, tend to get lost at the beach.

O’Brien has pulled a Rolex watch out of the sanitizer (he returned it),

countless sets of car keys and more than a few wedding and engagement

rings that belonged to women who had given up on their men.

It’s a lot more dramatic than staring at a jackhammer.

“Stuff goes on,” O’Brien said, “that you can’t hardly talk about.”