Hidden glass floats spark hunt on Block Island

CLEAR AS DAY: Auggie Lambert shows off one of the glass floats made by Eben Horton. / COURTESY JENNIFER SEEBECK LAMBERT
CLEAR AS DAY: Auggie Lambert shows off one of the glass floats made by Eben Horton. / COURTESY JENNIFER SEEBECK LAMBERT

Tourists come to Block Island for its beaches, the scenery, the charming center of New Shoreham and a relaxing vacation. For the past few years, people have started to include a “glass float treasure hunt” on the itinerary.

The glass-float project promotes the island and the arts through word-of-mouth. Each year, island volunteers hide several hundred handblown glass spheres on the island. Anyone who finds one can keep them. Each is stamped with the contour of the island, the year of its release and a code to register the “find” with the Block Island Tourism Council.

The project, now entering its fourth year, is starting to build momentum. Tourism officials say they are getting feedback that people are sharing news of their finds with friends, and making the activity a part of their trip. More than 600 people have registered their floats on the tourism council’s website, with brief descriptions explaining where they found it.

The glasswork has been found overhead in trees, tucked into shrubs on the island’s Greenway trails, on the stairs leading down Mohegan Bluffs and hidden among rocks on the beaches. The people who register their floats identify the area of the island where they found it, and sometimes the exact location: “Rodman’s Hollow turnip farm in a broken tree stump,” wrote D. Sommo, registering No. 56 in 2013.

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The challenge of finding a float has become a mission for many people, said Jessica Willi, executive director of the Block Island Tourism Council. “There’s not that many of them,” she said. “They’re hard to find. From where some of them are hidden, they won’t be found for years.”

The glass orbs – between the size of an orange and a grapefruit – are the work of Eben Horton, a glass artist and owner of The Glass Station in South Kingstown. They are inspired by the glass floats used to hold up nets for Japanese fishermen, he said. The breakaway floats are found each year along the Pacific coast, Horton said.

He offered to create the work and approached the tourism council several years ago about getting the project started.

It takes Horton several weeks to make the glass pieces. He estimated he can make about 30 to 40 a day. For Horton, the project is a way to do something rewarding for visitors, and keep himself busy during slow periods in his shop. “My furnace has to stay on,” he said. “It keeps me busy.”

Horton blows each bubble, which becomes the float, then tops it with another piece of molten glass after he detaches it from the pipe. That blob of molten glass gets stamped with the Block Island form, something he created using a graphite rod, before it cools.

Most of the floats Horton creates are made of clear glass, but each year he includes a small number of colored glass floats as well, the same number as the year. (So, 15 colored floats will be distributed this year.) Beginning in late May, Horton expects to begin delivering some 550 glass floats to the island.

One will be made of gold leaf.

The objects will be hidden by five volunteers, who discreetly handle that task throughout the year, Willi said.

Willi knew the project had taken off when Horton, who lives off-island, became the subject of social media chatter whenever he was seen on-island or on the ferry. The volunteers who hide the glasswork are unidentified, she said, so they won’t be followed.

Islanders as well as visitors have taken part in searching for the art, Willi said. Children enjoy the hunt, but so do adults. The floats are never placed in environmentally sensitive areas, such as the dunes or in the bluffs. But they aren’t in highly visible places either. Willi’s advice: look up and look down.

“It’s just another reason to come to Block Island,” she said.

The glass floats are now well-known around the island, Willi said.

“People on the island go out and hunt for them,” she said. “When you’re on the ferry, if you go into the stores, people talk about it all the time.”

That, of course, is the idea behind tourism promotion: Getting people to talk about a place.

Horton pitched the original idea, based on a similar, “finders-keepers” scavenger hunt in coastal Oregon in 2000, in which several glass artists contributed a variety of colored glass floats.

Horton was willing to create the glasswork for Block Island, but needed help with logistics, Willi said.

“We jumped right in,” she said. In its initial year, the project was grant funded by a statewide arts council. The tourism council also contributed $1,500, and built a website to support the project.

Horton said he gets emails and photos from people when they’ve found one of his floats.

Willi said women are organizing “girlfriend getaways” on the island and making “glass float hunting” part of their plan.

When people take a glass float home, stamped with the image of the island, it becomes a conversation piece.

“It’s grassroots,” she said. “It’s definitely getting people out on the beaches and the trails.” •

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