What did you do for Thanksgiving? Penticton's Cory West spent 14 hours at windy Okanagan Lake Beach painstakingly collecting and removing thousands of tiny Styrofoam/polystyrene pellets from the sand.
At times, other concerned folks joined him. Locals who learned about the mission through social media, like Kristi Wonneberger and Steven Zakall on Saturday and Zakall's mom Erika Elles Sunday.
But mostly it was West, a ton of sand, a ton of wind and a ton of those pellets – a terrible threat for the animals that might eat them.
"I've always picked up garbage wherever I see it," said West, who performed the cleanup on a purely volunteer basis.
"But we were having a fire the other night (at the beach fire pit near the intersection of Power Street and Lakeshore Drive), and my friend Shaonie started picking up these bits of Styrofoam. And I started thinking I should post it online and try to get more people down here.
"We were all worried about the ducks and the birds eating them and them going into the lake and the fish eating them. I'm guessing someone brought a bean bag chair to the beach and it burst open."
West's social media invites didn't attract many. But the few that did come Saturday had the help of a leaf blower.
Sunday the setup was a bit more primitive. West and Elles used whatever they could get their hands on to move the sand aside and reveal the pellets underneath, a slab of cardboard as a fan to blow the pellets into the same general area and a dollar-store strainer for final separation.
We suggested West could have been having a great day somewhere else celebrating Thanksgiving rather than tediously cleaning the beach, but he answered, "This is a great day."
Such sentiments seem typical for West, a relentlessly upbeat guy who posts photos of sunrises on his social media accounts and sincerely believes in the power of a positive outlook.
But his optimistic nature has never been as harshly tested as it was in 2023.
When the year began, the 36-year-old was happily employed at Penticton adventuring company Hoodoo Adventures. But soon something was wrong. He was feeling…odd.
He was losing his balance. He had trouble swallowing. His penmanship was on the decline. And most importantly, he was becoming cross-eyed.
Incapable of working, he left Hoodoo in April.
He went to an optometrist who told him he wasn't a candidate for surgery, which, he says, meant his vision issues weren’t in his eyes but in his brain.
By September, the symptoms had become so concerning that West made an appointment with his doctor, who in turn ordered an immediate MRI.
"I got urgently called into Penticton Hospital on the 19th," he said Sunday on the beach, "and was told I had a four-centimeter brain tumor on the stem of my spine, which pushed on my nerves for balance and coordination, vision and hearing.
"I was flown to VGH on the 20th, and underwent a 12-hour surgery that the neurosurgeon said was a nine out of ten in complexity."
But the surgery worked. West's leg spasms disappeared almost instantly. Within a couple weeks, his balance and coordination had completely recovered.
He was able to walk again by the 30th, just 11 days ago, but will wear an eye patch for a few more weeks to keep from feeling dizzy.
Sunday at the beach, he told PentictonNow he felt "great."
Unfortunately but not unexpectedly, his recent months have taken a financial toll. West says he was essentially homeless when he left hospital, but was able to "find a room at a family friend's house" for the month of October.
At the moment he brings in $500 a month "from disability" and is looking for affordable accommodation for the winter.
As for the Styrofoam/polystyrene clean-up, West returned to the beach Monday and will head down there again when the sand dries out from the rains of the past couple days.
Potentially helping him will be his Sunday cohort, Erika Elles.
"I'd like to help Cory again," she said. "There are all kinds of animals down here and it's terrible for them to eat Styrofoam beads. And I've picked up plastic bags and cigarette butts too. People just leave things and they have no regard for the environment."
We asked West if his beach clean-up thing might become a regular deal in the future, presumably once he's gotten his life back together. He smiled, as he does a lot, and said he'd already thought about it.
"Someone mentioned they used to have a cleaning group online," he said, "and we were thinking about starting that back up."
As for future employment, West hopes he'll be capable again before the year is out. Where he'll work is yet to be determined, though when contacted, Hoodoo Adventures CEO Lyndie Hill said, "We'd always welcome Cory back."
In the meantime, anyone wishing to join West in his beach cleanup or reach out to him may do so here.
"If you see something that needs to be done in the world," he said as we left him Sunday, "don’t wait for someone else to do it. Do it yourself. Be the change you want to see in the world."
