If you’re looking for your shower curtain, it’s on the beach at Kawaikui.

It’s about 30 feet away from the front of somebody’s old air-conditioning unit, and just up from a section of netted fencing.

There are piles of storm debris on the shore, and who knows what’s out in the water. A week and a half after an intense thunderstorm sent down more than 5 inches of rain in a matter of hours over a concentrated section of East Honolulu, the beach along Kalanianaole, behind all those pretty two- and three-story houses, is covered with things that washed down in the flood. When water rushed through parts of Aina Haina, Niu Valley and Kuliouou on April 13, it picked up all sorts of things and laid them out on the beach. Bicycle parts. Car parts. Clothing. Shoes.

The debris field is as hyper-regionalized as the flooding was. In one small section of the beach, an avalanche of halved kukui nut shells is spread 2 inches deep along the sand, mixed with soggy little sticks and the shells of dozens of African snails.

Another part of the beach is covered with ripped soda and beer cans mixed in with decaying leaves. Some parts of the shore look unchanged, as if unaffected by the flood. The ocean here is never crystal clear or aqua blue. It’s always kind of murky. But now the soil that washed down from the hillsides has made the water a dull dishwater gray. Where the storm drains emptied out their torrents, there are large branches sticking out of the water, a dead forest reaching up from the sea.

Some of the smaller storm outlets are choked with debris and starting to smell. They never smell all that great anyway. Hard to tell if this is a new bad smell.

The homeless man who has lived for years on the sand under the hau trees is still there with his very private shelter made of wooden pallets, coconut fronds and what looks like scavenged rattan curtains and carpets. He has a bike parked near his shelter, a barbecue grill, two coolers. All week, people have been scavenging through the discarded flood-tainted refuse piled along Kalanianaole. One woman actually stopped her car, turned on her flashers and got out to treasure-hunt through the drawers of a waterlogged bureau.

There are still professional cleaning crews working on some of the larger houses, wielding pressure washers and Shop-Vacs, hacking away at shrubbery that was bruised and broken in the rushing water.

Much of what’s piled up on Kawaikui beach is organic in nature: leaves, twigs, branches. But tangled up in all of that is trash. Soda cans. Plastic spoons. Lots of shoyu packets (so once activists are done banning Styrofoam, maybe they can work on that). There’s a lot of work to be done on the sections of beach that can’t be seen from the road. Maybe some helpful group is looking for a project. (Wear gloves.)

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.