I really did!
Actually, it's happened several times.
In a previous chapter of my ongoing Memories series (they’re all listed at the bottom here), I wrote about witnessing the moving reunion in death of a man who had been separated as a little boy from his father decades before on the deck of the dying Titanic.
At the end of that post, I mentioned that after the man’s ashes were scattered over the frigid North Atlantic out the back of a Coast Guard patrol plane, I tossed out a plastic Diet Pepsi bottle carrying two of my business cards. I promised to explain that strange behavior.
This is that explanation.
When I was a little boy of maybe eight or nine, my family took the car ferry from Massachusetts out to Nantucket Island. I was in awe. I had been on boats before, but never out of sight of land.
Big things have always impressed me. Big mountains. Big forests. Big rockets. But I had never seen anything as big as the Atlantic Ocean up close. It was large, wild, and more than a little ominous.
“I have an idea,” my father said. Dad’s ideas were always amazing and seemingly spontaneous, which I realized much later they weren’t. They usually involved an element of mystery.
Together, we sat down at a table. We wrote out two notes with our names, addresses, and the date.
Then, we went to the ship’s bar, where Dad got an empty glass liquor bottle with its cork. He had me slip the notes into the bottle. He stuffed the cork back in, all snug and tight.
What in my little boy’s world was going on?
We went to the ferry’s stern, where you could feel the engines’ power through your feet. Still no land in sight. Just dark water and whitecaps.
Dad told me to throw the bottle overboard as far as I could. I did. And we both watched the bottle bob in the wake until it was so small and out of sight all by itself in that vast, watery world.
“Where is the bottle going?” I asked in wonder.
“No one knows,” he said.
The idea of launching something without knowing its destination intrigued me greatly. It still does. A kind of open-ended dream with the possibility of never ending.
Thus began a lifelong hobby — I won’t say obsession — which continues to this day with some surprising results. The Titanic bottle was only one repetition.
Back home after that ferry ride, my father would tuck me into bed most nights. There were books he read to me, of course. A chapter per night. “Wind in the Willows” was one.
As Dad walked toward my bedroom door, he'd reach for the light switch. Then, he’d turn around and say, “I wonder where our bottle is tonight.”
And I would fall asleep those nights imagining all the amazing places it could be drifting. There was no end imagining.
Still today.
My father taught me many things over the years. About guns. About smoking. About thinking and remembering.
One evening Dad suggested we make a map of the stars from our rural Ohio backyard. Space fascinated me, ever since he took me to experience the magic of Saturn. I think it's the humbling enormity of the ocean and Space that intrigue. That I look up at the stars at night and know that those minute beams of light have been traveling to my eyes since dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
Dad and I took a card table out into the damp grass, where fireflies drifted slowly. On a large piece of paper, I began earnestly marking the star locations, oblivious to any impending revelation.
Sometime later, I noticed that all the stars were moving. “No,” Dad said, “we are.”
Before kindergarten and before television, he taught the alphabet by helping me cut out each letter, one or two an evening. Then sanding it smooth and painting each one any color, except the vowels had to be red. And I played with them on the carpet.
Here I am, three-quarters of a century later, still picking out one letter at a time, smoothing them, and coloring them into words and sentences that tell stories.
Now, about that Titanic bottle. It was one of many I sent on its way to somewhere with my name and address.
First, from my parka pocket, it flew out the back of a patrol plane 400 miles off Newfoundland, into the violent slipstream. Then it tumbled down and down through some wispy clouds 1,000 feet into the frigid waters that still imprison the Titanic.
And then I went on with my life.
Eighteen months later, on an island beach just off Bordeaux, France, a family was having an autumn picnic. A little schoolgirl saw what looked like a bottle sticking out of the sand. It was covered with sea growths.
Her father told the little girl to leave the dirty thing alone. But she didn’t. And when she shook it, something rattled inside.
My business cards prompted the girl to write me a letter and practice her English. She wondered where the bottle came from. (Trade secret: My notes never reveal the launch point, counting on curiosity to compel a reply.)
I, in turn, practiced my French by writing her back. We became pen pals for more than a year.
The beach discovery became her class project containing the bottle, with a map of the Atlantic showing the Titanic site and the bottle’s eastward journey of more than 3,000 miles on the Gulf Stream across the ocean, around the top of Scotland into the North Sea and down past Germany and Belgium, through the English Channel to the French coast.
No one knows the perils it survived, the adventures it had, where it may have rested a while before being swept back into deep waters, and why it ended, half-buried, on a French beach waiting for a curious school child on a family outing to come upon it and disobey her father.
French newspapers and TV heard of the girl's school project and did feature stories about the pen pals. That little girl probably has her own little girls by now.
I did not keep records on all the bottles nor all the ones returned. The real point, it seemed, was the never-ending journeys in my mind.
Over nine months, one of them went from the mid-Atlantic north into the net of an Icelandic fisherman.
A sail-boater off Connecticut found one launched into the surf of Martha’s Vineyard. He wrote me a letter and relaunched the bottle on a second journey that could still be underway 40 years later.
One bottle drifted from Vancouver Island down into the islands off northern Washington, where a little boy found it. Fishermen found two that drifted up the Japanese coast from our vacation beach. Another survived a violent waterfall but went just nine miles down a Montana river.
I have told the story of messages in bottles before. It’s one of those magical experiences that still ignite my imagination, as Dad intended so many distant days and nights ago.
Since that day on the ferry with Dad, with and without my own children, I have written out notes, slipped them into bottles, and launched probably a couple hundred into very large waters for journeys to I-know-not-where.
Dad’s gone now. But his imagination lives on. I imagine – no, I know — some of the bottles still bob along silently in big waters somewhere, waiting to be found someday by someone who never expected such a surprise. I’ll never know about them.
But in a way, I do.
This is the 16th in an occasional series of personal Memories. The others are below. I hope they trigger your own memories to share in the Comments.
As the RMS Titanic Sank, a Father Told His Little Boy, 'See You Later.' But Then...
Things My Father Said: 'Here It's Not Loaded'
The Terrifyingly Wonderful Day I Drove an Indy Car
When I Went on Henry Kissinger's Honeymoon
When Grandma Arrived for That Holiday Visit
Practicing Journalism the Old-Fashioned Way
When Hal Holbrook Took a Day to Tutor a Teen on Art
The Night I Met Saturn That Changed My Life
High School Was Hard for Me, Until That One Evening
When Dad Died, He left a Haunting Message That Reemerged Just Now
My Father's Sly Trick About Smoking That Saved My Life
His Name Was Edgar. Not Ed. Not Eddie. But Edgar.
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