Tide Tidings

 

I hope that someone gets my

I hope that someone gets my

Message in a bottle, yeah.

~ The Police

 

When I was 7 years old, I got a little obsessed with bottled messages. Oh, how I longed to cast one of them out to sea!

At the time I lived about 140 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. However, this minor detail was not going to stop me – I happened to have a creek running through my backyard. And I was pretty sure that that little stream spilled into the North Branch of the Susquehanna River a few miles away, which in turn, spilled itself into Chesapeake Bay and Bingo – The Great Atlantic Ocean!

So I found an empty aspirin bottle and wrote a note. My printing was kind of big at the time, and I was still using that nifty three-lined (dashed one in the middle) paper, so there wasn’t much I could fit on the page. Thus, even though there was SO much I wanted to say – volumes really – I settled for the decidedly unromantic: IF FOUND, RETURN TO… and neatly printed out my name and address. Then I folded it up, crammed it into the aspirin bottle, and glued on the cap.

After assuring myself that the act didn’t really qualify as littering, I tossed it into the creek and watched it pitch and bob its way to The Great Atlantic Ocean!

I thought about that bottle every day.

I imagined it making its way over falls and under bridges.

I imagined it bumped by river bass and a snapping turtle or two.

I imagined it breaking free of the bay and riding the waves in the wide open sea…

I imagined for a long time.

And then…

I stopped.

In fact, I forgot all about that little aspirin bottle with the penciled note.

Until…

About a year later, when a neighbor pulled up in his pickup, got out, and handed me a note – my note.

He smiled.

I shrugged.

My message had made it less than a mile.

But dang, those months of dreaming were fun!

And a couple of weeks ago when the world’s oldest message in a bottle was found off the coast of Scotland, I just had to smile.

First off, there was nothing particularly romantic about that note either – it was simply a Department of Fisheries ocean current study done way back in 1914.

And second, it was a Scottish study found just off the coast of Scotland.

Okay, maybe it made it more than a mile, but still…

I think I’m in good company.


PROMPT: Nothing adds more mystery, intrigue, and fascination to a tale than a message in a bottle. Cast one into your story today just to see where it goes!