Message in a Bottle
On Cape Cod, the month of April is a fickle beast. On this particular day, the weather was racing out of the north, a raw wind was blowing the rain nearly horizontal, and the sky and sea blended seamlessly along a steel-grey horizon.
So I suppose I wasn’t terribly surprised that no one showed up for my beach hike program, but I was a little disappointed. After all, it was the perfect day for a walk on the beach; my group would have had Mother Nature on hand to help form some great connections about the constantly changing character of our shoreline.
I decided to take advantage of the fine weather and struck out north along Nauset Light Beach. The beaches here are never the same place twice and I was sure I’d find something to make my soaked boots worth the while.
I soon came across a plastic water bottle partially buried in the sand, rockweed and finger sponge strewn about it. Trash collection being a reflexive habit with any park ranger, I kicked the bottle free, noticing that it seemed to have some sort of paper inside. As I knelt to pick up the crumpled bottle, I realized that along with a goodly amount of sand and pebbles, it did indeed contain a piece of green paper carefully wrapped in a zip-lock bag. My heart raced… I’d found a genuine message in a bottle!
And just in case I had any doubts, scrawled on the outside of the green construction paper in white crayon were the words “MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE.” The letter itself, neatly printed with red and blue crayon, was brief and to the point:
4-8-05
If you find this message contact me Tyler…Sent from Nauset Light Beach Cape Cod, MA.
I was thrilled; you’d think I’d found a gold doubloon from some ancient treasure wreck. (My colleagues back at the Visitor Center obliged me by acting like they were excited, too.) The fact that I’d found the bottle on the same beach from which it had been thrown into the waves only a few short days earlier mattered nothing to me. I was a girl who’d grown up in the Colorado mountains only to fall in love with the ocean, and messages in bottles were the stuff of Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island.
Thus began my continuing relationship with then-nine year-old Tyler. I did wait about a month before writing him back; I didn’t want to totally take the wind out of his sails by telling him his letter was found so soon after its voyage had begun. And I used the fact that the bottle had traveled a total distance of oh, say 20 yards, as an example of how the ocean works.
“Sometimes things will get caught up in currents,” I wrote, “and carried all over the world.” I told him how in school I’d learned about a ship’s container of Nike shoes that got dumped overboard and how those shoes ended up in countries all over the Pacific. But I also told him that sometimes the ocean puts things right back where it found them. “This is important, too,” I continued, “because this is how a lot of our sand gets put back onto the beach every summer after big winter waves eat the sand away.”
I may not have had any takers for my beach walk that wild April day in 2005, but lasting connections were made with a visitor nonetheless. A decade has passed since our initial correspondence, but Tyler and his parents have continued to stop in to say hello when they visit Cape Cod National Seashore. It means more than I can say that they do this. Several years back, they told me that Tyler had given the message in a bottle another try. That time he asked a surfer to carry his bottle out past the breaking waves before throwing it in. He’d probably given the surfer a lesson in coastal processes before he paddled out! These days Tyler’s taller than I am, and on their visits we’ll occasionally discuss the constantly changing coastline in the park. After all this time, Tyler has the long view now, too.
At its essence, interpretation is not really about information – it’s about inspiration. In a place as dynamic as Cape Cod, there are endless opportunities to connect both intellectually and emotionally. And like the Cape’s shifting sands, inspiration can go both ways. Whatever intellectual connections I may have precipitated for Tyler, he’s more than returned the favor, providing an emotional connection to my work that has stayed with me to this day.