"Woke up this morning, cant believe what I saw. A hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore.
It seems like Im not alone being alone. Hundred billion cast aways, looking for a home".
- Sting
- Sting
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As the waves pounded the bow of the military boat, Private Thomas Hughes wrote one final note. The ink flowed across its surface, blue, like the English Channel they now crossed enroute to war.
"Dear Wife, I am writing this note on this boat and dropping it into the sea just to see if it will reach you.
"If it does, sign this envelope on the right hand bottom corner where it says receipt. Put the date and hour of receipt and your name where it says signature and look after it well.
"Ta ta sweet, for the present. Your Hubby."
2 days later, Private Thomas died.
Oddly, the 26 year old Thomas had chosen to give his final communiqué to a most unreliable messenger, the sea. But when he slipped that letter into the narrow opening in 1914, he impregnated that bottle with words that would eventually give birth.
As Private Hughes was buried, his words floated on ocean waves undying. As the first World War ended, the bottle rolled and pitched in parts unknown. While Nazi U-boats plied the north Atlantic, all the while the bottle watched. When atomic bombs exploded over Japan, the bottle listened. As blood ran on the Korean peninsula, the bottle wept. When the Hoola Hoop took its first spin, the bottle bubbled and laughed on frothy sea. And in the glare of rocket flare, as men first danced on the moon, the bottle looked up from the cold and lonely black and marveled.
For 85 years the bottle journeyed. Burned by sunshine, bathed in moonshine, pelted with hail, and tossed in gales. Surviving sharks and sharp rocks, ships bows and undertows. Finally, as the world waited in fearful anticipation of a new millennium, the bottle decided to migrate back home. It was time to conceive.
From the Thames, England’s long birth canal, the message was finally delivered. The covering note simply instructed:
"Sir or madam, youth or maid, Would you kindly forward the enclosed letter and earn the blessing of a poor British soldier on his way to the front this ninth day of September, 1914. Signed Private T. Hughes, Second Durham Light Infantry. Third Army Corp Expeditionary Force."
Mr Gowan, 43, a cod fisherman on the Essex coast took his marching orders seriously. The green ginger beer bottle with a screw-on rubber stopper he found that march morning in 1999 must be delivered.
The intended recipient however was no longer home; or alive. As years passed, widow Elizabeth emigrated to New Zealand, an ocean of time and water away. In 1979 Elizabeth died, never knowing the bottle was out there, swimming, struggling, searching, trying to find her.
But just as seeds can be placed in bottles, so too in people. Elizabeth’s daughter, born only a year before the bottle, was there to receive it in Auckland from the hands of the Englishman who pulled it from the sea.
"I am just so pleased to have been able to deliver it and to have been the postman." said Steve Gowen who had been flown overseas to place it in her hands.
"It touches me very deeply to know that his passage reached a goal.” the now 86 year old child commented. “I think he would be very proud it had been delivered. He was a very caring man,"
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( While crossing the English Channel, James and I threw our own bottles in. Mine reads:)
On September 16th, 2013, 3 friends set out on a 2 week adventure from Haslemere, England through to the Alps.
May the turbulent tide of unborn days bring us providence, quiet and good fortune in the dark forest of uncertain future through which we now wander.
