Hmm, one of my students found a message in the bottle from 1964 out wedged in rocks on Channel Islands National Park.

[ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org]

Hmm, one of my students found a message in the bottle from 1964 out wedged in rocks on Channel Islands National Park. Now with the appropriate authorities. If anyone knows Becki Walters, formerly of Canoga Park, daughter of Roy A. Walters (now probably 77 and living in Tucson, Arizona as Becky Higgenbottom), give me a DM. #mystery

[peace@mstdn.ca]

@ai6yr

Super Cool

[ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org]

@Peace They are absolutely thrilled. Would be great to contact the lady who threw it into the ocean and get the story.

[peace@mstdn.ca]

@ai6yr
Amazing

[anne@toot.cat]

When I was a little girl, I put a message in a bottle, including my name and phone number, (those were the days, eh?), and flung it overhand out into the broad lake outside our protected cove.

Months -- possibly a year or more -- after I'd forgotten all about it, a man called our house asking for me. My father was properly suspicious and protective, but he nevertheless gravely handed me the phone (and then hovered, listening in).

It was a young captain of a lake barge. A crew member had spotted the bottle bobbing along and they'd managed to pick it up. He called to tell me that he'd gotten my message and that my bottle was a "welcome sight at sea." I still remember how warm and full his voice was, how seen I felt even over the miles of copper phone line. The whole world felt magical in that moment.

Eventually of course I grew up, forgot about that bottle all over again, moved away, had a life. Some of it was magical; a lot of it was not. Marriages, divorce, births, deaths, both illnesses and extraordinary vitality. I tried my best to figure out who I was and what I was meant for on this earth but ultimately realized the questions were less important than how I handled the collateral damage that comes of asking the unanswerable.

Now, 40+ years later, I'm back living near the lake again. Did I fail or succeed? At what? And what have I got to compare it all to?

But then, wouldn't you know -- it turns out that one of my next door neighbors is very likely the son of that barge captain. And just like that, a little bit of the magic flows back into the world and I think, maybe. Maybe I can settle a little and stay here for a while.

#storytelling