George Morrow of Cheboygan, at the tip of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, wrote a message to the world in 1926: “Will the person who finds this bottle return this paper…” He put the message in a green bottle like so many people in human history. Some have dropped urgent messages like Are Wiking, a Swedish seaman in the 1950s desperate for love. A man in Italy found the bottle and gave it to his niece, Paulina, who ultimately married Wiking. Some are confessionals. Others are memorials — ashes from a life that attached some significance to the great expanse of water. The New Yorker magazine has used the message-in-a-bottle motif a platform for hundreds a cartoons.
What is it about casting a message in a bottle in which the likelihood of anyone reading it within your lifetime is next to nil? It’s like the fantasy of radio operators in the early days of telecommunications: Is there anyone out there? (Why would we ever think they would understand our language?) Did George Morrow really think he would live to see the day when someone answers his letter? By the way, there was a footnote to his message: “tell where it was found.” He knew his message was sent on an unknown journey, presumably to faraway places. As it turned out, it didn’t go far, and in fact went down in the Cheboygan River, close to where he dropped it.
If you’re interested, there is a site dedicated to documenting some of the more interesting messages that are found: Message in a Bottle Hunter.
For nearly a year, I’ve been posting impressions of the Third Coast and dropping them into cyber space, thinking that maybe someone will pick up on them. Admittedly, I’m sometimes curious how far the blog will travel in space before someone reads it — and like George Morrow, I guess I’d be curious where it was discovered…
Post by Dennis Archambault
Photo by Nautical North Family Adventures, Cheboygan, Michigan
