Bottles Without Borders

3797…
Every time my father and I would walk down the sand to the water’s edge, just when our toes got their first lick, he would point down to our feet and say 
   “This . . . Robbie, this as far as you can go before you’re heading somewhere else. This, my
   boy . . . is a destination!” 
And then he’d ask me if I could see the land on the other side. Of course, I couldn’t. It’s Long Beach Island. It’s the Atlantic Ocean. And I’d tell him. 
   “Oh, you’re just not trying hard enough, Robbie! Get up . . . Up on your tip toes . . . Squint! You’ll
   see it! There! There! Far away . . . In the distance . . . Far, far away!”
I was just a kid. Romantic metaphors were over my head. I thought the reason he could see that land in the distance so clearly was simply because he was taller than me.
To this day, whenever I walk down the sand to the water’s edge, just when my toes get their first lick, I still get up, up on my tip toes and squint, and try, hard . . . harder, with all my might — That kid inside me wondering if today is the day I grew as tall as my father. If today is the day I’ll see what my father saw on the other side. 
A flash in the water. But not the water. Something in the water, dancing on the water, riding the waves, heading for the shore . . . And me . . . Taking all the light the sun had to offer and serving it up like diamonds in a kaleidoscope — Thousands of tiny supernovas. I couldn’t wait for it. I rushed into the surf and swam out to the dazzling thing.

A plastic water bottle. Just a plain, ordinary, plastic water bottle. How could such a lowly piece of trash mesmerize me so? But of course, it wasn’t the bottle. It was what was inside — All the sun those crinkles and blisters could glean from all the great big sky. All the ocean between New Jersey and the land on the other side of all that water. All the romance my father had left me in his will. And . . . What’s this? Romance indeed. Could it be? Nahhh . . . A message in a bottle is all about the bottle, right? An exquisite, hand blown vessel. A bottle any ship’s captain would be proud to sail into. And a cork — A real cork. Not some cheap, white, threaded plastic afterthought. A distinguished, sober label, a declaration of the contents within — A certain swagger, and a hint of class. I mean you could stuff the meaning of life into an Aquafina bottle but who’d ever bother to reach down to pick the thing up? 

                  Me. I guess.

As I waded back to the shore I unscrewed the cap, turned the bottle upside down and and shook it, stuck my pinky finger up the neck and wriggled it around until I caught just enough of its edge to drag it out. It was a tiny scroll, no longer than a dollar bill and maybe half as wide. And sure enough, a message. 

                 ’Water has no lines’

Short. Sweet. Cryptic to be sure, but to the point . . . Whatever that point was. I looked out to the horizon wondering who might have written it, and where they might have been when they tossed it into the water, and . . . Why. 
I could only shrug and shake my head as I walked up the beach toward the road and my car. A trashcan. I fully intended to toss the cheap plastic bottle and its inscrutable message — But mid wind up . . . Something was holding my arm back. I just couldn’t. I felt like I was breaking the law or something. Someone wrote this. Someone sent this. I accepted it. Opened it. Read it. But what if I wasn’t the one it was intended for? What if I didn’t accept it but intercept it? That’s like . . . Tampering with the mail. That’s like a . . . felony, right? I rolled the little scroll back up, stuffed it back inside its vessel, marched back down to the water and flung the thing right back into the churning waves. 
And that would’ve been the end of it. Return to sender. But it wasn’t. All the way home I just couldn’t shake the beach, and that crinkly bottle, and it’s mysterious message out of my head — Like sand in your hair, down to the scalp, and even deeper. I tossed and turned all night in my bed, my mind spinning. What if I was the one it was intended for? But if I was, why send me a riddle. To keep me up all night? To make me squirm? To play some sick, sadistic game?
Some kind of nautical chain letter? Nahhh. That’s crazy. I mean, there’d be instructions, right? You can’t build a pyramid without a blue print. Send a dollar — Or a prayer — to the name on the top of the list and add your name at the bottom. Send a dozen letters to other people telling them to do the same, and then sit back while your name steadily creeps up and up . . . Until it’s your turn? My grandmother used to tell me it’s bad luck to break the chain. Was it? Is it? She thought so anyway. And I remember hauling all those “links” to the corner mailbox every Saturday. It’s remarkable really, this obsession of ours, this futile attempt to load the dice in the cosmic floating crap game.
Call it a riddle. Call it superstition. Call it a Ponzi Scheme. Call it . . . Faith?

I don’t go in for any of that stuff but that night found me digging through my trash cans and recycling bin and scavenging every empty plastic water bottle in the house. And then, like a kid being punished by his teacher, writing the same line over and over in a marble copy book, and then cutting them into strips, rolling them up and then stuffing them into their clear, crinkly, watertight ‘envelopes’.
I knew what I was doing was crazy — And you can’t just drive to the beach and start tossing your trash into the ocean — But it was early, and I was all alone with the sand and the water. No witnesses, save the waning moon — He wasn’t going to rat me out — And the yawning sun, who had yet to gulp down her morning cup of fusion to jump start her busy day of showing all the other stars just how it’s done.
Most of the bottles just kind of rolled back towards the shore like little barrels on the tops of the waves. But there were a few that showed some real potential, defying their counterparts and the tide and inching their ways over the breakers and the foam and setting a course due east, pulled by the sheer vastness between where they were and where they were being taken.

I’d forgotten all about it — Well . . . Tried. I felt . . . I don’t know . . . Silly, throwing my precious rationality out the window — Into the brine. I don’t know what came over me. But something did. Maybe it was Nana and all those “links”. Maybe it was the sight of that single water bottle glistening in the sun, not carrying water but riding it, dancing across the waves in my direction. Someone was trying to tell me something, someone from far, far away was trying to get my attention. Trying to lure me into the surf, grab that bottle, twist its cap and free its greeting. And then, one morning, on my treadmill, with my coffee and my everything bagel and my cream cheese and CNN . . .

‘What you’re looking at is not a mountain range newly sprung up on the California shoreline and up and down the west coast from Canada to Mexico and beyond. Mounds and mounds of plastic water bottles. And we’re getting reports from all around the globe. People on every continent have been noticing the build up on their shores for weeks now — Months. But over the last few days there seems to have been an explosion of the curious containers.
That in itself would be astonishing enough but each and every one of these bottles contains a message. That’s right, millions and millions of messages in millions and millions of bottles —In every language — English. Chinese. Spanish. Russian. Arabic — Braille. Morse Code. Binary Code. Every language in the world, and in each language the same message.

‘Water has no lines‘

The visuals were striking. And they were followed by much speculation surrounding the phenomenon. Talk of the great trash vortex in the Pacific — As big as Texas, they say — Tons and tons of discarded plastic bottles and bags, six pack rings and credit cards swirling around and around like the great red spot on Jupiter. But why just water bottles? Where was all the rest of the plastic crap we dump into our sorry seas? And that damnable, hermetically sealed sarcophagus I lost the tip of my pinky finger to while trying to free the Swiss Army knife I bought on line — If I only had a Swiss Army Knife to get to my Swiss Army Knife!
Everyone, the man on the street, politicians, talking heads on the tube, social media —Talk about viral! And everyone had a theory, each and every proposal as cryptic as the four simple words inscribed on the tiny scrolls inside their unassuming carriers, and shedding more light on the speculators than the spectacle.

‘Well, I think it’s just . . . Beautiful, really. People all around the world reaching out to one
another in such quaint and wonderful fashion. I mean . . . Puts the creepy internet in its place, don’t you think?’

‘”Water has no lines?” What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘“Water has no lines’! So eloquent! So inspiring! It really says it all, don’t you think? I know they’re just cheap,
plastic bottles and all but . . . After all . . . It’s what’s inside that really counts. Don’t you think?’

“You never heard of the Trojan Horse?“

“I don’t know what it means. I don’ think anyone does, really. Like when it rains frogs or when you see a turtle with two heads. I mean, there’s an explanation, there has to be, but not while it’s happening. While it’s happening, you just have to shake your head and . . . I don’t know . . . Just go with the wonder of it all. Drop it on the doorstep of the scientists and the philosophers to wrestle with. Or just leave God to his secrets. He’s a . . . Rascal aint he?

“Why are they sending us their trash?”

I hadn’t been back to the beach since launching my own contribution to the furor. Funny how something so cheap and banal can rise to the occasion. The light was painfully brilliant, and the more trashed the trash, the more crushed and abused, ravaged, the more blinding the fireworks — Ali Baba stumbling into the thieves’ dark den — And then suddenly blinded by booty — Flashes of gold and silver and diamonds ricocheting off the cold dark walls.

Far across the valley . . . Shadows mulling around . . .

‘Who are you?’

Syncopated drum beats. Stuttering smoke. And before we knew it, we’re talking to a guy playing golf on the moon. The world is big. We keep coming up with new ways to try to make it feel smaller, easier to connect to one another — Got it down to one click, one finger — But with every delusion, we find ourselves back on the shore, staring out to the horizon, where the water ends and the sky begins.

It wasn’t raining frogs. This wasn’t a two headed turtle or a trash vortex or a thousand year old
storm — And this aint Jupiter! Inscrutable to be sure but anyone witnessing this phenomenon would tell you that it seemed to trigger something inside them, something strange but also strangely familiar. Something long forgotten and almost forsaken, languishing in a landfill of suspicion and fear.
An awakening? Recycling of our better angels’ wings? What lifts us up when we need to be lifted. A simple bottle with a simple, if curious message riding the waves . . . Drifting with the current. Not the most direct or efficient delivery system. Fed-Ex it aint. No overnight delivery. No signature needed. No insurance. And yet it will always reach its intended destination and recipient — Any destination, any recipient is the intended destination, the intended recipient. The address is elegant, dazzling in its resplendent ignorance. There is no return address, just a simple bottle stuffed with romance and serendipity.

But it isn’t about the bottle, is it? Or the water. Or the sky — Or even the message? It’s something else. Something right before our eyes. It’s the spirit we share with the bottle, the very soul, that through all our empty diversions and woeful mirages keeps pulling us back, back to that one point, on the shore, staring out — Confronted by the horizon . . . Old school.
Anonymity. Pure and simple . . . Naive. Without disembodied brass knuckles. Where the class bully has to meet you in the schoolyard after the bell rings and look you in the eye before punching you in the nose.
Space. To measure and mark how little we know against how much we still have to know. To gaze into the vastness ahead and up, and up into the aether, where the stars live, where the cosmic dust restlessly rustles, awaiting its chance to become new stars — Where all the answers are. To seek guidance. Offer a prayer . . . Or a dollar.
Time. To look into the mirror. Straighten our collar. Lick our fingers and press down that stubborn cowlick. Offer our hand in good faith.

Call it resurrection.
Call it grace.
Call it . . . Hope .

I got up on my tippy toes and sqinted.

ob