I can't read the words "message in a bottle" without hearing the voice of Sting, who repeats the phrase in the 1979 hit of the same name by the Police. (If you know it, you're stuck with it for the rest of the day, too.) But that may be fitting. The song's chorus begins with the lyric "I'll send an SOS to the world" — that might be as good a description as any of what an actual message in a bottle aims to do.
The staff writer Lauren Collins opens her fascinating piece with the story of Jean-Paul Sundström, a French sailor who sent more than two thousand bottles into the ocean between 1995 and 2020.
A lot of the notes are just silly, and searching for them can be great fun. One of the world's most active hunters is a mild-mannered stay-at-home dad named Clint Buffington, who lives in the landlocked state of Utah. (Not exactly an adventurer.) To hear him talk about the thrill of the hunt, you can't help but feel a bit of that excitement too. "There was no going back," he says, of finding his first bottle. "I knew if I could do it once, I could do it again." Collins accompanies Buffington on a search in the Bahamas, and along the way she shares everything you need to know to sound like an expert about this new world. Here's a few bits: messages in bottles are called M.I.B.s by fans; an estimated six million M.I.B.s have been thrown into the ocean since the mid-twentieth century; and the trend can be traced back to a short story written by a young Edgar Allan Poe.
What started as a novelty has endured as something quite beautiful. As Collins writes, "The wish, sometimes granted, is that the path of the note is as certain as the tides that carry it; that, pulled into currents and beaten by the waves and tossed onto rocks and burned by the sun, the message ends up exactly where it ought to be."