I remember as a young teenage boy, living in Virginia Beach on an Army base, how the thought of a "message in a bottle" seemed to encapsulate the most romantic thoughts that were available to me at the time. How I wrote a simple message out, telling a little of myself, and how to reach me, and then placed it inside a carefully cleaned and dried wine bottle and headed to the beach. Now on Fort Story, there was a place where some old landing craft were beached, and at high tide, if you were standing on one, you'd be 40 or 50 feet out in the water. So I boarded her, and sat and waited for the tide to come in, daydreaming all the while about who might find it, and what reply I might get.
Once the water was up around the edges, I stood up and hurled the bottle as far out in the ocean as I could manage, took my seat, and watched the bottle drift off into the vast ocean with my dreams inside it as I waited for the low tide, to get off the craft and head home.
For months I waited for an answer, but, as I am sure the majority of bottle wishes wind up, no answer was ever to be received.
Communicating here on the Cage is alot like that. We find some reason to contact somebody, and then we wait to see if there is a response. Sometimes we are lucky, and we get a reply, and a short, brief, communicative exchange takes place before it usually vanishes off into the vast ocean, never to be seen or heard of again. Other times we simply never do get a reply, or even an indication that it was ever received. and sometimes, yet very rarely indeed, our bottle crosses the ocean and we get a reply much much later than expected.
I found a bottle awhile back, and became more and more excited every time a new bottle from her arrived, and I answered as much as possible, but.... for some reason it seemed the frequency of bottles landing and launching diminished over time, and I thought it might just be another lost cause. Then out of the blue, another bottle has arrived on my beach .. only tomorrow will tell what message there may be inside... I wonder what it will bring, so here I am, same as I was as a young teen, daydreaming the possibilities and headed to bed with a smile on my face, at least a bottle arrived .....
