‘Message in a Bottle” — I never read it, but I know it’s one of those page-turners dripping with romance.
In the Nicholas Sparks book, our heroine (a columnist for a fictional Boston newspaper) is vacationing on Cape Cod. She finds a tearjerker of a note in a bottle. It leads her to the mysterious Garret Blake, a man in deep grief for his lost wife.
In the romance, her bottle has a cork. The mystery man has a sailboat — of course he does — and in the inevitable movie version, is played by Kevin Costner.
Get real.
On April 4, no kidding, a couple of 24-year-old guys in the plumbing business were walking on a Tulalip area beach south of Kayak Point. They searched for rocks, not romance.
“We were looking for agates when we saw a pile of plastic,” said Paul Isaak, a 2003 graduate of Arlington High School. Isaak and fellow plumber Tyler Bryant rent a beach house in the area. Bryant’s brother was with them, visiting from Texas.
Among the flotsam, they found a bottle — nothing fancy, just a plastic bottle used for water or a sports drink. It was so common, Isaak wasn’t going to keep it.
Inside, though, rolled up like that fictional note, were pieces of weathered paper.
No need to skip ahead to some happily-ever-after ending. The joy in this story is simply that notes scrawled by kids in 1998, stuffed into a bottle that went goodness knows where, could possibly survive to find readers almost 11 years later.
Better yet, in this age of Facebook profiles, it wasn’t hard to find one of the writers. The letters aren’t completely readable, but you can make out names: Kayla Eland and Kate Ratliffe.
On July 7, 1998, Kayla wrote: “Dear Finder, Hi! My name is Kayla Eland. I’m 9 years old. … I have a 7 year old brother and a dog named Hank.” She included her family’s Seattle address, and said she liked soccer, snowboarding and favorite singer “Natly Inbrulia” (Natalie Imbruglia, no doubt).
Kayla’s note was better preserved than the one wrapped around it. That one was written by Kate, who turns out to be Kayla’s older cousin.
They’re grown now, ages 19 and 21. Both are in college: Eland in California and Ratliffe in Colorado. Those guys weren’t making it all up like a Hollywood script. Eland clearly remembers putting notes in bottles when the cousins would stay with her grandparents on Whidbey Island.
“Wow! That is amazing,” 19-year-old Kayla Eland wrote in a recent message to my Facebook in-box after I found her on the social networking Web site. I had sent her a note about the bottle.
A 2008 graduate of The Bush School in Seattle, Eland is a freshman at Pitzer College, one of the Claremont Colleges east of Los Angeles. Her cousin, she said, is a student at the University of Colorado in Boulder, but this term is in Prague, in the Czech Republic.
Eland said she e-mailed her cousin that their note had been found. “She was shocked,” she said.
Raised in Seattle, Eland said she still visits Whidbey. “We have a family home up there. Our whole family, cousins and grandparents, are up there for the summer. It’s right on the water, near Langley,” she said.
“I guess my cousin wrote it, she was older,” said Eland, recalling that the girls sent several messages adrift. They’ve never before had a response. She didn’t remember specifics of bottle launching. “I’m sure we made it as dramatic as possible,” she said.
Google searches show Eland has been a cross-country runner in high school and college. She’s in a pre-med program, while her cousin is studying journalism.
Eland isn’t eager for any contact with the bottle finders, and that seems sensible. This isn’t fiction, remember. And she knows better now than to do what they did in their note — send a home address out to strangers while away on vacation.
Isaak and Bryant didn’t expect to contact the young women. They just wanted to tell their tale. “It’s sort of funny, kids are always throwing messages in bottles,” Bryant said.
In her girlish note, Kayla offered this physical description: “I have olive skin and dark brown hair and eyes. I have red, white and blue braces.”
“Not much has changed,” Eland said the other day. “I don’t have red, white and blue braces, but everything else is pretty much the same.”
Not everything is the same. Scientists could ponder what that bottle says about currents or tides. This journalist is intrigued by what it says about communication. It took 10 years for a bottled note to be read, but just 10 seconds online to find its writer today.
New media beats old? Nah, but it is faster.
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460, muhlstein@heraldnet.com.
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