Message in a bottle

In December, Merle Brandell was beach combing near his village of Nelson Lagoon, Alaska, when he found something unusual.

Floating amid a crowd of Japanese glass floats was a plastic soda bottle with a letter inside, yellowed and ripped at the seams.

The return address was North City Elementary School in Shoreline.

“Dear Finder,” the letter read. “My name is Emily Hwaung and I am in fourth grade at North City School. This letter is part of our science project to study oceans and learn about people in distant lands. Please send the date and location of the bottle with your address. I will send you my picture and tell you when and where the bottle was placed in the ocean. Your friend, Emily Hwaung.”

The letter had no date. Brandell, a 34-year-old born and raised in Alaska, set about finding where it came from. He sent a handwritten letter to the Shoreline School District, explaining how he found the bottle and just how remote Nelson Lagoon is.

“It’s on the southwest Alaska peninsula, Northwest of Cold Bay,” he wrote. “We do a lot of beach combing and find all kinds of good stuff on the Bering Sea beaches.”

When Craig Degginger, district public information officer, got the letter, he did some digging. He found the fourth-grade teacher whose students did the project, Carol Aguayo, now retired. He also found Emily’s parents, who still live in Shoreline.

Emily Hwaung is now 30 years old, an accountant who lives in Seattle. Her married name is Emily Shih.

When Degginger called her to tell her the news, she was amazed.

“When I got the call, I literally had goose bumps,” she said.

She was in fourth grade in the 1986-87 school year, but doesn’t recall doing the project.

The weekend after she got the call, she told all her friends about letter. They were as excited as she was.

“It’s just the fact that this thing you did so long ago and didn’t think too much about comes back in your life when you’re not expecting it,” she said. “It’s like every kids’ dream.”

Shih was eager to write Brandell back, but she wasn’t sure she would send a picture – maybe one of her with her husband.

The whole project has made her think about the difference between then and now.

“It was definitely a cool project,” Shih said. “I don’t think that would happen in this day and age.”

Aside from the idea of mailing a child’s picture to a stranger, there are the environmental issues, Shih said.

“I was reading something online about just how much pollution there is in the ocean and all these poor birds eat all this plastic and they die,” she said. “Of course my bottle was too big for a bird to eat, but I don’t think it’s something that should be done anymore.”

Shih remembers her fourth grade year as a good one. She and her family had just moved to Shoreline from Canada, but she made some friends and liked her teacher, she said.

She comes back to Shoreline to visit her parents, and is always surprised by how much development there is.

“A lot has changed,” she said.

While Shih’s bottle floated for 20 years, her life changed drastically, but the bottle also had a journey of its own.

“If it floated for 20 years, it would have looped several times around the gyres of the North Pacific Ocean,” said Curt Ebbesmeyer, a retired University of Washington oceanographer and an expert on flotsam – things that float in the ocean.

Ebbesmeyer has a newsletter, “The Beachcombers Alert” and a new book, “The Floating World” that comes out next year.

“Since floating bottles drift at an average speed of some seven miles per day, 20 years allows for a total drift of some 50,000 miles or twice around the earth at the equator,” he said. “This is a lot of drifting. You have a very well traveled bottle.”