Signed, Sealed, Delivered
Reiko Hiroyama lives on Ishigaki, a subtropical island in Japan. One morning, she went out to comb the beach near her house. Beachcombing conjures up a leisurely world of sand dollars and Daiquiris, but Hiroyama’s practice was actually about bringing in the trash. Over the years, she’d retrieved flip-flops, jerricans, hairbrushes, toothbrushes, fishing nets, and a seemingly endless array of bottles—jugs, flasks, milk bottles, beer bottles, water bottles, detergent bottles, baby bottles, motor-oil bottles. Yet that day a turquoise glass bottle caught her eye. Its neck was sticking out of the sand. There was a scroll-like object inside. “The sunlight shining on it gave it a strong presence,” Hiroyama recalled. “It seemed to say, ‘I’m here!’ ”
The cap was so thoroughly rusted that she couldn’t twist it off, so she decided to break the bottle open on a rock. “My heart was pounding,” she said. She extracted the scroll: a sheet of white paper covered in cursive handwriting. Hiroyama’s spirits sank when she realized that the letter was written in French. She put it in a desk drawer, hoping that, one day, someone would come along who could read it. Hiroyama told me recently, “I felt a deep affection for the bottle that had drifted all the way to this island from a distant land.”
One day, she showed the letter to a German woman who had recently moved to Ishigaki. The woman noticed that the letter contained a man’s name, Jean-Paul Sundström, and an address on Île de Ré, an island off the west coast of France. A couple the woman knew had vacationed there a few years earlier, and she got in touch with the owner of their Airbnb, who volunteered to find Sundström. No one answered at the address, but a neighbor suggested leaving a note at a nearby hair salon. Contacted by his hairdresser, Sundström called the Airbnb owner, who called the tourists, who called the German woman living on Ishigaki, who walked over to Hiroyama’s place.
“The circle was complete,” Ré à la Hune, a newspaper based on Île de Ré, reported. “We can only be amazed and say that many things that we do not think are possible are indeed possible.” The article featured a photograph of a smiling Hiroyama, standing in front of a banana tree. She was holding Sundström’s letter, dated May 8, 2009:
Six and a half thousand miles away, in rural Utah, two nearly identical letters, dated 2011 and 2012, hang in frames on a wall of Clint Buffington’s home office. The first was sent on a voyage from Venezuela to Gibraltar; the second, between Rotterdam and Montreal. It turns out that Sundström was something of a maritime spammer. Between 1995, when he began working as a cabin boy, and 2020, when he retired as a master pumpman, he sent more than two thousand bottles into the ocean. He always included some money or cigarettes, and, per maritime tradition, he chucked one into the water for good luck each time he passed through a strait. Buffington told me that both Sundström bottles were “in excellent condition” and “sealed with some kind of rock-hard caulk or glue-like substance.” He found them in 2015, somewhere “in the southern region of the Lucayan Archipelago,” which encompasses the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos—he won’t say more.
Buffington is one of the world’s most prolific hunters of messages in bottles. Since 2007, when he found his first M.I.B., as they’re known, he has recovered nearly a hundred and fifty specimens, ranging from love letters to promotional stunts, science projects, pleas for help, and drunken ramblings. “I have been taken prisoner by a grumpy old man,” read one letter, written by a son who apparently wasn’t having a great time vacationing with his father. Another author confessed, “As we have no more wine on board for the apéritif, we try to pass the time as we can.” (This writer, too, was French.) A man named Frank immortalized his holiday with a woman named Brenda on a sheet of paper from a Princess Cruises notepad: “It’s been interesting, it’s the end of a 8 year relationship. We are both putting messages in a bottle. . . . Brenda, hope you find what you are looking for. Love, Frank.”
Buffington’s home office recalls a museum exhibition on Mesopotamian material culture crossed with a frat house the morning after a blowout party. There are empty bottles everywhere—crammed onto shelves, catching the light on a windowsill. A bar cart overflows with bottles that Buffington has yet to open, or “solve,” as he likes to say. “I would describe this place as a chaotic nightmare,” Buffington told me cheerfully. He keeps the tools of his trade in a garage workshop that he calls the Lab: a spray bottle (for hydrating flaking paper), a U.V. black light (for reading faded lettering), Channellock pliers (for wrenching off aluminum caps), a rotary tool with a diamond drill bit (for slicing into recalcitrant ones), laparoscopic needle drivers (for removing messages without the risk of shattering or breakage). Buffington’s wife, a surgeon, suggested the last tool after watching him struggle with bamboo skewers and bits of tape. A lone aluminum can among the bottles contained the dregs of a Bell’s Two Hearted I.P.A.
Buffington’s exploits are particularly impressive given that he’s the default parent of two young kids and lives in a landlocked state. He is forty-one and has a master’s degree in English literature; for some years, he did technical writing for a nuclear-waste-removal company. As his LinkedIn profile notes, he is also a musician, playing “guitar, harmonica, and mandolin across genres.” Basically, he’s an earnest and chipper guy, given to recording himself yearningly singing Paul Simon’s “Slip Slidin’ Away,” and to crunching on apples while saying things like “Cool beans!” He is quick to make a friend, and maintains relationships with dozens of people whose bottles he’s retrieved. He once found a bottle with a note and an eight-year-old piece of wedding cake inside and traced it back to Ed and Carol Meyers, a Virginia couple who were celebrating their first anniversary. Buffington himself got married several years later and wrote on Instagram, “So, naturally, Ed & Carol came to our wedding & it felt like a blessing.”
“A lot of people think of messages in bottles as being sort of flippant or silly or whatever,” he told me. “My experience has shown me quite the opposite. I don’t know exactly what the impulse is, but it’s deep, it’s fundamental, and it’s foundational. I think it’s core to being human.”
The oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer has estimated that six million M.I.B.s have been tossed into the ocean since the mid-twentieth century. Hunting for them combines the suspense of metal detecting with the thrill of opening a present. Even if you’re lucky enough to find something, the question remains: Will it be any good? Or will you tear open the long-awaited parcel only to discover that it’s filled with pornography or cigarette butts? A pen pal writes to someone. The sender of a message in a bottle writes to anyone. The wish, sometimes granted, is that the trajectory of the note is as ineluctable as the tides that carry it; that, sucked into currents and pounded by the surf and tossed onto rocks and scorched by the sun, the message ends up exactly where it ought to be.
I first contacted Buffington in 2016. I’d been intrigued by his blog: “A message in a bottle can make friends out of strangers, lovers out of the lonely, or give the dead a final chance to speak.” I hoped to join him on one of his expeditions, but he was on an involuntary hiatus, owing first to the Zika outbreak, then to the COVID pandemic.
Eight years later, an e-mail from Buffington popped up in my inbox. “Hi Lauren, It’s been a minute!” he wrote, explaining that he was ready to begin far-flung bottle-searching missions again. Months passed as he pored over tide charts, satellite maps, and airline schedules, trying to determine the perfect location for our hunt. Finally, he settled on one: “I really think Mayaguana is where the magic is going to happen :)”
Mayaguana, the easternmost island of the Bahamas, is a hatchet-shaped spit of land about a hundred nautical miles north of the Windward Passage, the channel separating Cuba from Haiti. The island’s name comes from the Lucayans, its original inhabitants. In the early sixteenth century, Spanish colonization wiped out the local population; the land was sparsely populated until the early eighteen-hundreds, when settlers arrived from Turks and Caicos. In 1890, the future British statesman Neville Chamberlain visited the island with his brother to see if it would make a good sisal plantation. The latter was “in ecstasies over the flamingoes,” but the Chamberlains ultimately abandoned the project.
Mayaguana remains one of the least developed and most difficult to access Bahamian islands. Around two hundred people live there. The island is home to frigate birds, gnatcatchers, bananaquits, boobies, and a rare rodent called the hutia, which looks like a rat and comes out at night to feed. It has no hospital, grocery store, or A.T.M. Every ten days, a boat comes to deliver mail and to stock the island’s mini-marts. From Nassau, the capital, you can fly to Mayaguana on Monday or Friday. If you want to leave, you have to be at the airport when the plane comes in. Otherwise, you wait.
Buffington warned that Mayaguana would be no Margaritaville. “We are not talking about a ‘stroll’ here,” he wrote. “A typical day of hunting involves hiking maybe 8-15 miles on a beach: soft sand sucking energy from every footstep; relentless sun hammering you on exposed, shadeless shores.” He recommended that I come equipped with trekking poles, fingerless sun gloves, a multipurpose tool that included “pliers and a knife at minimum,” and “one 3-liter water reservoir with hose.” He also suggested packing provisions, including canned chicken, for “suitcase burritos,” and powdered Pedialyte.
There was one last thing Buffington wanted me to know: I shouldn’t mention what we were doing there. “It’s a paranoia born of finding footprints on desolate beaches that I have busted ass to reach (always a vibe-killer!), and so I take every wacko precaution to avoid tipping off anyone,” he explained. “Lest it inspire someone to get there before me.”
Unlike many trends, the fad for putting messages in bottles can be traced to a specific source. Sure, the Vikings, invading Iceland, hurled objects overboard and followed the currents toward resources like whales and driftwood. Yes, a twelfth-century Japanese epic tells of a banished poet who wrote a thousand verses on slabs of wood, called stupas, and threw them into the sea, hoping that they would reach his parents. But the modern era of M.I.B.s began in 1833, when the Baltimore Saturday Visiter published “MS. Found in a Bottle,” a short story by a fledgling writer named Edgar Allan Poe. The work’s narrator is travelling from the port of Batavia to the Sunda Islands on a ship filled with ghee, opium, and jaggery. As a “whirlpool of mountainous and foaming ocean” threatens to swallow the ship whole, the narrator attempts to tell the tale of his fateful voyage by sending a manuscript into the ocean. “At the last moment I will enclose the MS. in a bottle and cast it within the sea,” he vows.
As Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano write, in “Flotsametrics and the Floating World,” the story helped launch a craze for messages in bottles, speaking “powerfully to an age obsessed with long-distance communication, from clipper ships and the telegraph to the soon-to-emerge penny post.” In 1860, Charles Dickens published his own M.I.B. fiction, “A Message from the Sea,” about an American captain’s discovery of an oilskin-covered, glass-stoppered “strong square case-bottle” and his attempts to fulfill the charge of the message inside: “Whoever finds this, is solemnly entreated by the dead to convey it unread to Alfred Raybrock.” By the late eighteen-eighties, M.I.B.s had gained popularity with naval researchers and amateur oceanographers, including Prince Albert I of Monaco, who launched 1,675 bottles into the North Atlantic.
Buffington came to flotsam via fungi. He grew up outside Carbondale, Illinois, as the youngest of three children. The Buffingtons were the kind of tight-knit family that is fond of games, larks, and long-running japes. On weekends, they would go rooting around in the forest, searching for natural bounty—wildflowers, arrowheads, fossils, icicles to launch from the tops of cliffs. “We were always looking for mushrooms,” Buffington recalled. “And not just any mushrooms. The only ones we went after were morels, which are notoriously elusive.”
Every day was a treasure hunt, and the hunt was often more gratifying than the treasure. “Just because you go out in the woods doesn’t mean you’re going to find something, right?” Buffington said. “But there was always this element of anything could happen.”
When Buffington was around ten, his family started vacationing in the Caribbean. On one trip, his parents stumbled across a dark-brown embossed bottle filled with several long, thin objects. “They thought they were sticks or something,” Buffington recalled. The bottle, in fact, contained three documents: a certificate from the “Office of King Neptune,” a Guinness label, and a set of instructions for making the bottle into a lamp. The bottle was one of a hundred and fifty thousand that the brewing company had dropped into the Atlantic to celebrate its two-hundredth birthday, in 1959. The bottles are still being found as far away as Tahiti, Mexico, and the Canadian Arctic, where Inuit locals reportedly refer to one particularly fertile stretch of land as Beer Bottle Beach.
Buffington found his first M.I.B. on a rainy day in Turks and Caicos. “I was carrying a piece of Styrofoam on my back to shield me, like a turtle,” he recalled. The beach was full of empty bottles, but suddenly Buffington snapped to attention, without quite knowing why. “I get about ten feet away and feel this little electric charge—almost like a snakebite,” he said. There it was: a cobalt-colored glass bottle with a rubber cork stopper, lying on top of the sand, as though the tide had deposited it there just for him. The message inside, printed on bright-orange paper and tied with a piece of string, was written by Larry and Ruth, Canadians travelling to St. Maarten aboard a ship. “If you get this message, we would greatly appreciate a reply,” they wrote, thoughtfully enclosing two dollars for postage.
“There was no going back,” Buffington told me. “I knew if I could do it once, I could do it again.”
The Monday flight to Mayaguana arrives in the insistent light of early afternoon. Earnel (Shorty) Brown, the proprietor of the Baycaner Beach Resort, one of the island’s few guest houses, met Buffington and me at the airport. Brown grew up on Mayaguana, where his father was a fisherman. He and Buffington had already started discussing which otherwise inaccessible beaches he might take us to by boat. “We have to see what the wind does,” Brown said.
The Baycaner turned out to be gleaming and empty. In the wood-panelled bar, a vinyl banner attested to rowdier times: “Reality is an illness that occurs due to: insufficient alcohol, saltwater, and fly fishing.” It had been a long journey, but Buffington wanted to get in some bottle-hunting before the sun set.
I piled on my goofy gear—cop sunglasses, basset-hound earflap hat—and met Buffington on the beach. The sand stretched as far as we could see in either direction, overlaid by lanes of sargassum. The algae stunk, but Buffington was pleased: “To me, that’s a good sign, because it tells me that this drifted in from somewhere out there, and, along with it, all this other stuff.” He bent down to pick up a pink plastic bottle from the debris, aiming it down the beach. “The technique is mileage,” he said. “It all comes down to mileage.”
Buffington assigned me to trawl the wrack line. It was teeming with non-organic matter, including a red plastic piggy bank. I could see dozens of bottles, many of them opaque, wedged into the sand, or otherwise partially obscured. I picked up a rubber boot.
“This is one of the iconic beach finds,” Buffington said. “Let’s see if there’s a foot in there!”
We continued, scanning the beach with darting eyes, the way they teach you to monitor the road in a defensive-driving course. There were more red plastic piggy banks—Buffington deduced that there must have been a cargo spill. “I always tell people the ocean writes a story on the beach,” he said. “My job is to read it.” At one point, I spotted a clear plastic vessel with a gold-colored cap, and my pulse quickened: was that a piece of paper? Indeed it was, but further inspection revealed that it was only the label of a Turkish fabric softener.
By the time we finished, the sky had turned to orangeade. I’d found three bottles tied together with a light-blue ribbon, a mesh bag full of bottles, a handbag, a conch shell, and many single shoes. Buffington had found three glass fishing buoys, including an unusual one the color of an amethyst. Despite the dearth of messages in bottles, Buffington was feeling optimistic.
“Those floats are harbingers of M.I.B.s,” he said. “Anywhere you find one, you find the other.”
Collectors hone their interests according to some combination of location and whimsy. A sheller on Sanibel Island amasses Scotch bonnets, while a London mudlark scoops up shards of ancient pottery. A beachcomber was traditionally a deserter or a wayfarer: “a vagrant seaman, usually of low character, who loiters about seaports,” per the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary. Today, beachcombing is a hobby practiced by countless adults and children around the world. People collect shells, coral, sea glass, driftwood, egg cases, fossils, agates, pumice. There is even a subset of beachcombers who scour for “sea beans”—seeds and fruits carried on ocean currents. Last year’s International Sea-Bean Symposium, held in Cocoa Beach, Florida, featured a sea-bean-identification event and a talk called “Sea-Bean Hoarding, When Is Enough Enough?”
M.I.B.s are distinguished by their air of romance and mystery. “The thing about messages in bottles is that there’s a person behind the reason this is in the water,” Kirsti Scott, the editor of Beachcombing magazine, told me. “There’s truly a purpose.” Buffington believes that the ocean inspires a certain spiritual expansiveness, unlike freshwater, whose M.I.B.s often contain jokes or pranks. “I guarantee you I could go find bottles on the Mississippi, but why would I?” he said. “On the river, you’re thinking downstream thoughts. But on the wide open sea you’re thinking wide-open-sea thoughts.”
The Poeian tradition of the M.I.B. in extremis persists—“We are torpedoed, one in front and one in back,” an unlucky passenger wrote from the Lusitania, in 1915. More recently, crew members on an Italian container ship pushed an M.I.B. through a porthole, successfully alerting authorities that they had been hijacked by Somali pirates. Deathbed M.I.B.s have a particular allure as emanations of the soul at its most desperate, and thus, putatively, its most honest. But M.I.B.s are as various as their writers, conveying all manner of existential unburdening. One of the most moving messages Buffington has found acted as a sort of roving memorial to a lost pregnancy. “Will never forget you, my angel,” it read. “Sorry we never got to meet. Love, Mommy.”
In 1972, the seven-year-old Amor Towles chucked an M.I.B. into the water off Martha’s Vineyard, writing that he hoped it made it to China. Within weeks, he got a reply from an editor at the New York Times. Towles, now a best-selling novelist, credits the encounter with instilling in him a sense that “the world is a place where anything can happen.” This sensation must have been shared by the person who picked up a bottle one day and discovered inside an original Charles Schulz cartoon, sent by the artist on a whim from an Alaskan cruise.
The ultimate providential M.I.B. may be a note that a Swedish sailor named Åke Viking stuffed into an empty flask of aqua vitae and threw into the sea in 1955. “To Someone Beautiful and Far Away,” he wrote. “Write to me, whoever you are.” He included a photograph of himself along with his home address. The bottle washed ashore in Syracuse, Sicily, where it was found by the father of Paolina Puzzo, a fifteen-year-old girl. Three years later, Viking and Puzzo got married. They were together for more than forty years.
At 7:01 A.M., Buffington stood in the yard of the Baycaner, loading gear into a truck. He was wearing an outfit of rubber sandals, swim trunks, and a bubblegum-pink T-shirt with Barbie-style lettering: “MY JOB IS BEACH.” Brown, scrutinizing the weather, had determined that this was the day to visit a typically unreachable stretch of coastline. The plan was for him to ferry us there in a twenty-eight-foot powerboat and then pick us up six hours later, at the end of what would amount to—if all went well—an approximately ten-mile march.
Buffington was projecting Ken-like levels of enthusiasm, but anxiety was setting in. The trip so far had been a bust. The day before, nearly twenty thousand steps in unrelenting heat had yielded nothing of interest but an old Swedish Coke bottle and a fragment of a Space X heat shield. Meanwhile, another renowned bottle hunter, an elderly Dutchman named Wim Kruiswijk, has racked up some twelve hundred bottles foraging the shores near his home, in Zandvoort. “I have all the time in the world, and, instead of talking to other old people, I love to walk on the beach and see the surprises,” Kruiswijk once told a documentarian. He has observed that M.I.B.s are less plentiful than they once were, and that the decline coincided with the introduction of smartphones. The instant gratification of social media has largely destroyed both the culture of letter-writing and the patience required to wait for a message to be found.
Buffington endeavored to stay in high spirits. “I always have to remind myself that that’s what I do ninety-nine per cent of the time—not finding bottles,” he told me. We climbed into Brown’s boat and headed out into the deep, choppy blue. The vessel heaved while Buffington and I clung to the guardrails. Within a few minutes, we were all soaked.
After an hour of brain-joggling transit, we made it to the beach—something out of a shipwreck novel, devoid of any trace of human presence. Dropped onshore, Buffington and I walked and walked some more. There was no cell service, and Brown would be out of walkie-talkie range until we approached the pickup spot. For most of history, an island was a place of real isolation. Now a message could reach you practically anywhere—you had to find an island within an island to get off the grid. The experience of being totally incommunicado was liberating, but I also felt a sense of dread: What if I got heatstroke, or broke an ankle? Or, worse, what if Buffington did?
On the horizon, I noticed a blob. It looked like a rock with a sword stuck into it, but it turned out to be an actual shipwreck: the remains of a fibreglass-hulled yacht. Buffington was in the dunes, rifling through some trash. He picked up a bottle, round and brown, that looked like it contained a brochure or a wrapper. Then he found another, with some white stuff inside, its consistency somewhere between confetti and ash.
“It doesn’t look like much, but it’s definitely a message in a bottle,” Buffington said, wiping his brow. “Unfortunately, whoever made it sealed it with a rubber cork, and rubber just really doesn’t do a good job of sealing.”
We kept going. The hours and miles melted into one another, still and silent, until, in the distance, we could make out Brown’s skiff. Just before we left, Buffington, a touch desperately, picked up a final bottle, a brown squarish one that looked like it might have held rum. We couldn’t even tell if there was anything inside. “I just hope this isn’t the only trip of my life where I don’t find a bottle,” he said.
On the final morning of my visit, Buffington and I met on the porch of the Baycaner to open our bottles. The first—the one that looked like it contained a brochure—was the least promising. Still, Buffington slipped it into a gallon-sized ziplock, to catch any shards. Next, he took a hammer-shaped piece of coral and started tapping the bottle until the body separated from the neck. Buffington extricated the paper. It was surprisingly dry and perfectly legible, but the content was distinctly uninspiring: a user’s guide to various lines of LifeStyles condoms, including the Rough Rider, “seductively studded up and down.” The second bottle, with confetti-ish contents, was equally useless—whatever had been inside had broken down into a friable mess.
Buffington had warned me that the opening process could be unpredictable. “Each bottle creates a sealed environment,” he explained. “And once you breach that everything changes, and it usually changes quickly.” With one chance left, he picked up the squarish bottle and held it close to his chest, gingerly screwing off the cap. Then he raised it to his eye, like a telescope.
“There’s definitely paper inside,” he said excitedly. “And it has blue lines!”
Buffington broke the bottle open. Out came a wad of white material that resembled a soggy tissue. Buffington placed it on a binder and tried to separate the paper’s furls. Despite his caution, his fiddling provoked several rips.
“This would be much better to do in the Lab at home,” he muttered. “Take it slow, Clinty, take it slow.”
He got out a Swiss Army knife and began poking at the layers with a blade. The paper was indeed notebook paper, bearing handwriting. Letters were beginning to emerge.
“R-A-V-A!” he called out, with the edgy energy of a “Wheel of Fortune” contestant on the verge of solving a puzzle. “L-O-V!”
This was finally, undoubtedly, an M.I.B. There was no mistaking the trace of a human hand. But much of the paper was impossible to smooth out, and even where it was flat it was impossible to read. We couldn’t discern a single complete word. The message had found us, against steep odds, but the meaning was irretrievable.
Curtis Ebbesmeyer, the oceanographer, has calculated average reply rates to messages in bottles using data from mass M.I.B. mailings—scientific, evangelical, or promotional campaigns such as the Guinness drop, or the forty thousand “gospel torpedoes” that a Tacoma preacher sent out from the Puget Sound in the nineteen-forties. Ebbesmeyer estimates that for every ten M.I.B.s one is found and reported, three are found and ignored, three wash up but are never found, one gets buried in the sand, one drifts for years and years, and one “suffers any of a number of other fates,” including getting swallowed by an animal or sunk by the weight of barnacles.
The Golden Records on the Voyager spacecrafts—documenting everything from the music of Louis Armstrong to a baby’s laughter—are basically messages in a bottle, borne through space instead of water. So are time capsules, like the Crypt of Civilization, in Georgia, an airtight room filled with recordings which was sealed in 1940 and is intended to be opened in the year 8113. Ancient Romans scratched graffiti onto walls in Herculaneum; the 1974 Arecibo message aimed radio frequencies at a cluster of stars twenty-five thousand light-years away. All are examples of the abiding human desire to make contact. Closing the circle is a long shot, but such unlikeliness only intensifies the feeling of kismet when an M.I.B. hits its mark.
I was waiting at the airport when the plane came on Friday afternoon. Buffington, who was initially supposed to leave with me, had decided to extend his trip. “I’ll walk over coals, man,” he told me of his commitment to finding a bottle. After I left, he kayaked to even more remote points on the island. But these, too, proved fruitless.
Finally, he drove to the spot where we’d looked on the first day. “It was the very last place I could go,” he said. He walked until he saw our footprints and then pushed a little farther. About half a mile on, he spotted a champagne bottle, green and clear, with a perfect little cigarette of a scroll inside—the real thing, at last.
A couple of weeks later, Buffington held the bottle close to his computer camera, turning it slowly for me to admire. He pointed out that whoever had written it had sealed the scroll with a Band-Aid. “The really exciting thing is you can see writing in there,” Buffington said. He was right. Even at a distance, I could make out at least one full sentence, written in what looked like Sharpie: “Thanks for finding me.”
“That’s as legit as it gets!” Buffington exclaimed. The bottle had a screw cap, and Buffington’s plan was to pry it off and dump the message out, as if pouring a drink. He gripped the cap and gave it a firm twist. I could hear a hissing sound—years’ worth of air pressure being released.
“That is nuts!” Buffington said. “I don’t think I even need any tools.”
The message slid right out. As Buffington unwound the scroll, his hands began to shake. “Thanks for finding me,” he read aloud. “I was in WV and traveled to the Frying Pan Lighthouse where a desperate lady wanted to say there is life during a pandemic. And I hope we survive the 2020 election. God bless you. JAV.”
The message was dated September 20, 2020. The sender hadn’t included contact information or a full name. I wasn’t even sure that the first initial in “JAV” was “J” and not “L.” “Let’s not be discouraged,” Buffington said. “We have a lot of clues. We’ll find them.”
The first move, obviously, was to Google “Frying Pan Lighthouse,” which turned out to be a “decommissioned Coast Guard lighthouse located near the end of the Frying Pan Shoals,” in North Carolina. The tower was intended to help ships navigate the shoals, part of a perilous stretch of shallow water known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Built in 1964, the tower looks like an oil rig topped with a Tuscan campanile.
Frying Pan Tower, as it is often called, had an impressive online presence, including a Facebook account with more than three hundred thousand followers. A man named Richard Neal, a former Oklahoma software engineer, bought the tower in a government auction for eighty-five thousand dollars in 2010 and turned it into a nonprofit environmental-research center. Adventurous souls can sleep on site and volunteer for restoration projects, in addition to enjoying such activities as golfing off the lighthouse’s platform with biodegradable balls made from fish food.
Buffington recorded a video and posted it to social media. “If you know anyone who’s ever been to Frying Pan Tower, and you can share this with them, that would be awesome,” he announced, brandishing the letter.
In March, Joyce VanGilder was pulling into a building site when she got a text from her sister-in-law. It was a screenshot, showing Buffington with the message from Mayaguana. “I just kept looking at it,” VanGilder recalled. “I was, like, ‘That definitely is my handwriting. But I have no memory of this.’ ”
VanGilder admitted that the evidence that she had written the letter was overwhelming. She lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where she works in architectural services. Her middle name is Ann. Her sister-in-law, Vanessa, is a lighthouse fanatic, and in 2020, in the waning days of summer, the women had driven from West Virginia to visit Frying Pan Tower.
It was the middle of the pandemic, and the two were eager to get out in nature and do some manual labor. They spent three days repainting a pantry and clearing out expired foods. Evenings were festive. Vanessa had packed a kite to fly from the tower. VanGilder had brought a bottle of André Spumante. “My go-to,” she explained. “Cheap sparkling wine.”
One night after dinner, VanGilder decided to write a note—it was all coming back to her now. She had an empty bottle; she was, not unrelatedly, a little tipsy; she was on a decommissioned lighthouse in the middle of the ocean; and she and her boyfriend had recently been watching “Survivor,” in which “people were finding these little messages all around different places on the islands.” On a whim, she jotted down a few sentences. The “desperate lady” was VanGilder herself. “I had my mother staying with me during the pandemic,” she recalled. “She’s now ninety years old, and we have learned that we cannot live together.” Bottle, solved.
Confronted with her handiwork six years later, after a journey that likely took it into the Gulf Stream and around the entire clockwise circuit of the North Atlantic—a trip of several thousand punishing miles—VanGilder seemed more concerned about the bottle than about the message. “I feel like an international litterbug,” she admitted. Buffington had shown her a photograph of the site where the bottle was found. “When I saw all the stuff that was sitting around where he picked it up, I was, like, ‘Man, I guess I need to get down there and clean up some trash,’ ” she said.
VanGilder had sent the bottle with casual intentions, but I was oddly moved by receiving it. I grew up in Wilmington, not far from the Frying Pan, and, in 1988, my father had a bad accident on Bald Head, the nearest point of land. As I read about the tower, the names of local TV affiliates and the daily newspaper from my childhood kept cropping up. For almost a decade, I’d been writing a book about Wilmington. Physically, I was in France, but my head was in my home town. Somehow, it seemed, it had written me back. ♦