A Cautionary Message
All kinds of things wash up on the beach of our hotel in Xcalak, shoes, toys, kitchen utensils. plastic bottles, plastic bottles. Oh, and plastic bottles. At long last. a glass bottle washed up with a message in it. I’ve been waiting for this. In fact, I am mildly surprised one hasn’t washed up sooner. (I know what you are thinking and yes I did grow up watching Gilligan’s Island) Here’s the message:
The sender wrote in blue ink on school lined paper. My inner sleuth infers from the roundess of the letters a feminine hand and the whimsy of the phrase—a teen or young adult who frequents Chinese restaurants since the message reads like a fortune cookie caution: “watch out for mittens”. I wish the message included a name, date and the location it was dropped into the water, rendering a ready made story. Without that information, this message in a bottle remains largely a mystery. It could have washed down from Sin Duda traveling less than a day or been adrift for months since being casting off from a Florida shore, or been thrown off a cruise ship just beyond the cut in our reef and drifted to our stretch of Xcalak shoreline within a couple of days..
On the other hand, the absence of evidence and clues provides the pleasure of imagining anything….
