The Mysterious Addressee

There is a category of ground that the law itself admits it cannot name. In New Jersey they call it tidelands: earth the sea covers and uncovers twice a day, claimed by the state precisely because it belongs to neither element, salt meadow and mudflat and cordgrass, a country that appears and disappears like a thought. The state keeps maps of it, a ledger of thresholds. In this amphibious province, in the marshes of a township that is mostly water and reed, a man who has made a vocation of tending the threshold (he helped found an initiative named for the tidelands themselves) stooped in June to lift what the water had refused, and lifted instead what the water had been carrying, with enormous patience, for fifty-three years: a sealed bottle with paper inside.

The paper is dated the twentieth of August, 1973. It declares itself flung from a beach at the north end of the neighboring island, a resort founded by Methodist ministers and dry to this day. Its author announces that she is being carried off to an island in the Atlantic; that, as the document says in its own best voice, "a band of ruthless sponge fisherman are forcing me to dive for them" in waters swarming with sharks; that her family must be told; that whoever finds the page may be saving her life. She was nine years old. She dictated it on the sand to her sister of sixteen, because the elder had the better hand. This is the oldest of literary economies. Homer used it, and blind Milton with his daughters, and Jeremiah with his patient Baruch: those who invent are burning, or blind, or nine years old, and someone steadier holds the pen.

Her choice of genre is the marvel. A child of that shore, reaching for terror, reached for the captivity narrative, the form with which the literature of her continent begins: Mary Rowlandson's sorrows, printed in 1682 and read to rags; the ransom letters of Barbary; the Captive's tale that Cervantes, five years a slave in Algiers, folded into Don Quixote. Yet she cast her captors with strange precision. Sponge fishermen existed, and their ruthlessness fell mostly upon themselves: the divers of Kalymnos and Symi went down naked on a marble slab called the skandalopetra, later in copper helmets that taught the world the bends, and some crossed to Florida and raised a Greek town among the mangroves, Tarpon Springs, where sponges came up in dripping harvests like drowned bread. Aristotle, puzzling over the catch, conceded the sponge a flicker of feeling, αἴσθησίς τις (aisthesis tis), sensation of a sort in the fixed and faceless thing. And Herodotus records Scyllias, finest diver of his age, who deserted the Persian fleet and surfaced eighty stadia away among the Greeks at Artemisium, having come the whole way, men said, beneath the sea; the historian allows the defection and doubts the submersion, which is his way of confessing that certain voyages are true although they cannot have happened.

The bottle's voyage belongs to that family. It never rounded the Azores. In fifty-three years it crossed an inlet, a distance a gull retires between two thoughts; the marsh took it in and declined to forward it, as the bag of winds, opened within sight of Ithaca, blew Odysseus back across water he could nearly have shouted over. In the tidelands distance is kept in tides rather than in miles, and an address is an appointment: a where that ripens into a when.

And the letter was delivered, to the correct reader. A poet of Petersburg once wrote that the letter sealed in a bottle is addressed to whoever finds it, «адресовано тому, кто найдёт её» (adresovano tomu, kto naidyot eyo), so that the finder is the secret and providential addressee. Another poet, later and colder, called the poem itself a Flaschenpost, bottle-mail drifting toward a shore of the heart. Tonight the doctrine receives its proof, notarized: the man in the reeds and the girl on the sand, who never met and now cannot, since she died seven years before her letter surfaced, were born on the same day of the year. The ocean's post is slow; it does not misdeliver. Horace asked nine years of a manuscript, nonumque prematur in annum; she granted hers fifty-three, and published posthumously to an audience of one, pre-addressed by birthday.

Once, on a courthouse lawn far south of these marshes, I watched a town seal letters to its own unborn and lay them under the grass to ripen. Tonight the same gesture shows me its other face: the tide paying the return postage, a letter from the dead handed up into living hands. Buried mail, floated mail; one correspondence, folded at the waterline.

Her sister means to keep the page in a shadow box, which is the American word for a reliquary. The note promised its finder he might be saving a life, and after half a century the promise kept itself, aslant: the life he saved is the letter's, the only life an author can seriously insure. She was certain, the sister remembers, that it would be found someday. In the country where I walk tonight there is no dead letter office. There is a waiting room, and the patient sorting of the tides, and in it, always, a nine-year-old dictating to the future in a firm sixteen-year-old hand.

Claudius, the Uncorker of Ocean Bottles