new story line

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Funny thing, never happened before. I was sitting on my new dock, just talking to the dogs and trying to fool a fish or two, when I heard this "splush!". Right in front of the dock, maybe 30 feet out, a bottle shot up and dropped back into the bayou and floated bottom up, about 3 inches out of the water. It had once been clear, but now was dusky grey, from being stuck in the bottom mud for who knows how many years. The spot where it came up, was an area which might have been the bankline of the old channel which now makes a circular cut from just at the edge of my property and comes back to the newer straightened channel about 300 yards down.

Of coure, it was just probably an old drink bottle, but I couldn't reach it to tell. It did seem to have a little dimple in the bottom, like a mold mark or the belly button left by the tube on old hand-blown glass. My mind just started up all by itself, which is somewhat of a miracle also.

What if it had a note in it? What if the note was a long-lost letter? A love letter, a will, directions to buried fortune? What if the document would have changed history, either locally, or just in someone's heart? What if I had retrieved it and then set out to find the long-ago recipient, only to become embroiled in a mystery of another generation, a murder, an unrequited love, a missing legacy? What if......?

I promise not to start on this one until I finish "The Listener", but why don't we just play with it a while? Any ideas I haven't touched on?

-- imaginatonRus (lgal@exp.net), August 14, 2004

Answers

Lon, when I was about 12 and the lake was not so crowded as it became later, I found a note in a bottle and went on an obsessive search that lasted a couple of months one summer. Every spare moment was spent trying to stir the flotsam and jetsam in the back of some cove or sort through the debris hung in brush above water line or left on the bank by wave action or fluctuations in the water level. I actually found quite a few bottles with notes in them (maybe six or eight I could make out, I think). But for the life of me, I can't remember what a one said or what I did with them. I never tried to make contact with anyone. It's all pretty fuzzy, but seems like there were a couple with addresses from towns away off somewhere, and most weren't signed. Since I'd never even considered (much less written) a letter, I wasn't tempted to do so. We didn't use the telephone much back then, and that wouldn't have occurred to me. I did not acquire a romantic bent until a couple of years later, and such things were merely interesting to me, like turning rocks over to look for crawdads. Looking back, maybe I'd have found something earlier that I tried in vain to conjure up later, maybe some of the people I knew later had floated the bottles and I never knew they had that same kind of lonesome, lost-kid feeling that I felt sometimes. It was not like they could have come from another lake, they had to have been deposited locally, but at the time, I couldn't make out some of the messages, couldn't understand others, figured (probably incorrectly) that all of them had been set adrift by joking big city kids on vacation last summer, and just tired of the game about the time I should have been sharpening to it. I haven't thought about that in a very long time.

Louis L'Amour, the Western novelist, wrote a book called Conagher in which a subplot has one of the characters, a lady who wrote poetry and messages and tied them to tumbleweeds on the open prairie, causing all kinds of speculation among cowboys. All but one (Conagher) overlooks the author as she is plain to most eyes. (Of course, you have to allow a little license as we all know most of the tumbleweeds wouldn't have made it far, but who wants to spoil the fun.)

Interesting, your bottle popping out of the mud of generations past. Last words written in blood by a pirate captive? A lonely heart that turned out to be a character's granddad instead of the woman he thought it was? Undated note leading to visions of the little red haired girl by you, Charlie Brown, when it is in fact a lost work of a famous poetess who vacationed at the long-razed resort around the bend two generations ago. The last plea of a shipwrecked sailor adrift on a hatch cover on the open sea, the deed to the ranch, the finger pointing to the murderer who thought he got away with it, A Spanish note mixed in with some little pieces of gold-laced quartz and a name that turns out to be that of a _______ instead of a ______, the last couple of pages of a journal of someone lost to the hurricane of 1900 (wasn't it 1900?). Oh, yeah. Go, Lon. Let it flow.

-- J (jsnider@hal-pc.org), August 15, 2004.


What a lovely experience Lon. At first I wondered why you didn't just row out there and retrieve it, but have since thought it's much better to let your imagination fill in the details.

What made it pop up just then? What's lurking in the bottom of the bayou, disturbing long kept secrets? Might be the Bayou bunyip or a hundred year old alligator? Would the note be from distant shores or times long past or both? Perhaps it contained a note for Lon and was dropped by a stealth goose who fell short of the mark.

-- Carol (c@oz.com), August 17, 2004.


Carol, the only love notes I get are from the girl at the bank. they always say the same thing: "What part of OVERDRAWN don't you understand?!"

???? bunyip ????

-- lonesome ole Lon (nolovenotes@the.bayou), August 17, 2004.


What if the bottle went through a space/time warp before it burped out of the bayou?

-- helen and the mule muse (dreams@are.nice), August 17, 2004.

Sorry Lon I wasn't actually thinking of a love note. More along the lines of the secret missions that Rob writes about. I'm also curious why the bottle popped up just then. What disturbed it?

In Aboriginal legends a bunyip is a mysterious creature that lives in swamps and billabongs. A billabong is a waterhole.

Lol Helen. I like that "burped out of the bayou". Good one.

-- Carol (c@oz.com), August 18, 2004.



Wondering if John Wayne ever made an Oz movie..................

"Waall, little lady, just you hold yore hosses while I ride my cayouse over to the billibong and lass-sue us up a nice fat bunyip to toss on the barbie"

No, I bet not.

-- aspiring screenwriter lon (lgal@exp.net), August 18, 2004.


A funny thing happened tonight. I was out with my husband and right where we were sitting there was a huge new print on the wall. There was John Wayne staring straight at me! I could just hear him saying "Waall, little lady". I chuckle everytime I think of it. It's not something you expect to see way down here. Maybe you should become a screen writer Lon.

-- Carol (c@oz.com), August 21, 2004.

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