Message in a bottle

It’s not just the title of a rather silly movie filmed largely in Maine and starring Kevin Costner: the message in a bottle is also a time-honored method by which humans attempt to communicate. But with whom?

Such a marine missive is often a class project or a lark in which the writer includes an address and hopes only to find out how far the bottle will get and who will find it. But others who cast messages adrift on the sea in corked glass containers seem to be trying to make contact with the universe, or at least with those who cannot be contacted.

An example of the latter was found by a family in Kilmore Quay, County Wexford, Ireland. Members of the lobstering Maddock family found a bottle washed up on the shore of Ballyteigue beach near their fishing town.

The family has a Maine connection. Maddock was one of the “Twelve Apostles,” a dozen Irish lobster harvesters who attended an International Lobster Congress in Portland several years ago and stayed an extra couple of weeks to go fishing with 12 of their Maine counterparts.

The bottle contained a letter written in German, signed with only the first name of the woman who wrote it.

Therese Maddock speaks fluent German, so she translated the letter and informed her local papers of the find.

Dated May 19, 2001, the letter is a cry from the heart, addressed to a man by only his first name, Urs, lamenting his death and the fact that the letter writer had not been able to say good-bye. The writer, Tanja, begins the letter by saying she wrote it aboard the QUEEN ELIZABETH 2 headed from New York to Southampton, Great Britain, where “I came to work and found there was a letter.”

The letter to which she refers was an email from a friend named Boris, written from Swissotel, telling her that their mutual friend had suffered a fatal accident when, during a parachute jump, his chute failed to open.

Her letter opens, “Dear Urs… I sit and stare at the computer screen. I read the mail over and over, it takes a while for me to understand you are no longer there – you are dead – just gone. I still don’t understand. My eyes fill with tears – the computer screen swims before my eyes – just like now…”

After she expresses concern for her friend’s last moments and whether he was in pain or afraid, she turns to happier thoughts: “I thank you for the time we were allowed together – I thank you for your humor – you made me laugh – you made me cry…” Quickly she descends again to sadness over the loss of her friend, saying, “always when no one is looking and I feel that the sorrow is rising again, then I cry… I try to concentrate on my work – and succeed only partly.”

In the next paragraph she recalls her friend’s life and it brings her some comfort. “The only consolation that I have is the knowledge that you lived your life the way you wanted – no compromise – no wishes or plans put off – you lived here and now,” Tanja wrote. “You will always have a place in my heart, and when I look for you I know I will find you – in a flower, a tree, a waterfall, a rainbow, a cloud – a raindrop, a ray of sunshine – I know you will be there.”

Her last paragraph expresses the universal regret that she had failed to contact her friend often enough and tell him how much she liked him. “It’s funny, as long as you know that a person you like is there… [and] you can contact them when you want… you make little use of it.”

The Maddock family also turned the letter over to their parish church and it contents were published in the community newsletter. “Its discovery on the beach so close to the Memorial Garden is especially poignant,” said the story prefacing the letter in the newsletter.

Poignant because the Memorial Garden is dedicated to the memory of those lost at sea. Kilmore Quay, which bills itself as the “Seafood Capital of Ireland in the Sunny Southeast” is a fishing village located near the southeast tip of Ireland, between the international ferry port of Rosslare and Hook Head, the oldest lighthouse in Europe.

One part of town, Forlorn Point, overlooks an area known as “The Graveyard of a Thousand Ships.” On this spot, the town of Kilmore Quay erected a memorial to all those lost at sea, and called it the Memorial Trail and Garden when it was opened in June of 2001. The Garden, planted in the shape of a mooring bollard, features a stone ship with a compass fountain that incorporates a propeller blade from the ship Lennox, lost off the nearby Saltee Islands in 1916. A Vigil Sculpture, two grieving figures looking out to sea, and a Ship’s Wheel sculpture, complete the artwork. A stone base supporting a tall mast lists the names of townspeople who died at sea.

The Maddock family has lived in their cottage, Ceol na Mara (Music of the Sea), near the harbor for generations. Sean Maddock retired from lobstering only a couple of years ago, turning the boat and business over to son, John. Sean’s daughter, Therese Maddock, has also worked as a lobster harvester and served for a few years as secretary of the now-inactive Irish Lobster Association.