Hope floats

Shortly before midnight on June 28, 1991, 26-year-old Sergeant Ted Simpson gripped a wine bottle, peered out at the Atlantic, and — from his place aboard the cargo ship — threw it as far as he could.

The bottle soared end over end before splashing into the dark water. Whatever happened next was out of his hands; the message he’d tucked into that bottle was now at the mercy of the waves.

Sergeant Simpson, who’d spent the last three years serving for the 18th Airborne Corps, was also at the mercy of the water. Yet after three years as a member of a helicopter crew (one regularly dispatched to recover crashed aircraft during combat operations), his last and latest mission (serving as a cargo escort) seemed the safest way to end his military career and return to his home in Wisconsin.

Ted and the rest of the crew had boarded the Arcade Eagle 23 days before. Their journey from the Port of Jubail in Saudi Arabia to the military ocean terminal near the Statue of Liberty would transport them over 10,000 miles in 31 days. Though, within a few weeks, boredom set in.

“It was just the same scene day after day,” Ted recently shared from his home in Eau Claire. “And so I started to get creative.”

One evening, about three weeks into their journey, Ted and a few other soldiers retired to the ship’s rec room to play games, watch television, and exercise. Ted read quietly until the hour grew late, eventually glancing up from his book to realize he was the last one still awake. Rising from his chair, he noticed an empty wine bottle on a nearby table.

“Heck,” Ted thought on a lark, “I should put a message in that bottle.”

He rinsed and dried the bottle and then started working on his letter, which included his name, rank, and recent service in Operation Desert Storm.

Inspired by The Police’s hit song, “Message in a Bottle,” Ted allowed his letter to serve as his own “S.O.S. to the world.” After three years of enduring a front-row seat to the horrors of war, he was grateful — for this last mission — to have found a way to serve as an emissary for peace. After he completed his letter — adding his parents’ home address in Cedarburg — he tucked it into an envelope, then a waterproof plastic bag, and finally, into the bottle.

Yet these precautions, Ted knew, would hardly be enough to compete with an ocean’s worth of water. Ted determined that his best bet to preserve his letter would involve dipping the top of the bottle into a thick latex paint, of which the ship was never in short supply. The next day, Ted repeatedly returned to the ship’s tool room, dipping the bottle into the paint until he’d created a dry seal nearly a fourth of an inch thick.

At last, the bottle was ready to go and not a minute too soon. From the moment he’d spotted the bottle in the rec room, Ted had been determined to toss it precisely in the middle of the Atlantic, ensuring the longest and most unlikely journey possible. This way, it would be even more miraculous if it did return to land, given the far-flung coordinates where it had begun.

June 28, 1991, was a calm, dark night in the middle of the Atlantic. The full moon hung like a prop in the sky while the phosphorescent glow of algae churned in the wake of the ship.

“It was a perfect night,” Ted later remarked, “to send the bottle on its journey.”

• • •

Ten months later, on an April day in 1992, Ann Maclennan of the Isle of Harris off the Western Isles of Scotland went for a stroll along the beach near her home and discovered a green bottle with dried paint along the bottle’s top. Curious, she took it home, removed the paint, and fished out the letter within.

The following October, Ted walked to his mailbox to find a brown envelope with an “air mail” sticker forwarded from his parents’ address.

“Dear Mr. Simpson,” the letter began. “Please accept my apologies for being as late in attending to this.” The letter described how she had discovered the bottle and its message, which was “found-intact and without any dampness…although it must have traveled so far.” Her letter also included a postcard showing the beach where the bottle was found after traveling ten months and two thousand miles.

Ted wrote one last letter to Ms. Maclennan, thanking her for her reply and noting how her letter restored some faith in humanity for him while also providing him some much-needed closure to his military service. He never heard from her again, though he always wondered what became of her.

Thirty-four years passed, at which point — after hearing Ted’s story — I joined the search for Ms. Maclennan. In August, I shared the story on a social media page dedicated to the Isle of Harris. The story inspired a team of locals, some of whom rallied to my aid, including a correspondent from the BBC, who promised to help me get to the bottom of the story once and for all.

In some ways, my social media post was my own message in a bottle. History seemed to be repeating itself as this BBC reporter — herself a resident from the Western Isles of Scotland — was again coming to a Wisconsinite’s aid.

Weeks later, after a bit of sleuthing, my BBC friend regretfully informed me that Ms. Maclennan had passed away years before. There would be no more messages. No more unexpected twists of fate.

I informed Ted of the development, and while he lamented the loss, he also expressed gratitude that he and Ms. Maclennan had the opportunity to cross paths at all; that thanks to an idea and an empty bottle, he was able to find kindness and connection from a stranger half the world away.

All these years later, Ted remains grateful that the waves granted the bottle mercy. That ten months and 2,000 miles wasn’t too far to find some reader on the other end.

“I did it because I wanted to put some good back in the world,” Ted says.

Message received.