I must’ve seen it in a movie. Maybe a pirate movie or something. Or maybe B.C. comics. A message in a bottle, drifting across the vast ocean.
My family and I were at Camp Arago on the Oregon Coast. It was Family Camp week. I was sitting alone beside a shallow waterway known as South Slough, watching the pointy little waves leap around, when I noticed a beer bottle in the sand. It gave me the idea.
I ran back to the building where we were sleeping and got a pencil and paper. I could put a message in the bottle, and then someone far far away, maybe clear on the other side of the world, in China perhaps, would read what I had written!
Now all I had to do was come up with something to write and the adventure could begin. I sat there in the sand, holding my stubby pencil, waiting for an idea. What to write? It had to capture the mood of mystery and prophecy I associated with the 'message in a bottle' concept. Something profound, like a fortune cookie. All within the confines of my extremely limited written vocabulary. I was seven.
Anxious to get to the part where I put the bottle out to sea and the Chinese boy read my message, I wrote down pretty much the first thing I felt confident that I could spell:
“GO TO SPAIN.”
I put the slip of paper into the beer bottle and threw it out into the water. It kind of bobbed around a few feet out. As I sat watching the bottle out there I started thinking, I wonder if it’s a problem that I forgot to put some kind of a top on it. Well, maybe it would work out anyway.
The unfulfilling part was that I could never really know for sure.


But maybe, just maybe....
Many moons later, on the lazy shores of the Xijiang River, a little village boy is sitting alone, eating his Chow Mein. He looks out and sees something bobbing in the water. “What can it be?” he wonders, in Chinese. He pulls it out of the river with his fishing net. “AH SO! An open beer bottle with a soaking wet little slip of paper in it!” The boy gets the note out, and, struggling, can just barely manage to make out the faded, enigmatic words: Go to Spain.
The little Chinese boy ponders this profound directive, letting the words penetrate into the fiber of his being. Suddenly he is struck, as if physically, by a violent flash of enlightened inspiration. “Oh Honorable Mystery!” he calls out in wonder to the sky. “This message has changed me forever. I must go and tell my family that I shall go to Spain IMMEDIATELY!“
He runs breathlessly to his thatched hut, where his honorable mother and father are making specialty chopsticks. “Honorable Mother and Father! Something has happened!“ ”What is it, son?” “I know now what I must do! Go to Spain! This little slip of wet paper I can barely read has spoken to me. Pack my bags! In Spain my life shall be transformed in miraculous ways. I must follow my bliss, as that white foreign devil Joseph Campbell has said.” “But son!" they protest. "You are needed here!” But the little Chinese boy is undeterred. “No way! I’m going to Spain, and nothing, not even thousands of years of unerring tradition and rigid familial obligation, can stop me.”

Hey, it’s possible.