#22: Message in a Bottle Spider

In the spring of 1994 (my best guess from memory), I tossed a message in a plastic Pepsi bottle into the Mississippi River from St. Cloud, MN. It was probably mistaken for litter, but I figured that glass would have a greater tendency to break. After doing some research on messages in bottles, I discovered that glass is actually pretty resilient. It was Benjamin Franklin's idea (brilliant man that he was), when he was postmaster general, to use messages in bottles to map the ocean's currents, specifically the Gulf Stream (which he is responsible for naming), in an effort to seek the fastest way to ship mail. I have to wonder how many bottles were actually sent forth in order to complete this task.

The early history of messages in bottles is filled to the brim with intrigue, adventure, and tragedy: military forces sending messages about enemy whereabouts, a stranded ship crew bidding their final adieu from an island, a long-lost father sending his last words before dying at war. The message-in-a-bottle spider pays homage to the words lost and found at sea.

The message in this bottle is a poem by E.B. White titled "Natural History," from Poems and Sketches of E.B. White (Harper and Row, 1981):

The spider, dropping down from twig,
Unfolds a plan of her devising,
A thin premeditated rig
To use in rising.

And all that journey down through space,
In cool descent and loyal hearted,
She spins a ladder to the place
From where she started.

Thus I, gone forth as spiders do
In spider's web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken thread to you
For my returning.

Materials: vintage glass fish bottle, ink on tea-stained card stock, raffia and jute, plastic fern, shell beads, blue glass bugle beads, ivory glass seed beads, blue plastic beads, silver wire