My mouth was completely parched. I was far too tired and chaffed at that point in the day to want to get up from my reclined vantage point in the construction of the world’s greatest sandcastle with my nephews. The afternoon sun was shaded from my eyes thanks to my camouflage jungle hat and the scent of my third application of sunscreen was also most certainly causing some mild hallucinations when I first saw the glimmer across the water’s edge. I initially dismissed the thought of getting up, thinking it was some random ray of sunshine reflecting off the surface water at just the precise angle. Squinting through my sand- and salt-encrusted sunglasses I recognized that familiar bob and weave of the glassware – it was a bottle. As I approached the weathered object in its solo interpretive dance, there was the all but now cliche image of a glass bottle with cork on its top and what clearly looked like a rolled up piece of paper inside.

I picked up this aquatic antique and I managed to pry the top off with ease but struggled to reach this ultra rare “scroll”. My digitus secundus manus and digitus med’ius (index and middle fingers) were simply too large and lacked the dexterity to navigate such a delicate extraction. Without wasting any time, I knew I had to recruit my youngest nephew John Paul into this mission.

Johnny is all boy – while he’s the most rugged four year old ever assembled, he has a curious eye for assisting in such precise maneuvers. With the ease of an otolaryngologist removing a foreign object from deep within an ear canal, Johnny grasped the tightly curled yellowed paper, shrugged his sunburnt shoulders, handed me the insubstantial sheet, and went back to erecting his golden sandy stronghold. With no premonition of what I could possibly read, I unfurled this single paged treasure.

The page was well worn and barely interpreted the 187 on the top left corner of the page. I could make out some of the words near the middle of the page that read, “All right. Listen to me a minute now….I may not word this as memorably as I’d like to, but I’ll write you a letter about it in a day or two. Then you can get it all straight.” The edges of the page were tattered and bleached from the sun. The majority of the remaining words and letters on this salt-aired scrap were obscured.

I wondered for about seventeen seconds what was the intent of the hopeless romantic who had launched this into the Atlantic. I didn’t want to waste any more time contemplating its origins or the proclivities of its previous owner – the spirits moved me to just turn the page over.

I could barely make out 188 on the top left of this page and the word “Rye” near the middle. Near the center of this side of this ancient seafaring artifact I deciphered what appeared to be another quote, “Here’s what he said: ‘The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.'”

What had begun as a late afternoon adventure into the finer details of fabricating a beach fare foundation and fortress, led to a walk back into time and a reintroduction to Pencey Prep’s Mr. Holden Caufield. I recalled one such part from The Catcher in the Rye where Holden determines “certain things, they should stay the way they are.” Feeling somewhat emboldened by Holden, I looked around me, tightly rolled the page back into its water-resistant accommodation, secured the cork and launched the bottle back into the ocean. I watched that bottle dance among the moving crests of the waves until it disappeared. I stood for a moment on the edge of some remnant of a rip current and then turned back to continue to help Johnny and all these little kids he had now enlisted as subcontractors for his shaping of his seaside fortress.