THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, July 21, 1994 TAG: 9407200165
SECTION: SUFFOLK SUN PAGE: 17 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PHYLLIS SPEIDELL, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 75 lines
This past spring, Berry Hightower finally got an answer to a note he sent 10 years ago. But Hightower has no complaint with the postal service. He had ``mailed'' the note by sealing it in an empty rum bottle and dropping it into the ocean 50 miles off the coast of Wilmington, N.C., in March 1984.
When his reply came this past March, via the post office, it was a letter from Las Tunas, Cuba. A 40-year-old fisherman, Oldemar Gonzalez Madrigal, had found the bottle wedged in the roots of a mangrove tree at St. Lucia Beach on Cuba's northeast coast.
With his letter, Madrigal enclosed the note he had found in the bottle. It was in surprisingly good condition, although a little brittle and browned.
``I don't think the bottle leaked, but it could have been sitting in the sun for years,'' Hightower said.
Hightower, 48, is a resident of the Western Branch section of Chesapeake. He retired from the Coast Guard after 23 years of service, owns a lawn maintenance service and also is active in the Bennetts Creek Ruritan club.
A childhood spent in small towns in coastal Georgia left him fascinated by the ocean, its currents, and the debris carried on them.
``When I was still in diapers, I used to throw things back into the water to see where they would go,'' he said.
When he grew up and joined the Coast Guard, Hightower began tossing bottled notes into the waters wherever he was stationed - from the Aleutian Islands to the Caribbean.
Before he dropped the notes overboard, Hightower first sealed them in a plastic bag, then tightly corked the bottle. Occasionally, he sealed the cork with wax, but he gave that up when he realized that the sun would melt the wax fairly quickly.
In 1984, Hightower was aboard the Coast Guard ship Taney when he tossed a series of 14 rum bottles into the Atlantic Ocean. Why rum bottles? ``That is what my friends drank,'' he said with a smile.
Carefully noting the locations of each drop and the pattern of the ocean currents, he expected to receive answers, if at all, from the north.
Two years later, Hightower heard from a man in Florida who had retrieved one of the bottles on a Fort Lauderdale beach. Hightower assumed that it was a fluke, that the bottle had missed the current and had somehow drifted south.
When his letter from Cuba arrived, Hightower was puzzled.
``Who in the world do I know in Cuba?'' he wondered. ``It had been so long that I had forgotten about the bottles.''
Hightower can only surmise that rather than floating north, this bottle was caught in a current that moved in a circular route, carrying the bottle across the Atlantic Ocean, down along the western coast of Africa, and back across the Atlantic Ocean to the northeast coast of Cuba.
After Hightower had the letter translated from Spanish, he realized that his correspondent was pleading for help. In the lengthy letter, Madrigal explained that he had lost his job because he was not a Communist, his wife had died recently, and he was trying to support two children who were hungry and needed clothes.
He was in critical financial trouble and hoped that Hightower would help by sending U.S. dollars.
``It seems like a legitimate request,'' Hightower said, adding that he has not yet answered because he is still unsure what to do. He is afraid that the Cuban government might confiscate any money that he sends, and he is not sure if there is any type of charitable agency that could help Madrigal.
``I am thinking about sending a letter without money to see if we could set up a correspondence,'' he said. ILLUSTRATION: Staff photos by MARK MITCHELL
Berry Hightower rereads the note he threw overboard in a bottle
about 10 years ago when he was in the Coast Guard. He finally got a
reply.
The original note shows wear and tear. The reply is in Spanish. by CNB