Scavenging

Message in Bottle Found, 25 Years Hence

Those New Zealand beaches are disgorging treasures galore. First it was a relic from a sunken sailing ship, found recently by a Taranaki beachcomber. Now it’s a message in a bottle that was returned to its writer this week, 25 years after she chucked it into the sea. Last Christmas Day, eight-year-old Aucklander Tom Hussona discovered the artifact on yet another North Island strand, Cooks Beach. “The message was just in hundreds of bits,” Tom’s mother Erica told a reporter. “The paper was so delicate … we had to try to get between the folds and unravel it with toothpicks.” Assembling the message, they saw that it had been written by a girl exactly the same age as Tom — but she had written it 25 years ago. 

With the help of the Internet, this week Tom and Erica located the message-writer, Kylie Tatham-Tahere, who is now a grown woman, married with three children. (They texted her — talk about the opposite end of the communication spectrum from messages in bottles!) During a childhood vacation a quarter-century ago, Tatham-Tahere and a cousin threw the bottle into the sea while boating just offshore from Cooks Beach.

The families are planning a joint vacation where they can all meet … at the beach.

Thrift-Shop Robbers Strike Again

The trend continues. How low can you go? A St. Vincent de Paul thrift store in Newark, Ohio has been burglarized, as reported by Channel 4 in Columbus. It happened on January 25, but as the crime remains unsolved, Licking County Crime Stoppers is now offering up to a $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and indictment of those responsible. At night while the store was closed, the perpetrator(s) broke a window, climbed in and stole an undisclosed amount of money. According to Channel 4, some of that money was snatched from a “jug” in the store itself, and some of it was stolen from “a coffee can that was stored in a locker” outside the public shopping area.

Don’t pull that “desperate times call for desperate measures” line on us. It won’t wash. Then again, we’re not saints. If St. Vincent de Paul heard about this crime, he’d probably cry — and buy the burglars lunch. As described in our book The Scavengers’ Manifesto: “St. Vincent de Paul was a 17th-century French priest whose pioneering charity efforts included orphanages, foundlings’ homes, workhouses and soup kitchens. Some of these institutions sound chilling to modern ears, but they were revolutionary in Vincent’s lifetime — a brutal era when poor urban orphans were commonly forced into prostitution and/or deliberately maimed and used as begging-bait. The Society of St. Vincent de Paul — founded in 1833 by a young Parisian student named Frédéric Ozanam, who was inspired by Vincent and who has been canonized as well — now operates hundreds of stores.”