Each year on her birthday, Ann Hernandez and her friend, Alan Tomaska, would settle on the rocky shore of Thacher Island and say a toast to the day. When the tide going out, Hernandez would tuck a handwritten message inside a bottle and Tomaska would hurl it over the rocks and into the crashing surf.Tomaska considered the ritual a lark. But for Hernandez, the messages in a bottle were a kind of personal driftwood -- a piece of her joining the sea and traveling with its currents to hoped-for far-flung locales. This article shares the fate of one of her messages.
