There are days when my cell phone tries to send a virus to my computer.

Such things make me feel like I’m in the middle of an incredibly bad science fiction movie.

They make me long for simple times. Times when the world seemed endless.

The Le Sueur River cut through our farm. It was not one of the major rivers.

We referred to it as a creek, but we pronounced it &uot;crick.&uot;

Cottonwoods and willows rose from the banks of the Le Sueur River.

I spent a lot of time on the bridge that allowed the gravel road to pass over the river.

It was the perfect place for daydreaming about sailing ships while waving at the infrequent cars that traversed the township road.

A perch to watch dragonflies, mosquito hawks, as they cruised the creek.

It was a great fishing hole&045;unless you wanted to actually catch fish. I’d use a willow pole for a rod and would put a cork on the line for a bobber. The cork made the lazy job of fishing enticing on a day made for extreme laziness.

On a sunny day when the fishing was uneventful, my friend Slap and I concentrated on daydreaming.

It was an activity that did not invite suspicion.

He earned the nickname Slap because he had slapped so many mosquitoes in his life that he

slapped them even when they weren’t there. He was a caution.

Slap and I pretended that we were shipwreck victims. We were country. We pretended a lot. We had not yet been granted admittance to the enclave of men. We had found an empty glass bottle of &uot;Nehi&uot; (knee-high to what, we didn’t know) orange pop that somebody from a low-grade family had chucked out of the window of a passing car. It was a soda or soft drink bottle to some, but it was a pop bottle to us.

We decided to put a message in the bottle, reasoning that would be what real shipwreck victims would do.

I carved up a cork bobber to fit as a stopper in the bottle while Slap crafted a note on a page of a small Farm-Oyl notebook by using a stub of a lead pencil that he’d licked to a point.

Messages have been dropped into the water for as long as humans have been able to write messages. The earliest recorded sender was the Greek philosopher Theophrastus who threw sealed bottles into the Mediterranean in 310 BC.

In 16th century England, Queen Elizabeth I appointed an official Uncorker of Ocean Bottles and made it a capital crime for anyone else to open the bottles.

The severe punishment was deemed necessary because the British fleet sent messages about enemy positions ashore in bottles.

Christopher Columbus relates in his log that on the voyage back to Spain after discovering the New World, his ship Nina was caught in a terrible storm midway across the Atlantic. Worried that he might not survive, Columbus wrote a brief account, sealed it in a cask and cast it adrift at the height of the storm. The report requested that the finder deliver it to the Queen Isabella.

A.A. Milne, in &uot;Winnie the Pooh,&uot; wrote about the delightful adventures of Piglet thusly, &uot;Then he put the paper in the bottle, and he corked the

bottle up

as

tightly

as

he

could…and he threw the bottle as far as he could throw &045; splash! &045; and in a little while it bobbed up again on the water and he watched it floating slowly away in the distance, until his eyes ached with looking.&uot;

&uot;We placed our message,&uot; complete withour names, addresses, phone numbers, location and the date into the &uot;Nehi&uot; orange pop bottle and dropped it into the creek.

We put it in the hands of Neptune, god of the sea, hoping he covered rivers, too.

&uot;We sent our message out of curiosity and as a fuel for our imagination.&uot;

The bottle bobbed its way north.

What was the fate of our bottle? Did it break and sink? Did it become snagged along the shoreline and become buried in the mud? Did it fall prey to one of the monsters of the not very deep and become doomed to live forever waterlogged in Davy Jones’s locker?

Or did somebody find it and choose to ignore the message inside?

I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.

Oh, the Le Sueur River is still there, but the phone numbers and addresses have gone away.

(Hartland resident Al Batt writes a column for the Tribune each Wednesday and Sunday.)