The Sea Guards Her Secrets Well

I’m becoming a believer in coincidence.

Time and again, lately anyway, I no sooner commit to the subject of my weekly Chronicle than something in the news totally relates.

In last week’s post, “Cowichan Lake Children Fought Cougar to Standstill,” I told you how one of those heroic kids, Tony Farrar, became a lieutenant in the Canadian Army and was accidentally killed on the firing range. The same day this post was published, it was reported in the Times Colonist that the Canadian Army had charged one of its members in the death of an army reservist who’d been fatally shot while participating in live-fire training at Camp Wainwright in 2019.

Uncanny.

And again: I’d no sooner decided to write on beachcombing and secrets that have been given up—or withheld—by the sea than an article in the TC caught my eye. Researchers from Universite du Quebec a Rimouski are trying to determine if a letter that washed up in a bottle onto a New Brunswick beach in 2017 is genuine.

It purports to be written by Mathilde Lefevbre, a 13-year-old school girl from France who, with her mother and three siblings, went down with the Titanic. Did her eerie letter from beyond the grave float about in the Atlantic for more than a century before it was picked up on a beach in the Bay of Fundy?

We’ve had similar spooky missives from the Twilight Zone turn up on B.C. beaches. I’ll tell you about some of them next week.

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Photo caption: For decades, beachcombers have reaped a harvest of the attractive Japanese glass fishing floats on west coast Vancouver Island beaches. They’ve become highly prized—this one is posted on ebay for a mere $1750 U.S. But not all finds have been as desirable; some, in fact, have come from another world.