An old-fashioned social networker

Harvey Bennett could be the world’s leading bottle messenger, said Corey Kilgannon in The New York Times. The 61-year-old tackle-shop owner has spent his entire life in Amagansett, on the eastern tip of New York’s Long Island, and every few months since childhood he has put a note in a bottle and thrown it into the ocean. “It’s a pretty primitive way of communicating, but it works,” he says. Of the hundreds of plastic and glass bottles he’s tossed into the waves over the past half century, roughly 50 have been found—some as far away as the Caribbean and England. “It’s a tremendous thrill to get a phone call from some guy in Bermuda saying, ‘I got your bottle.’ Then you talk to him and find you have things in common and strike up a friendship.” Some folks are less enchanted, like the woman in nearby Montauk who phoned Bennett just to scold him. “She said, ‘You know, that bottle could have broken and my kids could have stepped on it.’” But the occasional negative comment won’t stop Bennett from dropping bottles into the Atlantic. “For me, it’s a wonderful distraction,” he says. “I’ve had adversity my whole life, and this takes me away from it. I become that kid of 6 or 7 who decided to throw a bottle into the ocean.”

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