Call it the loneliness brought on by watching the last Sandhills cranes whirling south on those northern busters.

Yep, call it the shorter days of November getting to me. Nope, I’m launching notes tied to something else. No, I’m not stuffing business cards into my empty wine bottles and tossing them into the buffalo grass, hoping some rancher finds them and returns them before his prize Angus bull crushes them underfoot. So, traveling across the Great Plains by mule wagon researching mid-America marine fossils, I’m giving messages another go. I’m still waiting for the first message to be returned by Neptune or someone combing his beaches. I did it because I was curious and lonely. I’d take an empty bottle, scribble a note on a scrap of paper, cram the note in the bottle and toss it into the sea. While sailing alone around the world from 1998 to 2003 on my sailboat “Sea Bird”, I launched dozens of messages in bottles. I’ve even launched some bottles of my own. When I sail, I keep an eye out for bobbing bottles. When I walk on the beach, I look for bottles with corks in them, hoping one of them might contain a note. I have always been charmed by messages in bottles. I thought, “I need to put a message in a tumbleweed and see if I hear back from anyone.” Messages in Bottles Can you send a message in a tumbleweed? How would you do it? I was traveling across America with my mule Polly.

Animated gif tumbleweed