Treasure From The Past
By: Don Crawford
Copyright: 2000
It’s a warm June morning in the year two thousand and a mist rises from the water as we ease the boat into the lake. We are at the edge of a popular lake in St. Paul Minnesota. Our gear is stowed and ready. We move away from the shore and head for a spot on the lake that we feel may hold some treasures.
We have looked at our maps of the lake and determined the area along this shoreline will be a good place for our dive. We move along slowly, the bow of the boat parting the mist as we go. We survey the shoreline and watch the depth finder mounted at the rear of the boat. As the maps have indicated there is somewhat of a steep drop off sloping away from the waters edge. We move over the entire area that we intend to dive, alternately looking at the depth finder and eyeing the shoreline, wondering what it must have looked like one hundred years ago at the turn of the last century. Finally we stop and drop anchor in front of a huge Willow Tree, watching as a Great White Crane glides overhead. It’s long wings moving slowly as it surveys us as well. There is no sound. We know that soon the breezes of the day will sweep the mist away, people will appear along the shoreline and in boats and canoes. They will be fishing, swimming and picnicking as they would have been in the century past.
We don our gear, as we have so many times before, anxious to get below the surface for our first glimpse of this place that may never have been seen by any man before. Many of the lakes in which we dive are considered to have poor, if not zero, visibility. For this reason they do not attract other divers. We are not other divers. We are not as concerned with good visibility as we are with diving in spots never before explored.
We drop over the side of the boat in unison. My dry suit clings tight to my legs as I pop back to the surface. I check my compass and then the rest of my gear. Kerry is already paying out line on our dive flag and attaching it to his BC. This flag and our empty boat will be the only indication to the rest of the world that we even exist. If not for these two items we would disappear beneath the mist and cease to exist to those that may pass this way in the next hour. I grab our buddy line from a hook on the side of the boat and slip it over my wrist. I hand the other end to Kerry and he slips the loop over his wrist. This line will keep us from becoming separated while we are down. We peer into the water and can see our fins below. We comment that this is a good sign. This means we will be able to see at least five feet. As a matter of fact on this particular morning we will have visibility of more than ten feet. One final check of our equipment. All is in order. We look at each other and nod. This is the sign that we are both ready. We have dove together so many times that much of the time we know what the other is thinking and find no need to communicate verbally.
The air escapes our BCs and we drop through the water column to the lake bottom. A quick look at my compass, a little air in my drysuit and we move from twelve feet and head down the drop off. At seventeen feet the bottom turns from sand and gravel to muck. We move out into this muck five or ten feet and make a 180-degree turn. We hit the harder bottom again at exactly seventeen feet and begin moving up the drop off to shallower water. We are headed directly toward a shoreline that has been in existence since the glaciers moved through this area cutting into the earth to form these lakes thousands of years ago. We move up and down the drop off a number of times. Suddenly my eyes spot a familiar shape. It is a smooth slightly rounded shape in the sand that indicates there is a bottle lying covered by a thin coating of silt. My hand reaches out as it has so many times before and I pick the bottle up and wipe away the silt. It is an old green Seven Up bottle. I do not want it so I push it into the sand upside down. It will not pollute the lake and in this position it will be an indicator to anyone that may dive this area in the future that a diver has already passed this way. We continue our search, looking, feeling. I check my air consumption. I still have two thousand pounds left in my tank. I am sure Kerry has about the same. This means we still have plenty of time to explore. Suddenly there is a bottle lying directly in front of me. A feeling of excitement comes over me. It is not covered with silt. It is lying there as if someone just emptied its contents and pitched it into the lake. Maybe a fisherman sitting alone on shore or maybe someone at a family picnic. I pick the bottle up and look it over. This time it is not a Seven Up bottle. It is an Ale bottle from the mid 1800s. I look it over and hold it above my head to catch the light from the surface. I can read the heavily embossed lettering even in ten feet of water. Furch & Walter St. Paul MN. I have found a treasure. Mr. L. F. Furch and Mr. Charles W. Walter started a company in 1868 that manufactured soda water and bottled ale. I am holding one of their bottles in my hand. I wonder, if I were to surface would I find the houses that surround the lake gone? Would we see only woodlands and grass? Would there be a lone fisherman sitting on the shore or maybe a family around a blanket sharing a picnic lunch? I can only wish it were that easy to travel to another time. Instead, this bottle has been lying in this very spot for over one hundred thirty years. It was probably last seen, spinning through the air catching the sunlight before hitting the surface of the lake and sinking out of sight, by the person that drank the refreshment. Now it is in my hand and will go on a shelf to be admired by many. I slip it into my goody bag and continue on. A short time later I spot another bottle and immediately recognize it as a “hutch”. Hutch is a term used by bottle collectors to denote a bottle with a Hutchinson style top. These bottles were manufactured in the 1800s and are the bottles that originated the term pop bottle. As I pick it up from the bottom Kerry tugs on the buddy line. Looking up I see he has a matching bottle in his hand. I can tell he is grinning from the expression behind his mask. We slow down and search the area carefully.
After about sixty-five minutes under the water we surface near the boat. We are both happy with the dive. We remove our gear and climb back aboard the boat. We shake the silt from inside the bottles we have found and rinse the sand from the anchors we have found before bringing them aboard. Not a bad dive. We have found four anchors and over a half a dozen old bottles. Four of these bottles date back to the 1800s and the others date from 1903 to somewhere in the 1930s. Not a bad haul for a 65-minute dive. Not bad at all.
Only now do we realize that there are others on the lake. The mist is gone and the sun is bright. On the other end of the lake a boat races with a water skier chasing it. Up the other direction a pontoon boat is anchored with four men resting on their elbows watching their bobbers drifting lazily on the surface. A canoe passes by and the man paddling waves. I imagine another time and another type of canoe, one that is not made of aluminum. I imagine a different man in the canoe, maybe with a heavy beard and mustache. Maybe a man that just finished his ale after removing a fish from his hook. I look around, the houses are still there. I look back and see an aluminum canoe and the glint of sunlight off a wet paddle as a balding gentleman paddles away. My thoughts are interrupted by Kerry’s voice. I hear my own voice asking (“what”?) as I move back into reality. Kerry repeats his question. “ I said, would you like a seven up with your sandwich?
The illusion is gone but the bottle still rests comfortably in my hand. I feel much closer to the past than I did when we entered the lake and I still ponder the thought, who threw this bottle in the water? What was he doing here? What kind of a day was it? Was he here alone or with his family? Does one of his descendants still visit this lake from time to time? Is he or she here today? Do they know he was here on a day much like today 130 years ago? They may never know but I do. I have the proof in my hand. I gently set the bottle down knowing it has not felt the air, the warmth of the sun or the touch of a hand in a long, long time.
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