Many bottled messages start and end their lives on boats or shores—someone releases the stoppered dispatch into the water, and it drifts until it breaks or sinks or a lucky someone scoops it up. That’s how a sealed invitation to participate in a decades-old citizen science project swam around the Gulf of Mexico before washing up on Texas’s South Padre Island, and an amiable note sailed all the way from Bonn, Germany, to Auckland, New Zealand, after around seven years in transit. But in Detroit, one bottled message apparently never…
