GREENFIELD — Following heavy storms in Bermuda in mid-October, Katie Trimingham and her mother popped down to the local beach to survey any damage and look at the waves. That’s when she spotted a glass bottle sticking out of some seaweed.
But this was no ordinary debris — there appeared to be a painting or photograph inside the bottle. So Trimingham took it home, smashed the bottle inside a plastic grocery bag, and out came an oil painting and business card.
“I did four, and that’s the only one that ever materialized,” said Dennis Wade, the Greenfield painter responsible for the artistic message in a bottle.
Wade and his wife spend part of their year in Stonington, Maine, where he would cast paintings into the Atlantic Ocean in corked glass bottles four years ago.
“I forgot all about it, I really did. Then last week, out of the clear blue, [Trimingham] called me, tells me who she is,” Wade, 77, recounted on Oct. 21. “She says, ‘You made my day.’ I said, ‘You made my week.'”
The painting depicts flowers, a cottage and a sailboat on the water at night, with a moon in the background and a reflection in the water.
“I kind of picked out some nice ones I liked, that I thought people might enjoy owning, you know?” Wade explained.
Trimingham, who owns All the Trimmings, a luxury wedding and events planning company she founded in 2013, said she never could have predicted this find.
“My jaw dropped,” she said. “It was really special.”
Trimingham mentioned she intends to have the painting framed and hung in her office.
“That’s where I sit all day,” she said.
Messages in bottles are the stuff of romantic and maritime lore. They can be used to relay distress messages, study ocean currents, memorialize loved ones or just for fun. Two messages in a bottle written by a pair of Australian soldiers on Aug. 15, 1916, a few days into their voyage to the French battlefields during World War I, were found in western Australia on Oct. 9.
Professor R. Mark Leckie, a geographer and paleo-oceanographer who teaches the main oceanography course at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, suspects that the bottle Trimingham found made it to Bermuda because the south-flowing Labrador current — which flows from the Arctic Ocean and along the coast of the Canadian region of Labrador — intersected one of the eddies associated with the Gulf Stream, which likely spun the bottle in the direction of Bermuda in the Sargasso Sea, the only sea without a land boundary.
“[The Gulf Stream], it literally flows like a meandering river,” Leckie said. “It also transports warm tropical water north and toward Europe.”
What has him stumped, however, is how the bottle made it so far east. Bermuda, a British island territory, is at the same latitude as Montgomery, Alabama, and its nearest point to the United States East Coast is Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, which is approximately 650 miles away.
“Bermuda is quite a ways off from the coast,” Leckie said.
Wade, a hobbyist painter who learned the craft from his mother-in-law about 20 years ago, owns 474 Main St., which houses his Greenfield studio, and the four buildings around it. A Northampton native, he has been in Franklin County for 40 years. He said he would like to meet Trimingham, though his flying days are pretty much behind him.
But Trimingham said she would enjoy visiting New England to see the man who sent her a painting in a bottle.
“He’s very talented. I would love to go to Maine someday and see his studio and meet him in person,” she said. “I think that would be really fun.”