It is a pleasant September afternoon on Clopper Lake, a 90-acre expanse of water in Seneca Creek State Park in Gaithersburg. Blue herons pose on the shoreline. A turtle rests on a log.
Sgt. Susan Hatter, a state park ranger, pilots her patrol boat along the lake's edges, peering across the water. After nearly an hour, something catches her eye. She idles the boat near the gray, leafless branches of a dead tree that has fallen into the lake.
"I would like to find out more, but I'm not sure we ever will," Sgt. Susan Hatter, a state park ranger, says of the messages found inside bottles at Clopper Lake. Hatter says the works strike her more as art than crime.
(Andrea Bruce Woodall -- The Washington Post)
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"We found another bottle," she says into her radio.
The glass is clear; the outside is wrapped in black thread and has no label. Inside, dangling from the cork by the thread, is what looks like a postcard cut in the shape of a hand. It is made from two photographs stuck together; one side depicts a palm, the other side the back of a hand. The back is affixed with antique stamps and an "air mail" sticker. A broken skeleton key is tied to the base of the hand.
Since May, park employees have found nine such bottles, each subtly different from the others. All have fortune-cookie-from-the-dark-side messages printed on the palms of the postcards. The one Hatter found says: YOUR QUESTION IS A MISUNDERSTOOD ANSWER.
The author of the works says they are the communications of a "reluctant oracle" -- a term that describes the artist himself. He calls himself Hobby Horse and will not divulge his name or other details, other than to say he leads "a normal life." To prove he is the artist, he encloses digital images with his e-mails that depict the hand that appears in the bottles.
In one of his e-mails, he cites "The Blair Witch Project" as a "contemporary recasting of the horror novel." The 1999 movie was partly filmed in Seneca Creek State Park. He also mentions Edgar Allan Poe, who published a story called "MS. Found in Bottle," as the inventor of the detective story. "Imagining this art project and developing it felt similar to writing a detective novel -- without the last chapter."
The form is a cliche: a message in a bottle. But people who have seen Hobby Horse's artworks find them creepy and alluring. The idea of a disembodied hand is less than pleasing. Some of the palms contain splotches of red that could be taken for blood. The thread that suspends each postcard has been stitched along the side of the middle finger.
Hatter keeps the bottles in the park office as she investigates their meaning and origin. They strike her more as art than crime. "From our point of view, there's nothing threatening about them," she says.
Still, the puzzle they present is intriguing. "It's unanswerable; it's very daunting," Hatter says. "It drives me insane when I put my head to it. But I appreciate it. I would like to find out more, but I'm not sure we ever will."
One feature the postcards share is the stamp "REBUTS." A French postal term, it means dead letter.
Sometime in late July, a package arrives in the office of the Washington City Paper. Taped to the box's top is a piece of paper with the sentence: "One of several postcards (?) found this year floating in bottles near the Clopper Lake boathouse." It is signed "M. Antipyrine." The package includes an e-mail address.
Inside the box is one of the bottles, and inside the bottle is a hand-shaped postcard. The palm reads: SEEK INSTEAD THE QUESTIONS TO YOUR ANSWERS. City Paper runs a photo of the bottle as its "Found Art" feature Aug. 13.
On Aug. 26, an e-mail from a Washington Post reporter to M. Antipyrine -- sent to the address provided to City Paper -- yields a reply in less than 10 hours. "Sorry," it reads, "I would rather not contribute to a story about" the bottles. But he offers to forward a message to the artist.
