Whiskey, water and fate A message in a bottle brought Erich Bauch the love of his life

SCHULENBURG - They were married 55 years - would have been 56, but she went into the hospital for that operation and never got out. Wasn’t a hospital within a hundred miles of here she hadn’t been to there at the end, and throughout it all, 82-year-old Erich Bauch took care of her. "Her name was Dixie Dale but I always cut it short, called her D.D," the man says. "My D.D."

The place is gone, too - Lake Corpus Christi, which has covered much of the Nueces River country of Erich Bauch’s boyhood, was just scratchings on an engineer’s drawing board when this all happened. But he still has a story of whiskey, water and fate, and how those elements converged to hasten a union that has produced three children, four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. It’s the best message-in-a-bottle story ever, a different kind of story than the one in the recent Kevin Costner movie. It’s certainly different from that song by the Police that was a kind of existential "Tie a Yellow Ribbon."

It goes like this:

Erich Bauch’s parents came out of Fayette County, and they found 60 acres north of Mathis, 35 miles in from the coast, and started farming it. They grew cotton and potatoes, raised hogs and cattle, ate fried chicken for Sunday dinner and had four children, the youngest of whom they named Erich. Erich grew up during the Depression, and the land that had always been hard and hot and flat seemed even less generous than usual. And so Bauch went into the Army for three reasons: "Breakfast, dinner and supper."

He went in on Aug. 15, 1935 - the same day Wiley Post and Will Rogers crashed their plane - and hooked up with the 15th Field Artillery. In those days the 12th was still a mounted division, and he figured that would be his luck - to get off a horse on his daddy’s farm and get on another one for Uncle Sam. But he got into the 15th.

Two years later, he got orders to ship out to Hawaii to be a drill instructor, and they cut him a 90-day leave beforehand. Erich the soldier went home, but his father just saw an extra pair of hands, and he always had use for an extra pair of hands. One August afternoon, though, in 1937, Erich got caught up enough to take off with his old single-shot .22 rifle, walking toward the river to plink at whatever he saw and pass the time.

There was good fishing in that river, and upstream about a mile a man by the name of Charlie Hart had been doing that. His friend Curley Butler was there, too. It’s always hot on the Nueces in August, and Curley Butler was tipping a whiskey bottle in the interest of keeping the dust out of his throat, not to mention protecting himself against deadly snakes, and before you knew it the bottle was empty. And then Curley took a piece of paper and wrote their two addresses - one for the Harts, one for Curley - and rolled up the paper and corked the bottle and let it go in the river.

It didn’t take too long for the bottle to float down around where Erich was looking for targets. So he saw the bottle and started shooting at it. Then he noticed something in it, some kind of paper, and he put down the .22 single-shot and started throwing sticks out beyond the floating bottle so that the ripples would push it toward him and he could get it without getting all wet.

He succeeded in recovering the bottle, and found the rolled-up paper inside with two addresses in Freer, Texas. Erich had a habit of carrying paper and pencil in his left breast pocket, and he took those out and copied down the addresses.

Now Erich had a little story to tell at supper that evening, and he had a joke to play: He’d wait until he got over to Hawaii and then spin a yarn about how that whiskey bottle had floated all the way across the ocean, and write to those two addresses in Freer about the bottle’s long journey.

But Erich’s mama said, no, don’t do that, it wouldn’t be right. And Erich was taught to mind his mama. Fall came and Erich’s leave was up and he went off to Hawaii. And when he got there he still had the paper he’d copied the two addresses onto, and he wrote a couple of letters saying he’d found the bottle with the note inside in Freer, which was a lot more true but a lot less exotic than saying he’d found it in Hawaii.

Mr. Hart didn’t care to write back to the soldier in Hawaii, and neither did Mrs. Hart, but launching a message in a bottle and getting a letter back from a soldier in Hawaii is pretty interesting when you’re 14 years old, so the Harts’ daughter asked permission to write back.

They deliberated and then they said, All right, Dixie Dale. You can write that Army man back. And she did. And they kept that up for about a year and a half, exchanging news and the minutiae of one another’s lives, until Erich came home for a visit. He went to the Hart house in Freer wearing his uniform, tall and confident, and everybody sat and got acquainted. He took Dixie out on their first date, and they went to the movies, but Dixie made him take her home because she got the measles during the picture. Erich was enjoying the movie quite a bit until Dixie took sick.

They were married in Alice on Nov. 27, 1942. D.D. Bauch was often heard to say that she met her husband over a whiskey bottle. That’s a true story, although not everybody Erich and D.D. Bauch tried to tell it to believed it to be so. But they knew. They knew that what makes those bottles float isn’t air, it’s potential. It’s not the message inside so much as what the person who finds the message does with it. It’s a blend of chance and willful decisions that becomes important only when viewed with hindsight: If Curley hadn’t been tipping the bottle that day, the message wouldn’t have had a vessel. If Erich Bauch’s daddy had decided it was a good afternoon for his boy to clean out the shed, he never would have gotten away that afternoon. If he had succeeded in hitting the bottle with his first shot, the message would have been lost. If he hadn’t kept the addresses, the correspondence never would have begun. Then there’s the not inconsiderable bit about Dixie and Erich having to meet, and her falling in love with him, and he with her.

A man with a story like that, he thinks about those things that had to happen - and how easily they might not have happened, and maybe he holds that person just a little more dear. Maybe that’s why he carried her picture, the picture of a dark-haired 14-year-old girl, all through World War II, through Africa and Italy and Japan. Maybe that’s why he carried it another 14 years in the Air Force. Maybe that’s why he carried it through all his decades as an itinerant Texas lawman, until he retired here. Maybe that’s why he was the only one who could communicate with her as she lay dying in the hospital. He still keeps paper and pencil in his left breast pocket. You never know.

Patrick Beach worked as pop music critic for The Des Moines Register until spring 1997, when he was run out of town by an angry mob of Neil Diamond fans. Since then he’s written features for the Austin American-Statesman. He lives in Austin with his wife, Allison, and their two sons.