Anytime we come up with a wild idea we look for confirmation. I wrote up a description so I could pass it around to some close friends. One of my inspirations for recognizing the military is Scott Keffer, a Navy Chief, currently overseas in Italy. He guided me through our other project in 2007-08 called Photographers for Freedom, when Keffer was deployed to Iraq.

I created a description of the project (MessageInABottle PDF) and started thinking about the logistical details. I started feeling nervous when I started calculating what it would take to build a wall in the park. The main planter is 210 ft long by 18 ft wide. A water bottle is 2.5″ x 8″. Thinking that I would stack the bottles like firewood, it would take approximately 30,000 bottles to build a wall 210 ft long x 6 ft high. If we wanted to collect enough bottles to represent every serviceman/woman engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan (200,000), the wall would have 6-7 layers of 30,000 bottles. That’s a big wall and a LOT of bottles.

The logistics of collection, processing, recording, and preparing the bottles for the park is a daunting task. And what of the construction itself? How will the wall be supported, how will the construction be staged, how will the bottles be attached to each other, what kind of lighting would be required?

I wanted to know if the idea had enough merit to warrant further study. Sometime we fall in love with our own ideas, and this one needed some confirmation before I was going to jump in. The initial reaction from people was good, although most quickly realized what a difficult task lay ahead of us, especially if we wanted something in place before the holidays.