And, just like that, a decades-old mystery has been solved. The Mystery… of the Garfield Phones.
Put that way, it sounds like a lost Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys (or even Three Investigators) book. It was a real mystery, however. For decades, at random intervals, plastic Garfield phones have been washing ashore on beaches in Northern France. They had to be coming from somewhere… but where?
The answer? The Garfield Cave.
Oh, okay. It’s not actually called The Garfield Cave. But it should be, and from now on it might be given that name.
For more than thirty years the assumption was that a crate – or perhaps multiple crates – of the phones had fallen off of a ship and into the waters of northern France. Many attempts have been made to locate the theoretical submerged crates, with no luck.
Then came the break.
Claire Simonin-Le Meur, president of the environmental group Ar Viltansoù, was performing routine cleanup on one of the beaches recently when she was approached by local farmer Rene Morvan. He told her that he’d seen the source of the phones about thirty years prior, when he and some friends were exploring seaside caves. The caves weren’t always accessible, because they are underwater during high tide. But his group had gone exploring shortly after a major storm and saw a huge wrecked crate of Garfield phones in one of the caves.
Over the years, they’ve been carried out, one by one, by the tidal currents. They’d come to rest on local beaches, where the scourge of Jim Davis reached out from pre-cellphone days to harass people in the present.
With no murders or sex, it really does have the feel of an old-school young adult mystery. Now we just have to figure out where the feet are coming from in the Salish Sea….
Question of the Night : What’s your favorite newspaper comic strip?
