In life, as well as in life, online, inline, offline, shoreline, clothesline, we plug in.

My paternal ancestors passed a legacy to me that they have protected for generations.

We share a deep, dark secret.

Many, many years ago, a man was given a simple task, an ordinary task, to protect a stash, a cache, but not at the Cash A Ranch.

The man, as a reward, received several jars and boxes of nails, screws, bolts and nuts.

Cigar boxes. Pill bottles. Coffee jars. Match boxes.

A hodgepodge of containers.

Not a spot of rust inside them but plenty of dust, dirt and oil.

Old, torn labels, barely legible.

A prescription for Librium.

A sticker advertising two premium cigars for twenty-five cents.

The man packed the hardware in a scratched-up trunk and stored them behind a clothes dryer in the outside utility room of an unassuming bungalow on a nondescript street in the subtropical heat of south Florida.

He told his son who told his son that the nails, screws, bolts and nuts were valuable beyond compare.

They each in turn reminded the other that the day would come when the material needed to see the light of day.

Or night.

Given the right technology.

Last evening, in the midst of a record-setting cold spell, the time, the date, the phase of the Moon and the technology were finally rightly aligned.

An autonomous submersible, shaped like a piece of driftwood, or the silhouette of an alligator, navigated the backwater channels of a neighbourhood canal, stopping along the reeds at the backyard.

A man, no longer young, slipped out of the house, unlocked the utility room, loaded the boxes, jars and bottles into the submarine shipping container and sent it coursing out into the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico where it will find its way up the Mississippi River, Tennessee River, Flint River and into a small creek to be picked up and carried to a house where a gold refinery will convert the bolts, nails, nuts and screws into the shape of gold coins from whence they originated centuries ago.

Am I that man?

At over a half century in age, I cannot believe I have become him.

The legacy lives on.