Student learns personal connection with message in a bottle found after 26 years
It was like an accidental note to self nearly three decades into the future.
It’s rare for bottled messages to get seen by anyone, let alone their immediate family. However, that’s exactly what happened to Makenzie Van Eyk when she cast a note into a lake and had it read by her own daughter — 26 years later.
“I definitely wasn’t thinking about it often, so I was very surprised,” the Canuck told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation while recounting the improbable occurrence.
The bottled correspondence was part of an assignment the Canuck had received in 1998 while in the fourth grade at St. John the Baptist Catholic Elementary School in Belle River, Ontario.
She had been tasked with writing about the water quality in the Great Lakes and then bottling the note and tossing it into Lake St. Clair.
Makenzie then likely forgot about the school project until this fall, when River Vandenberg, a kindergartener at the school, discovered the mail ale while visiting the water body with his grandmother.
“I thought it was a map to kill a grave digger or something,” said the kindergarten student, who realized that was not the case after reading it.
“This letter is coming from Makenzie Morris and I go to St John the Baptist School. I am in Grade 4 in Mr. St. Pierre’s class,” the message read. “My letter is about water in the Great Lakes. We read a book called Paddle-to-the-Sea. It was a very good book.”
Flabbergasted, Vandenberg and his gran Michelle sent the elementary school, where a fourth-grade teacher read the message to a class that happened to include Makenzie’s daughter Scarlet.
She couldn’t believe her ears. “My mouth completely dropped,” exclaimed the mind-boggled tyke. “And everyone was like, ‘Who’s that? Who’s that?’ And I was like, ‘My mother.’”
It was unsurprisingly a full-circle moment for her mother Makenzie, who had always wondered what happened to the note.
“It was memorable to do something like that, throw something and think maybe someone will find it later,” she said.
Roland St. Pierre, the now-retired teacher who dreamt up the assignment all those years ago, was equally moved by the miraculous discovery.
“I had forgotten all about it, so it was a real shock,” exclaimed the ex-pedagogue, adding that he was surprised that the note survived for “26 years without breaking down.”
While certainly improbable, this isn’t the longest time a bottled message has lasted before getting found.
That honor goes to a 200-year-old message in a bottle that was unearthed during an archaeological dig in northern France in September.
The message was written by archaeologist P.J Féret, who wrote that he orchestrated an excavation at the same site in 1825.
