An unexpected message from the past is being delivered to a family in Canada, and they are enjoying it.Makenzie Van Eyk told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) on Wednesday, Nov. 6, how she put a message in a bottle into Lake St. Clair in 1998 for a class assignment and didn’t give it any more consideration until her daughter found it 26 years later.
Van Eyk informed the journal that she was given the task of writing a letter about the water in the Great Lakes while she was a fourth-grader at St. John the Baptist Catholic Elementary School in Belle River, Ontario.
After putting her message in a plastic bottle and throwing it into Lake St. Clair, she quickly forgot about it.
That is, until the bottle was found on a jetty by River Vandenberg, a kindergartener who is currently enrolled in the same Ontario school.
Vandenberg’s grandmother told CBC, “I assumed [the letter] was from this year, or maybe last year at most, because there was no date on it.” We sent it on to the school. Later that day, his teacher contacted and said it was from 1998. “I was taken aback.”
After reading the note, the teacher made the decision to surprise Van Eyk’s daughter Scarlet, who just so happened to be in Vandenberg’s classroom.
The name scrawled on the paper 26 years earlier was revealed when the teacher read the letter aloud at the end of the school day.
Scarlet told CBC that she was shocked. “Everyone asked, ‘Who is it? Who is that? And I exclaimed, “My mom!”
Van Eyk said she was shocked to find the letter and how long it had been preserved. She recalls writing the note and using wax to seal it in the bottle.
Van Eyk told the CBC that he was “very surprised because I definitely wasn’t thinking about it often.”
She remarked, “I think that process has really stuck with me.” One of the first things I ever printed on paper and had the chance to utilize was a computer lab that our school acquired at the same time. “Doing something like that, throwing something, and hoping someone would find it later was memorable.”
Roland St. Pierre, her own instructor, came up with the idea. He told the source that he had “forgotten all about” the project until he got a call from the school informing him of the new discovery. It “was a real shock,” he said.
Finding out that one of the bottles had withstood the test of time was a “emotional” event for the retired educator, who said, “For it to survive 26 years without breaking down, it’s kind of surprising.”
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