Mom's Childhood Message in a Bottle Finds Its Way to Her Daughter 26 Years Later: 'Mouth Completely Dropped'
Amazingly, Makenzie Van Eyk's fourth-grade message, which she placed into Lake St. Clair, recently found its way to her daughter Scarlet
Hans Barten/Getty
A message in a bottle as seen on Getty.A family in Canada is celebrating the arrival of an unlikely message from the past.
On Wednesday, Nov. 6, Makenzie Van Eyk told the Canadian Broadcasting Coorporation (CBC) how she'd placed a message in a bottle into Lake St. Clair for a school project in 1998 and never gave it a second thought — until it found its way to her daughter 26 years later.
Van Eyk told the outlet that she had been tasked with writing a letter about the water in the Great Lakes as a young fourth grader at St. John the Baptist Catholic Elementary School in Belle River, Ontario.
She then placed her note into a plastic bottle, dropped it into Lake St. Clair and forgot about the whole thing.
That is until kindergartener River Vandenberg — a current student at the same Ontario school — found the bottle by a jetty.
"There was no date on the letter, so I thought maybe [it was from] this year, maybe last year at most," Vandenberg’s grandmother told the CBC. "We sent it to school. His teacher contacted us later that day and said that was from 1998. I was shocked."
The educator read the note, then decided to spring a surprise on Van Eyk's daughter Scarlet — who, through an amazing coincidence, shared a classroom with Vandenberg.
At the close of a school day, the teacher read out the note and revealed the name written on the paper 26 years earlier.
"My mouth completely dropped,” Scarlet told CBC about her reaction. “Everyone was like, 'Who's that? Who's that?' And I was like, 'My mother!' "
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Van Eyk said when she learned about the letter, she was astonished to find that it had been preserved for so long. She even remembered writing the note and sealing it in the bottle with wax.
"I definitely wasn't thinking about it often, so I was very surprised," Van Eyk told CBC.
"I think that process really stuck with me. This was also right when our school got a computer lab … one of the first things that I ever printed on paper and got to do something with," she added. "It was memorable to do something like that, throw something and think maybe someone will find it later."
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The idea came from her own teacher Roland St. Pierre, who told the outlet that he'd "forgotten all about" the project until he got the call from the school about the recent finding. He noted that it "was a real shock."
The retired teacher said it was an “emotional” moment to hear that one of the bottles stood the test of time, adding, "for it to survive 26 years without breaking down, it's kind of surprising."
