A Little Girl Dropped a Message in a Bottle Into a Lake. Her Daughter’s Classmate Found It 26 Years Later

In 1998, a fourth grader named Makenzie typed and printed a letter, rolled it up and tucked it into a plastic bottle. Once her elementary school classmates had done the same, they all tossed their messages in bottles into a nearby lake.

Makenzie grew up, got married and had kids (today, her name is Makenzie Van Eyk). But she never forgot about her message in a bottle and often wondered what happened to it.

Now, 26 years later, her bottle has been discovered by a student at the same school. The bottle made its way to the classroom of Van Eyk’s daughter, who is now in the same grade her mother was when she wrote the message.

“I got a phone call from the school secretary and she said, ‘Do you have a couple minutes?’” Van Eyk tells Good Morning America’s Yi-Jin Yu. “Typically, when the school calls and asks that question, you’re usually pretty frightened as a parent, but she said, ‘It’s good news. I just need you for a few moments. We found a letter that you wrote, and I think you're going to want to hear this.’”

A student named River Vandenberg found the bottle this fall while exploring the shores of Lake St. Clair in Ontario with his grandmother. They opened the bottle and read the undated letter inside, which said, in part: “This letter is coming from Makenzie Morris and I go to St. John the Baptist School. I am in grade four in Mr. St. Pierre’s class. … P.S. Please contact us at St. John the Baptist School.”

Vandenberg is a kindergartner at the school mentioned in the letter, St. John the Baptist Catholic Elementary School. He brought it with him to school, where a teacher read it out loud to a group of fourth graders.

One of those fourth graders was Van Eyk’s daughter, Scarlet Van Eyk, who recognized her mother’s maiden name.

“My mouth completely dropped,” Scarlet tells CBC News’ Bob Becken and Amy Dodge. “And everyone was like, ‘Who’s that? Who’s that?’ And I was like, ‘My mother.’”

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Roland St. Pierre, the teacher who assigned the message-in-a-bottle project back in 1998, is now retired. But he remembers coming up with the idea after his class read Paddle-to-the-Sea by Holling Clancy Holling. The children’s book tells the story of a hand-carved canoe that travels from the headwaters of the Great Lakes through the St. Lawrence Seaway to the ocean.

He instructed his students to write letters introducing themselves and explaining what they’d learned about the Great Lakes from the book. After stashing the papers in bottles—which they sealed with wax—they went to the pier at the end of the Belle River, which feeds into Lake St. Clair. There, the fourth graders dropped their assignments into the water.

Some of the bottles were found within a few months. But others remained in the lake for more than two decades. Whether intentional or not, St. Pierre’s assignment taught students an important lesson about plastic pollution. The fact that the bottle survived for 26 years without breaking down is “not a good thing,” St. Pierre tells CBC News.

Earlier this year, archaeology students in France found an even older message in a bottle. They were excavating an archaeological site in the town of Eu when they discovered a 200-year-old note written in 1825. It had been left by an archaeologist, P.J. Féret, who had worked in the area centuries earlier.

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.