They say the world works in mysterious ways. No where was that more evident than in a fourth-grade classroom in Ontario, Canada. And it all started 26 years ago.
A little girl, in 1998, wrote a letter while she was in fourth grade. A teacher asked the children to write a letter about the Great Lakes. Then, the letters were tucked into plastic bottles and then tossed into the lakes, likely never to be seen again.
But sometimes fate intervenes. Just a few days ago, 26 years after it was chucked into water, a kindergartner from the same school found the bottle on the shores of Lake St. Clair that it had been sent off from.
Makenzie Van Eyk, center, holds the message in a bottle she threw into Lake St. Clair in southwestern Ontario 26 years ago. Photo by Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board
River Vandenberg found the bottle as he was playing on the sandbars. “I thought it was a map to kill a grave digger or something,” said the kindergarten student.
“There was no date on the letter, so I thought maybe [it was from] this year, maybe last year at most,” his grandmother, Michele, said.
We sent it to school. His teacher contacted us later that day and said that was from 1998. I was shocked.”
The news of the bottle made its way through the school, and a fourth-grade teacher read the note to her class. But she knew a secret – and that was the name of the letter’s author. When she was finished reading, she said a name: Mackenzie (Morris) Van Eyk.
Scarlet, a student in the classroom couldn’t stop her jaw from dropping, while other kids asked the teacher who that person was. “My mouth completely dropped. And everyone was like, ‘Who’s that? Who’s that?’ And I was like, ‘My mother.'”
Makenzie Van Eyk reads the message she put in a bottle 26 years ago to her daughter. Photo by Amy Dodge/CBC
That’s right, Van Eyk’s daughter was in the same grade her mom had been when she sent the letter into the Great Lakes.
Van Eyk, said remembers writing the letter and then sealing it into the bottle using wax. “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.”
It was memorable to do something like that, throw something and think maybe someone will find it later.”
Here’s what the letter said:
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.
My letter is about water in the Great Lakes. We read a book called Paddle-to-the-Sea. It was a very good book.
The story was about a little boy who carved a paddle person out of wood and put it in the water and it travelled through all the Great Lakes. Do you know that all the Great Lakes spell HOMES? I thought that was pretty cool.
I learned at school that water has to go through water cycles to get all the bad stuff out, like germs and lots of other things. The water has been there since God created the world. Isn’t it funny to think that you might be drinking the same water Jesus did?
P.S. Please contact us at St. John the Baptist School. From Makenzie Morris.
For Van Eyk, it was a nice reminder of her days in school, a sort of “time capsule” that she can now share with her daughter. “I definitely wasn’t thinking about it often, so I was very surprised.” Roland St. Pierre, Van Eyk’s teacher at the time, said he came up with the assignment after reading a book, “Paddle-to-the-Sea” to his students. “I had the kids do a writing assignment where they had to mention who they were and mention a few things of what they learned with the water study,” St. Pierre said.
He said that a few bottles had been found right after they students first threw them into the lakes. But when he got a call about this one, he was shocked. “It was wild. I’ve got a lot of ties to this building. I taught 33 years here. It’s close to me. I had forgotten all about it, so it was a real shock.” “For it to survive 26 years without breaking down, it’s kind of surprising.”
