In a twist of fate, a Canadian family has discovered an unexpected link between past and present. Makenzie Van Eyk was taken aback when she learned that a message in a bottle she had written nearly 30 years ago as a school project had resurfaced — and that it was found by none other than her daughter, Scarlet.
According to a report by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Makenzie, then in fourth grade, participated in a class project in 1998, where students wrote letters and released them into Lake St. Clair. Fast forward 26 years, and the bottle was discovered by kindergartener River Vandenberg near the very spot where it had been set adrift. River, who attends the same elementary school as Makenzie once did, initially believed the letter might be a map or something mysterious. His grandmother, Michele, assumed the note was a recent find until the school confirmed its origin.
The school surprised Scarlet by reading the letter aloud in her class, building suspense until revealing Makenzie’s name. “My mouth completely dropped,” Scarlet said. “And everyone was like, ‘Who’s that?’ And I was like, ‘My mother.'”
Makenzie shared her amazement at the news, admitting she had not thought about the project in years. However, she vividly recalled the experience. “It was one of the first things I ever printed and got to do something with,” she said. Reflecting on the moment, she added, “It was memorable to do something like that, throw something and think maybe someone will find it later.”
The teacher behind the original project, Roland St. Pierre, expressed his own astonishment at the bottle’s survival. “It was a real shock. For it to survive 26 years without breaking down, it’s kind of surprising,” he noted. “It’s emotional.”
Makenzie’s letter mentioned reading Paddle-to-the-Sea by Holling C. Holling, a story about a boy who sets a carved wooden figure on a journey through the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean — an inspiration that, decades later, connected mother and daughter in an extraordinary way.
