In 1998, a fourth grader named Makenzie Morris typed out a letter about the waters of the Great Lakes on a computer in her classroom, as part of a class assignment from her teacher, Roland St. Pierre, at St. John the Baptist Catholic Elementary School in Belle River, Ontario. Once the letter was printed, nine-year-old Makenzie rolled it up, sealed it inside a plastic bottle with wax, and walked with her classmates to a pier where the Belle River empties into Lake St. Clair. There, roughly 32 students let their bottles go into the water, most likely never expecting to hear from them again. Twenty-six years later, in the fall of 2024, one of those bottles surfaced near the pier on the same lake where it had been thrown in. It was found by a kindergartner from the very same school, and it eventually made its way into a fourth-grade classroom where Makenzie's own daughter, now a student there herself, happened to be sitting.
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