Message in a bottle: communication beyond borders

 By Liv Stecker

 The banks of rivers are often the keepers of secrets and mysteries that wash down from upstream civilizations and plant themselves in the gravel and mud somewhere along the way.  From human bones to ancient tools, riverbanks and shorelines are some of the best places to find unexpected treasures. Steve Buchholz stumbled across something he never expected on the banks of the Kettle River earlier this spring as the flood waters began to recede. It was a bottle, sealed from the turbulent waters of the spring-runoff engorged flow of the tributary river. Steve found it near Kamloops Islands, just before the Kettle River spills into the Mighty Columbia and becomes absorbed in Lake Roosevelt. Inside the bottle was a rolled up piece of paper.

Steve and his wife Michelle carefully opened the bottle and unrolled the paper, now yellowed with exposure to sunlight refracted through the glass of the bottle. The note, scratched in crayon between word-search puzzles torn out of a subscription magazine, was from nearly six years ago, and entirely different country.

 "Hi my name is Jeremy Peter - I am 8 years old - I live in Lake Country , BC - we are camping at the Little Dipper Hideaway Campground.”  it reads. Steve and Michelle turned to social media to track down the sender of the message, and after more than 100 shares on Facebook, someone in Kelowna, British Columbia, tagged Anita Peter, Jeremy’s mom.

“Steve went walking on the Kettle River beach and found this bottle, brought it home unopened. When we opened it, on the backside of a crossword puzzle page was a msg. So Please share this maybe we will find Jeremy Peter, 8 at the time, who lives or lived in Lake Country BC and let him know we found his msg. (expiration date of the paper was 2011 so we know it’s approximately that old ),” the Facebook post read. Michelle was able to make the post public so that it could be shared more widely and a friend posted it to a buy, sell and trade page in Kelowna. After they made contact with Anita, Michelle updated the post:

“UPDATE: We found Jeremy! His mom contacted me and left a comment, will close this tomorrow. We would like to thank each and everyone of you for sharing and helping us find little Jeremy , Very short journey but exciting nonetheless,3 Yay!!”

On May 11, Anita commented on the Buchholz’ post:

“That's hilarious. That is Jeremy Peter's bottle, my son. We have a yearly site at the Little Dipper and decided to send a message in a bottle one afternoon. Very cool!” Michelle sent Anita a message and got the full story behind the bottle.  Anita told the Buchholz’ that Jeremy had indeed dropped that bottle and a few more in 2008 when they were camping in their usual summer spot at the Little Dipper Hideaway. She voiced disappointment at first that the bottle had been rediscovered still in the Kettle River, until she realized that the Buchholz found the bottle at the very southern end of the Kettle, nearly 100 winding river miles south of the campground, and in the U.S.!

After tracking down the Peter family, Michelle was amused to discover that Anita is good friends with one of her cousins.

“It’s such a small world, really,” Michelle laughs. She says lucky things like this happen to her husband a lot. “Steve is always finding stuff and having lucky things happen to him. He’s just that kind of guy!” but according to Steve, a message in a bottle was the last thing he expected to find as the flood waters receded from the banks he likes to wander. Steve and Michelle plan to return the bottle and note to Jeremy so he can keep it as a souvenir, a reminder that long journeys and international borders can take you to new places, with a little time.