Messages in bottles, balloons, and bait cans

What possesses us to put messages in bottles? Wikipedia suggests several possible motives, including sending distress signals, cultivating pen pals, and studying ocean currents. Presumably the same applies when the medium is a balloon or a can.

There is something undeniably romantic about signing your name to a note and sending it off into the world, unsure whether, when, and by whom it might ever be read. While humans may have a built-in aversion to randomness, these sorts of stories nevertheless seem irresistible.

The following is a list of messages (in chronological order of discovery) sent or retrieved, by air or water, by people in the West Kootenay, that beat the odds by being found. In each heading I’ve indicated where the message originated, where it ended up, how long the journey took, and roughly how far it went.

(Illustration by ChatGPT)

Slocan Park to Miles, Wash., 1953-55 (20 months, 300 km)

In May 1953, Nancy Samsonoff, a teenager from Slocan Park, read a story about sending messages in bottles at sea. She tried it herself, send a note in a bottle that she dropped in the Slocan River.

On Jan. 25, 1955, Dan R. Balcom found the bottle near his home at Miles, Wash., five miles from the mouth of the Spokane River. Dan asked Nancy to become pen pals, suggesting she might also like to write to his younger brother Monty, who is “about your age, 13.”

I don’t know if Nancy accepted the offer, but retrieving messages in bottles was old hat for Dan. It was the third one he’d received from Canada, including one from Castlegar. (Source: Nelson Daily News, Feb. 4, 1955)

Christina Lake to Coulee, Wash., 1969-70 (one year, 250 km)

On April 1, 1969, Jamie Hilton of Slocan put a bottle with a note inside into a stream near Christina Lake. I don’t know what the note said, but on April 16, 1970, the bottle was discovered by Mr. and Mrs. Glen McLean of Coulee, Wash., who got in touch with her. The bottle had evidently travelled south on the Kettle River, but it wasn’t reported exactly where the McLeans found it. Did it make it over the Grand Coulee dam? (Source: Castlegar News, May 7, 1970)

Balfour to Amsterdam, 1971-72 (14 months, 7,400 km)

This one is hard to believe.

On June 9, 1971, Katherine Kukuk of Spokane was fishing with her father, Leon Davey, near Balfour. The weather was bad and the fish weren’t biting. To entertain herself, Kukuk cleaned out a couple of bait cans, wrote two notes and placed them in plastic sandwich bags. 

They explained where and when they were that day, and suggested the finder call Davey in Spokane. The notes went in the cans and the cans went in Kootenay Lake. Kukuk expected they might end up near Portland, or maybe even San Francisco. Instead, in August 1972, Davey received a letter postmarked Amsterdam.

It said: “Wifred [sic] is my name. I plant agriculture in the fields near Den Haag (The Hague). I find your words in a small can.” The letter said Wifred (or Wilfred?) Dekker, a teenage boy, had twice tried to phone Davey collect, as the note had instructed. That didn’t work, but the operator provided Dekker with Davey’s address.

Kukuk speculated that the cans had floated down the Kootenay and Columbia rivers, into the Pacific Ocean, across the Bering and Arctic seas and thence to Holland. Which seems … highly improbable.

Could it have been a prank, pulled off by someone who knew about the can? A few years ago, Vancouver Sun columnist Jane McDougall admitted to doing something like that.

She found a message in a bottle on the beach in the Gulf Islands, signed by two young boys who had a cabin nearby, and dated just a few days before. She took the bottle home, wrote a reply, and a week later gave it to a friend going to Los Angeles, who mailed to the boys from there. The letter claimed the bottle had been found floating in California. (While McDougall thought this was harmless fun, some of her readers thought it was mean-spirited.)

And yet, a Google search does turn up someone in Holland named Wilfred Dekker.

Kukuk planned to write to Dekker to find out more about where he found the can. His letter said he was planning a trip to America. But I could find no follow-up stories. Kukuk died in 2016. Her obituary noted that “She loved fishing with her husband and father at Kootenai [sic], Canada.” She was also well known in Spokane bowling circles. (Sources: Spokane Chronicle, Aug. 23, 1972, and Nelson Daily News, Sept. 7, 1972)

Spokane Chronicle, Aug. 23, 1972

Auburn, Wash., to Edgewood, 1984 (11 days, 650 km)

On Feb. 25, 1984, Dean McLean discovered an inflated orange balloon on the beach in Edgewood.

He popped it and found a message inside: “My Balloon Finder. My name is Joshua Ide. Our school is participating in a Finding-A-PenPal program. Please put this card in an envelope, along with your name, address and the city and state in which you found our card. Then mail this card to us at Lake Dolloff Elementary School, Auburn, Wash., If you write to me, I’ll write back. Feb. 14, 1984.”

There was no word if McLean wrote. (Source: Arrow Lakes News, March 7, 1984)

Castlegar to Darcy, Sask., 1996 (A few days, 1,000 km)

Balloons as advertising: in 1996, Frank Hendriks of Dutch Crunch Autobody in Castlegar attached his business card to three helium balloons with string and let them go. A few days later, Hendriks and his wife Janet received a letter from Jim and Val Hoenecke, who had a farm near Darcy, Sask. It began: “You may find this strange, but we found three balloons in one of our fields …” (Source: Castlegar Sun, Dec. 31, 1996)

Yaak, Mont., to Genelle and beyond, 1994-97 (3.5 years, 250 km)

In 1997, Delor Watson found a bottle floating in the Columbia River near Genelle. It turned out it had been launched in June 1994 by a school in Yaak, Montana that had the distinction of being the only remaining two-room schoolhouse in the state. (It’s still operating.)

Watson gave the bottle to his niece, Ali O’Connor Watson, who was in kindergarten at Morrish school in East Trail. Her class adopted it as a project. Unfortunately, there was no photo of the bottle in the newspaper, but it was described as “a miniature Noah’s Ark … made of wood, painted bright red, [with] two canisters attached to hold messages.”

Amazingly, this was the third time the bottle had been intercepted in the West Kootenay. It had previously been picked up by students in Balfour and at Nelson’s Waldorf, who relaunched it below the Kootenay River dams.

The Morrish class added their own message and put it back in the river. I haven’t found any further sign of its adventures. And I don’t know if the kids in Yaak ever learned how far it went. (Source: Trail Times, Dec. 2, 1997)

Colville to Nelson, 2003 (About a week, 150 km)

Kody Grimes, 18, found an orange balloon in his grandmother’s yard in Nelson’s Rosemont neighbourhood. It had a postcard attached that read: “We want to know how far this went. If you find this postcard, please mail it back to us. Please let us know where you found it, so we can keep track of where our summer reading program goes.”

It was one of 310 balloons released by nine libraries in the Stevens County Rural Library District, to give kids a better understanding of geography. Librarian Andrea Gillaspy-Steinhilper said the balloon experiment was a great way to demonstrate to them that even though Nelson is in Canada, it’s closer than Seattle.

Grimes’ grandmother, Vi Sanders, sent the postcard back as requested. I don’t know how many others they might have received. (Source: Nelson Daily News, June 24, 2003)

Glade to Kettle Falls, 1972-2003 (30 years, 10 months, 130 km)

This one had the longest time elapse before it was discovered and the most heartwarming ending.

On Nov. 18, 1972, Jim Shlakoff and a couple of friends each wrote messages, put them in separate bottles and tossed them the Kootenay River near Glade. His said: “Hi, I’m Jimmy. What is your name? How old are you? I am 10 years old … I live in Glade and go to Tarrys school. Please send to Shoreacres, BC. I hope you write soon.”

While Jim’s friends’ bottles bobbed on down the river, his sank, and he went away feeling deflated. Yet somehow the current eventually picked his bottle up anyway.

Fast forward to September 2003. Dewey McDonald of Othello, Wash., an avid fisherman with a cabin near Kettle Falls, spotted the bottle on shore on a high bank. It took some effort to remove the cork, but once it came off, the bottle reeked of booze.

Dewey tried calling the phone number included in the note several times. It rang, but no one answered. The story, as recounted in the newspaper, didn’t say how Dewey and his wife Sallie ultimately found Jim. But Sallie, along with Jim’s wife Sandy, arranged for the two men to meet at a restaurant in Spokane. Jim knew about it in advance, but it was a surprise to Dewey. 

The two couples talked for almost four hours. Dewey ended up giving the bottle and letter back to Jim. Dewey also planned to visit the Shlakoffs the following summer. A picture appeared in the newspaper of Dewey and Jim, reunited with the letter and bottle. (Source: Castlegar Citizen, Dec. 15, 2004)

Trail to ???, 2009

Balloon as charity fundraiser: the Trail Rotary Club filled a bunch of balloons with waterproof sealed envelopes and at the end of the Silver City Day parade, let them go. Whoever found them would receive instructions on how to donate to Rotary International’s campaign to eradicate polio. I have no idea how successful it was. (Source: Trail Daily Times, May 15, 2009)

Astoria, Ore. to Nelson, 1970s to 2012 (35 years, 950 km)

It didn’t come with a message per se, other than the name engraved on it, but it did make its way home after being thrown in the sea. And I played a small part.

In March 2012, two teenagers discovered a battered urn among some rocks on the north Oregon coast that said “William George Kennedy 1870-1925.” They took it to funeral home director Tom Preston in Astoria, who turned to genealogists and media outlets to find next of kin. Kennedy had been a Bellingham hotel proprietor, and before long some of his second wife’s descendants were found. But Preston wanted it to go to a blood relative. 

He learned that Kennedy had spent time on Kootenay Lake, so he sent an email to the Nelson Star, where I worked, including some genealogical information that contained a critical clue: one of Kennedy’s sons married Jessica Dorothy Hopwood in Nelson in 1922. That name stood out, because there was only one phone listing for Hopwood in Nelson. 

I called John Hopwood, who confirmed Jessica was his aunt and revealed William’s three granddaughters were alive in various places in BC. One of them, Iris Close of Oliver, told me she was surprised to learn her grandfather’s ashes had been found, since she was never aware they were missing.

It later emerged that an Oregon resident had found them 30 to 35 years earlier when cleaning out a closet. Kennedy was his ex-mother-in-law’s uncle. He went out in a boat about 50 miles off Astoria and buried them at sea. But they came back.

Preston sent the ashes to Close, who brought them to Nelson a few months later and had them buried in her father’s cemetery plot.

William Kennedy’s urn, in September 2012, about to be buried in the Nelson cemetery, in the plot of his son, William Jr. 

Iris Close with her cousin John Hopwood in the Nelson cemetery, September 2012.

Baltimore to Goat River, 1939 (Travel time unknown, 3,800 km)

Finally, I’ll throw this one in as well, even though no actual message was involved either.

In 1939, two hikers, John Comer of Creston and Walter Johnson of Wynndel, stumbled across something odd in the Goat River watershed: the remains of a US government weather bureau balloon. Its instruments and parachute were found on the shores of what was described as an “acre-wide lake.” They hoped to collect a reward for returning it. (Source: Vancouver Sun, Sept. 23, 1939)