BALDWIN, Mich. — A few weeks ago, Tammy Bailey and her husband were clearing out branches on their property near Baldwin. Down by the Baldwin River edge, upstream from where it meets the Pere Marquette River, they found something.
"My husband found a bottle," Bailey said. "He was just going to toss it aside, but then we heard a noise."
Inside the bottle were some old, oxidized coins and a note. She had to cut the plastic bottle open to retrieve the brittle paper.
"The note said, 'Please contact Billy Stone,' and gave me an address in Grand Haven and the date was September 16, I believe, of 1996," said Bailey.
That was 27 years ago.
She posted on the Grand Haven Informed Facebook page a photo of the bottle and note.
"My wife said, 'Billy, you gotta look on your Facebook page,'" said Bill Stone.
Bill remembers the day vividly in 1996, when he brought his four children to the Newaygo Bridge along the Muskegon River.
"This actually started in fourth grade," Bill said. "In Mrs. Stefani's fourth-grade class, I read Letters to the Sea and I wanted to do something like that."
He had each of the kids write a letter and place it and four dimes into four bottles.
"I can still see them today peering over the railing," Bill said. "Looking down as their bottles are falling in there and we watched them float away. Then we went across the street to get ice cream."
Billy Stone, who was 8 years old when his dad, Bill, had him drop the note, heard from his sister someone had found his bottle.
"The memory started to vaguely come back to me," Billy said.
He doesn't remember the day specifically, but does remember doing fun things like that with his dad.
"If you're going to throw your garbage into the river, leave a note in it so some good comes out of it," Billy said. "Go do fun things with your kid."
Bill and Bailey, both living in Grand Haven, actually met up after she found the bottle.
"I was utterly dumbfounded," Bill said.
Yet, a mystery still remains. Bill says the bottles were dropped off in the Muskegon River, but they were found 27 years later miles north in the Baldwin River.
"In all of the people we’ve talked to about the waterways, and my brother is a hydrogeologist, these two waterways don’t connect," said Bailey, "There’s no physical way the bottle could have been dropped where it was and found where it was by waterways."
They have theories, of course. Maybe an eagle picked up the bottle and carried it, maybe a bear or even another human. Unfortunately, they'll likely never know.
"I love a good mystery, I love history, geography," said Bill, "I think it’s the best of all three of them."
The other three bottles the children threw into the river have yet to be found.
"For whatever reason 8-year-old me was really excited to send some messages in bottles," Billy said. "And now, 27 years later, unexpectedly, it comes back around."
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