A Kelowna woman is on a mission to reunite a love letter she found in a bottle near a B.C. lake with the couple involved.
Kessa Desmarais was visiting family in Kamloops this past weekend. On Sunday, she went to a favourite walking spot with her mother and their dogs near Tobiano golf course on Kamloops Lake.
“We usually walk along the shoreline, because the dogs like to play in the water,” Desmarais told Lodestar Media. “We were walking up a little higher, kind of in the brush... there's driftwood everywhere.”
As she was watching her step, near Bruker Marina, she spotted the bottle.
“I noticed it had paper in it and I was like, 'No way. Is this a message in a bottle?' That's only something you hear about, right? It's not something you actually find,” said Desmarais.
'A beautiful love letter'
She’s a big fan of romance books and movies so she knew she had to read the letter.
"I'm trying to get it open and I can't twist it open, so I'm like hitting it against the logs, trying to just loosen the lid and then I did eventually twist it open, and there was a little bit of water in the bottle,” she recalled.
As she slowly pulled the letter out, she saw it was written on May 24, 2011.
"It was definitely ripping as I was unrolling it. But I laid it out on a log, and the sun was really hot, so it dried it really quickly. It's pretty readable and in beautiful handwriting,” said Desmarais.
Even though the paper was over 14 years old and wrinkled, she could make out most of what was written. It was addressed to a man named Tanner James.
“It was a beautiful love letter, like so romantic,” Desmarais said. "He was moving to Victoria, so she was really heartbroken and torn on what to do. It sounds like she was maybe debating moving with him, but wasn't quite ready for that.”
The letter was only signed off with the letter "C."
“She was just really sad that he was leaving and didn't want things to end, but didn't want to hold him back.”
Did they make it?
In an effort to reunite the letter with its rightful owners, Desmarais shared her discovery in a local Facebook group.
“I haven’t heard from either of them but I just thought it would be really cool to hear the rest of their story and maybe return the letter to them,” she said.
She kept the contents of the letter private and didn’t share all the details.
“It feels like I'm reading somebody's journal,” said Desmarais. "It's super personal. She's probably writing this at night, pouring her heart out, and then throws it in the river, thinking no one's ever gonna see it again."
The social media post garnered tons of reaction from the community with more than 700 reactions.
“You never would think that if you throw a bottle in the river, it's going to get found 14 years later,” she said, adding the letter is being kept at her parent's place in Kamloops. “People are just loving the story.”
Desmarais believes the couple was in their early 20s when the letter was written. Now, they'd be in their mid-30s.
"I'd just love for them to reach out. I would love to hear like, what happened? I'm just super curious because now I feel like I'm in the middle of a romance novel,” she said.
“Did they end up together? Are they in a new relationship?”
