A Southington teen’s message in a bottle from a decade ago turned up in the Meriden section of the Quinnipiac River during a waterway cleanup last month.
Michael Wieloch, a volunteer with the Quinnipiac River Watershed Association, found the glass root beer bottle during a cleanup event on April 15 and could see the note inside.
“Hey person who finds this, I’m Amanda!” the note says. “I’m helping my best friend ever Shantel babysit her kid brother and sister.”
The girl’s note includes a date, April 26, 2007, and says that she’s 15 years old. It includes her cell phone number as well as a Myspace page. Neither the phone number nor the web page are active.
“This bottle started out in Southington CT, tell me where it ends up!” the teen wrote.
Wieloch said he found the bottle on the river bank “buried in a bunch of bushes.” The screw-on cap was tight enough that no water had gotten to the note.
“It had been floating around the river for 10 years,” he said.
David James, QRWA president, said it’s one of the most unusual items cleanup volunteers have pulled from the river.
“They brought it to the registration table and we opened it up,” he said. “It was clear enough still, even though it has apparently been in the river for 10 years, to see the note inside.”
Volunteers are accustomed to hauling old tires, crumpled beer cans, shopping carts and construction debris from the river.
“To a lot of people, (the river) is an avenue or medium that takes things away. It’s a trash disposal,” James said. “For this person, it was a means of reaching out.”
He said the note joins a prosthetic wooden leg found at another cleanup as the most unique items.
“We still have that leg,” James said.
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