Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 124

4A DETROIT FREE JAN. 19, 1984 MS Seaman relishes life on rusty river barge i By MICHAEL BENCSIK Free Press Special Writer Free Press Photo by PAULINE LUBENS Jack Mather in front of his two-room river barge, where he watches over a dredging company's ships. "I have friends who tell me, 'Jack, you got it I often think they're right," he says. When a visitor asks where the bathroom is, Mather replies, "Outside." "Where?" asks the guest. "Anywhere," says Mather.

(He later explains that a bathroom in a nearby workshed is unusable in winter because the shed is unheated.) His life is as simple as his lodgings. Inconveniences as well as conveniences are relatively few his fuel oil heater occasionally breaks down and his refrigerator motor conked out a couple weeks ago but can be irksome. "It's sort of hard to get a repairman out here," he says with a chuckle. MATHER'S SOLITUDE is less than complete, however. His wife, Edna, lives in Trenton and friends from downriver often visit, especially in summer, when Mather's guardhouse is only a short, pleasurable boat ride away.

Once the river freezes solid, Mather also gets regular company from friends and family who don't mind a brisk mile-long walk on ice. But in fall and spring, when the ice bridge is weak, he sometimes goes for weeks without seeing a soul except the captain of a passing ship. "Last year was a real pain," Mather recalls. "The ice was thick enough for a while that you couldn't get a (small) boat through it, but it wasn't really strong enough to walk on." When the weather allows, Mather treks back and forth to his barge in his own motorboat. He also has a small aluminum boat that he can push across the ice in late fall and spring, one foot on the ever-thinning ice and one in the boat.

He says he usually breaks through twice a year and has already reached his quota this winter. "Twice I was out and went down once to here (he points to the top of his boot, just below the knee). The other time I went in up to my waist." A FEW YEARS AGO, Mather broke through while bringing back groceries from Grosse He on his sled. "I went through and so did the sled," he says. "I lost $90 in groceries and 100 pounds of dog food." The dog food was for his two companions on the barge, a pair of Labrador retrievers named Bruiser and Sweetie.

Mather found Sweetie on the ice about five years ago. She was a beaten, bedraggled, sickly looking pooch. Gradually, though, she came to trust Mather and has been around ever since. In winter, the dogs roam all over the ice-choked river; recently they were spotted about a mile upriver, on the Canadian shore. If they don't get nabbed by immigration officials, Mather knows the dogs will be back.

EDNA MATHER, 55, a registered nurse at Riverside Osteopathic Hospital in Trenton, says she generally doesn't worry too much about her husband because he has always taken care of himself. But when the ice is weak, the matter of his safety nags at her a bit. "He starts playing around and going places he tells me not to go. And that's when something will happen," she says. "I tell him, 'Hey, what are you trying to do, make me About a mile off the eastern shore of Grosse He, and a couple hundred yards from an imaginary line separating the United States and Canada, lives a seaman named Jack Mather.

He doesn't sail the oceans anymore, and it has been years since he hitched a ride on a passing lake freighter. But the 61-year-old Mather still enjoys the solitude of a sailor's life, living alone in a two-room shelter atop a rusty barge moored in the middle of the Detroit River. Mather has spent much of the last seven years in his river lookout, guarding a small fleet of barges and tugs strung along a narrow strip of land just north of Stony Island. The ships belong to Dunbar Sullivan, a dredging company that has moored and repaired its vessels in the river channel since the 1920s. Aside from curious kids who motor out to poke around the boats and dredging machinery maybe with the thought of permanently borrowing some of it Mather shares his spit of land mostly with visiting mink, muskrat, foxes, raccoons and an occasional horned owl.

On winter weekends, he shares it with ice fishermen, some of whom don't make the most fastidious neighbors. "They were all over here Saturday and Sunday," Mather says. "They left their damn beer cans everywhere." MATHER, a solidly built man, has the lined, leathery face of someone who has spent much of his life outdoors. That face has been heading into the wind for 46 years, since Mather ran away from his Grosse He home at age 15 to go to sea. He shrugs off a suggestion that the solitary nature of his job would send most people packing.

"Oh, once in a while I'll get lonesome, but not often," he says. "There is plenty to do around here. I can take a walk, read, put on the radio or go fishing but the fishing has stunk. I was out this morning and didn't see a thing." Mather is concerned more with matters such as the quality of fishing and the dwindling number of blue heron than having someone to eat dinner with. "Every year, there are fewer and fewer of them," he says of the graceful heron, which for decades populated the southern reaches of the Detroit River.

"They don't nest out here anymore and just a few years ago there were dozens of nests in the cove off of Stony. I don't know why they're moving away." HE TALKS while sitting in a padded chair in his quarters. An electric space heater warms his feet. Overhead hang a pair of towels on a clothesline strung between the two-by-fours that brace the roof. The walls of the small room are covered with pictures of ships.

An old Jewel stove sits in a corner by the door. Beyond that, creature comforts are few. When coming in from outside, for example, Mather doesn't have to wipe his feet on a rug. There isn't one. His other room has a bed in one corner and more ships' pictures.

A television sits on an old wooden chair and three fishing rods rest against a dresser. a She says Mather likes to explore coves and marshes around Stony Island, where the fast current keeps the river from freezing over as well as in other places. She remains good-natured about her husband's line of work, though. "He's got it made out there," she says, drawing out the words. "All his buddies come cruising in there on their boats in the summer.

In the fall it's the duck hunters and in winter it's the ice fishermen. "If you have a bad winter and you get separated from the mainland, then it can be bad. But that's his life and that's the way he wants it. I'm enough of an independent person that it doesn't bother me." MATHER has always been pretty independent, too. He says he was bored when he quit school at age 15 and went to England (an adventure-minded uncle paid his way), where he got a job as a deckhand on the sailing ship Pimar.

It carried grain from Australia to Ireland. A few years later, when the United States entered World War II, Mather joined the Coast Guard and served in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. After the war, he got his first and last office job in Ford Motor then-fledgling public relations office. He gave plant tours and the like. "I was there about a year and I hated it the entire he recalls.

"Being behind a desk all day just is not right for me, so I quit and started driving trucks For the next 16 years, he drove his rig between Michigan and California and a lot of places in between, sometimes staying on the road for three weeks at a stretch. He also married and had four children. In the early '60s, he was inspired to sell his truck and buy a cattle ranch in northern Michigan, near Onaway. That experiment lasted eight years. "The kids didn't like it, the wife didn't like it and I couldn't make any money at it," Mather says.

SO IT WAS back on the road again for another six years as a truck driver, until he got the job with Dunbar Sullivan. His first wife died in 1968 and he and Edna were wed a couple of years later. Between them, they have six grown children. Matthew, 24, Mather's youngest son, is studying to be a ship captain at the Great Lakes Maritime Academy in Traverse City. "At least I'll get one sailor out of the family," says Mather with a smile.

For the next few years, Mather intends to keep living on his river perch. But he and Edna are salting away plans to move near Onaway, to a house on the Black River, an old river man's perfect retirement haven. "It's only a couple acres, but being up there it is like having 15,000 acres," he says. "I think we're going to enjoy it." Not that he considers life all that rough now. "I have friends who tell me, 'Jack, you got it he says.

"I often think they're right." Go fly and multiply, turkey! Hi? LOCATED FOR 6 YEARS AT ALIGNMENT SPECIAL FRAZH0 (lO) GROESBECK (M-97) arfat By JUDITH MALONE Free Press Staff Writer OYER 100 DEALERS! BRAKE SPECIAL FRONT DISCS LABOR aW V. COME RAIN OR SHINEI Hav 62,000 ft. of ENCLOSED SHOPPING $999 MOST CARS PLEASURE DRUM DISC SPECIALISTS FOREIGN DOMESTIC DRAWING Evary Friday )cJ OPEN A LC-" Friday i3 ivovV; If Sat. Sunday mm. The area is about 40 percent tiirber and 60 percent farmland.

Birds released last year at both the Rose Lake and Waterloo recreation areas already have doubled their population, he said. Stewart said wild turkeys have a leg up on their domestic kin. Because cross-breeding reduces the wild turkey's ability to survive on its own, it is illegal in Michigan to release pen-reared turkeys in the wild, Stewart says. Stewart said wild turkeys have a leg up on their domestic kin, which he described as short-legged, big-breasted and stupid. It is illegal in Michigan to release pen-reared turkeys in the wild.

In southern Michigan, hunting wild toms is allowed from mid-April to mid-May in the Allegan State Game Area between Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo, where restocking began in 1954. The DNR has a toll-free number, 1-800-292-7800, for calls about poaching, and the Michigan Wild Turkey Federation offers a $250 reward for evidence leading to the conviction of anyone illegally killing a wild turkey in the state. The wild turkey is back in Oakland after almost 100 years. A victim of hunters and land development, the bird disappeared from the area near the end of the 19th Century. Last week, 17 birds 14 hens and three toms arrived from Missouri and were released in the Seven Lakes Recreation Area in Holly by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

The mini-media event was attended by DNR officials, conservationists, reporters and photographers. Caged for more than a day after their capture, the birds took off for parts unknown at the speed of hawks rather than the vultures they resemble. The turkey's mission is simple: Be fruitful and multiply. DNR officials expect the birds to adapt easily to their new home. "We're similar in weather and habitat condition" to Missouri, said Al Stewart, a DNR wildlife biologist.

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