You can’t walk home

By Larry Kaplan
The following chapter is excerpted from Kaplan’s manuscript, “Life and death on a Great Lake,” which chronicles the stories of local fishermen through the twentieth century: from the Carlson family in Leland’s “Fish Town,” to Native American struggles for fishing rights, to the more recent battles against the invasive sea lamprey.
You can’t stand inside Carlson’s Fisheries for very long without having your attention drawn to the 65-year old news clipping that hangs, framed, in the center of the front wall.
“FISHING BOAT BURNS, ONE MAN RESCUED, FATHER DIES,” reads the banner headline of the August 7, 1941 edition of the Leelanau Enterprise.

The Enterprise, then as now, does not use banner headlines very often. The incident began on Tuesday morning, August 5, when Pete and Will Carlson — Bill Carlson’s father and grandfather, Clay Carlson’s grandfather and great-grandfather — left Leland at 5 a.m. on their boat, The Diamond, for a typical day of fishing. The lake was unusually calm, and there was barely any wind. They were heading for fishing waters near South Fox Island, about twenty miles from Leland, a trip they had probably taken hundreds of times before. This one would be different.
In the 1940s, small fishing boats were powered by gasoline engines; these days, diesel, a less volatile fuel, is more common. About two hours after The Diamond left the dock at Leland, Pete Carlson smelled gasoline. He told the story — or more accurately, re-told it — to the Leland Township Library in 1987, which collects oral histories of the local fishing industry.
“When I got back to the engine, I saw that the gas line had broke off next to the carburator (sic). I was just going to reach back and turn the switch off when it backfired and ignite the fire in the boat. So we had one fire extinguisher, just about had it run out of stuff.”
The boat was burning, the fire extinguisher was empty, and there was no lifeboat aboard the small fishing craft. Out of options, the Carlsons strapped on cork life jackets and jumped into the chilly, deep waters of Lake Michigan. At that point, they were off the mainland, but their journey to Fox Island had barely begun. North Manitou Island was the closest land; their only hope for survival was to swim there across miles of open water — or wait for a rescue.
Normally, the Carlsons would be back by 2 p.m. after a full day of fishing. No one was alarmed when they weren’t back by early afternoon, since fishermen don’t punch a clock and fishing trips rarely run on a precise schedule. But on this day, another clock was running. Even in August, at the height of summer, the water temperature in the northern stretches of Lake Michigan can drop to 60 degrees or lower. Sixty degrees doesn’t sound very cold, but at that level — 38 degrees lower than normal body temperature — children will die in about two hours.
In 1941, Will Carlson was 62 years old, Pete Carlson was 31.
Pete Carlson told the story of what happened on August 5 several times: to his rescuers, to the Leland Township Library in 1987, to members of his family over the years. There is no record, however, of what he said to his father or what his father said to him as the two of them floated in the lake. Did Will, a fisherman for at least five of his six decades, assure his son that a way could be found to safety? Did Pete have to reassure his aging father? Or both?
Hoping against hope that someone would see the smoke from their burning boat and head in their direction, father and son coiled together for warmth and comfort. In such desperate circumstances, a father can only hold on to his son, and a son can only clutch to his father. After eight hours — or maybe it was ten — Will Carlson died from exposure. He took his last breath, in the arms of his son, sometime between three and five in the afternoon. Pete held fast to his dead father, trying at least to preserve the body.
By early evening, Rita Carlson — Pete’s wife, and Will’s daughter-in-law — knew that something had gone very wrong. At 6:20 p.m., she placed a call to the Coast Guard station in Traverse City, recently equipped with a new seaplane. She was told, however, that it would take half-an-hour or more to get the plane into the sky, and that no pilot was available to fly it.
Instead of an aerial search, the ferry that ran mail between Leland and Manitou Island, a local tug boat, and a Coast Guard cutter from South Manitou Island were enlisted to look for the lost fishermen. With miles of lake to search, and no clues to go on, they didn’t have much luck. Still floating, still holding his father’s dead body, Pete Carlson saw boats pass him twice: The mail ferry at about seven in the evening, and the Coast Guard cutter at about one in the morning. But no one on the boats saw him.
At some point in the dark hours of the night, perhaps around 10 p.m., maybe closer to 1 a.m., Pete had towed his father’s lifeless body for as long as he could. It was time, he decided, let go and try to survive by swimming on his own towards Manitou Island. “He put his life jacket on to him and turned him loose, face down so the birds wouldn’t get him,” recalls Bill Carlson, who was not yet born when the accident took place, but has heard the story a time or two.
A tug operated by local fishermen Marvey Cook and Percy Guthrie had joined the search at 11 p.m. that night. Five hours later, they drew close enough to Pete that they nearly ran over him.
“… About four o’clock in the morning the next day, why, they just about ran me down. It scart’ the pants off them too, because they didn’t expect to hear anybody, and just as they went by, I hollered at them. They found me, which was 20 hours later. I was kind of soaked up by that time.”
On August 7, in addition to a banner news headline and lead story reporting on Will Carlson’s death and Pete Carlson’s rescue, The Leelanau Enterprise also printed an angry front page editorial. The newspaper ripped into the Coast Guard for not putting a plane in the air as soon as possible after the accident.
“Here’s the situation. The night was perfect, not a cloud, practically no wind, and Lake Michigan as calm as it could be. We say that if it’s impossible to use this plane under those conditions, crate it up and send it with other lend-lease materials to Great Britain!”
A month later, on September 4, The Enterprise reported on an investigative hearing in Leland conducted by the Inspector-in-Chief of the U.S. Coast Guard, into the circumstances surrounding the accident. The local Coast Guard lieutenant explained the hazards associated with flying at night, and the newspaper reported “a spirit of friendly cooperation and most of the people present felt the deep interest of Coast Guard officials in the Carlson affair.”
Pete Carlson talked about the boating tragedy in later years, Bill Carlson recalls, “but not a lot. He had some scars from the fire. He talked about it some, but we didn’t press him on it too much. He didn’t care to go swimming much after that.”
“I’ve had some close calls,” says Bill. “Fishing is a very high risk business. When things happen out there, you can’t walk home.”
Now, for the first time in more than a hundred years, there is no one named Carlson operating a commercial fishing boat out of Leland. Lake Michigan is a large body of water, but it is not infinite. When the Ottawa and the Chippewa won the exclusive right to fish in certain parts of the lake, other people lost out. Bill Carlson was one of them.
The original 1985 consent agreement — which the Bay Mills band [in the Eastern Upper Peninsula] found so objectionable — took away the fishing grounds where Carlson had been operating his novel purse nets, which had never been used in the Great Lakes before. “We had to abandon that operation,” he says. “We sold it to a guy in Saginaw Bay, but I don’t think he was ever as successful as we were.”
The 2000 agreement was much better from the point of view of Indians at Bay Mills, since it allowed them, as Kathryn Tierney [attorney who represented Native American fishing rights] says, to go “where the fish are.” But it was even worse for Bill Carlson. When the Indians got more fishing territory, state-licensed fishers got less. “To have consistent returns with a good size crew, you have to have a generous quota. Our quota here is 77,000 pounds annually. That’s not enough to even run a small operation.
“Our quota’s not big enough to justify an operation of any size for whitefish. It’s less expensive to have other people who have more generous quotas fish for us.” Carlson’s Fisheries now buys its fish from the Peterson family, who are state-licensed fishers out of Muskegon, several hours to the south — and from members of Michigan’s Indian tribes.
“Now, we work with the Native Americans, and they catch most of our fish for us in the off season, Ed and Cindy John and William Fowler,” says Carlson. “A lot of those guys learned how to fish because they weren’t fishermen to begin with, and the two that we work with, they are just excellent fishermen.
“They do a really good job and they take care of their fish. That’s the main thing: You’ve got to take care of the fish all the time. You can’t drop the ball anywhere, from the time they’re coming out of the water to the time they’re going to the consumer, it has to be handled properly. It means as soon as they’re brought out of the water they’re put on ice immediately, they don’t sit on the deck.
“These guys are really good. The product is as good as if we were to catch it. Not all the fishermen are like that, but the ones that we deal with, not only are they very conscientious, but we demand it. They’re meeting our criteria for having a good product, so that makes all the difference in the quality of the products.”
On an October afternoon, a tall Indian named Tony Miller delivers a thousand pounds of whitefish to the Carlson’s from Grand Traverse Bay, across the Leelanau Peninsula. Standing on the dock at Fishtown outside Carlson’s Fisheries, Miller uses a power hose to clean out the containers used to carry the fish, climbs out of his yellow overalls and offers a firm opinion about Bill Carlson.
“Bill,” he says, “is a real gentleman.”
A member of the Grand Traverse Band, which has a reservation and operates a casino in Peshabastown, Miller says there are “maybe ten to twelve hard-core fisherman, and that’s about it” on the reservation.
He fished gill nets on and off in the 1970s, and got a job working trap nets for Ed and Cindy Johns in 1985, when the original agreement between the tribes, the state of Michigan and the U.S. government formally opened up new fishing waters for Indians. Unlike gill nets, which sit vertically in the water and catch every fish that try to swim through, trap nets use an elaborate set of mesh boxes that lure fish in to the open end of the trap, but prevent them from swimming out again.
“With trap nets,” says Miller, “it takes two or three years to get a good basic idea of what’s going on. You’ve just got to have the skill to know where and when to set ‘em. If you don’t get a good set, you may not catch anything at all. You get a good set, you never can tell what you’re going to get.”
“It’s been a hard way to make a living this past year,” he says; the whitefish catch has been down. “You never can tell. Everything is hard when you get some bad luck going.”