Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/787068
58 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S T he theme was an old one. Puny man pitted against the elements. A flyspeck of humanity out there alone, somewhere in an endless waste of ice and water, snow and gale, staving off death hour after hour—or waiting for it, numb and half frozen, with cold-begotten resignation. None heard the story unmoved. Millions sat at their own firesides that winter night, secure and warm and fed, and pitied and wondered about Lewis Sweet, drifting unsheltered in the bitter darkness. The fast-falling snow prevented much action for the first 24 hours. But the storm blew itself out Wednesday forenoon, and the would-be rescuers went into action. There was too much ice there in the north end of Lake Michigan for boats. The search had to be made from the air, and on foot along the shore of Waugoshance Point and around Crane Island, south into Sturgeon Bay, and on the frozen beaches of the islands farther out. Coast Guard crews and volunteers joined forces. Men walked the beaches for four days, clambering over rough hummocks of shore ice, watching for tracks, a thread of smoke, a dead fire, any sign at all that Sweet had made land. Other men scanned the ice fields and the outlying islands, Garden and Hog and Hat, from the air. Pilots plotted 2,000 square miles of lake and flew them systematically, one by one, searching for a black dot that would be a man huddled on a drifting floe. Lewis Sweet, who on Monday of that week had hardly been known to anyone beyond the limits of his hometown, was now an object of national concern. Men bought papers on the streets of cities 1,000 miles from Alanson to learn what news there might be of the lost fisherman. Little by little, hour by hour, hope ebbed among the searchers. No man could survive so long on the open ice. The time spun out—a day, then two days, three—and still the planes and foot parties found no trace of Sweet. By Friday night hope was dead. Life could not endure through so many hours of cold and storm without shelter, fire, or food. On Saturday, the last day of the search, those who remained in it looked only for a dark spot on the beach, a frozen body scoured bare of snow by the wind. At dusk the search was reluctantly abandoned. Folks no longer wondered whether Sweet would be rescued, or how. Instead, they wondered whether his body would be found on some lonely beach when spring came, or whether the place and manner of his dying would ever be known. But Sweet had not died. T wice more before dark on Tuesday Lewis Sweet believed for a little time that he was about to escape the lake. The first time he saw Hat Island looming up through the storm ahead, a timbered dot on a gray sea that smoked with snow. His floe seemed to be bearing directly down on it, and he felt confident it would go aground on the shingly beach. No one lived on Hat; he would find no cabin there. But there was plenty of dry wood for a fire, and he had his big trout for food. He'd make out all right until the storm was over, and he had no doubt that some way would be found to rescue him when the weather cleared. But even while he tasted in anticipation the immense relief of trading his drifting ice floe for solid ground, he realized that his course would take him clear of the island, and he pistol-sharp report rip across the ice. He looked up to see his shanty settling into a yawning black crack. While he watched, the broken-off sheet of ice crunched and ground back against the main floe and the frail darkhouse went to pieces like something built of cardboard. Half an hour later the two shanties of his companions were swallowed up in the same fashion, one after the other. Whatever happened now, his last hope of shelter was gone. Live or die, he'd have to see it through right in the open on the ice, with nothing between him and the wind save his snow wall. He went on building it. S weet knew pretty well what he faced, but there was no way to figure his chances. Unless the ice field grounded on either Hog or Garden Island, at a place where he could get to the beach, some 60 miles of open water lay between him and the west shore of Lake Michigan. There was little chance the floe would hold together that long with a winter gale churning the lake. There was little chance, too, that the wind would stay steady in one quarter long enough to drive him straight across. It was blowing due west now, but before morning it would likely go back to the northeast. By that time he'd be out in midlake if he were still alive, beyond Beaver and High and the other outlying islands. And there, with a northeast storm behind him, he could drift more than 100 miles without sighting land. Sweet resigned himself to the fact that, when buffeted by wind and pounding seas, even a sheet of ice three miles across and two feet thick can stay intact only so long. In midafternoon hope welled up in him for a little while. His drift carried him down on Waugoshance Light, a lighthouse abandoned and dismantled long before, and it looked for a time as if he would ground against its foot. But currents shifted the direction of the ice field a couple of degrees, and he went past only 100 yards or so away. Waugoshance was without fuel or food; no more than a broken crib of rock and concrete and a gaunt, windowless shell of rusted steel. But it was a pinpoint of land there in the vast gray lake. It meant escape from the icy water all around; it spelled survival for a few hours at least, and Sweet watched it with hungry eyes as his floe drifted past, almost within reach, and the squat red tower receded slowly in the storm. By that time, although he had no way of knowing it, the search-and-rescue resources of an entire state were being marshaled in the hope of snatching him from the lake alive. The two men who had fished with him that morning were still on Crane Island when the ice broke away. They had stayed on, concerned and uneasy, watching the weather, waiting for Sweet to come back to the beach. Through the snowstorm they had seen black water open offshore when the floe went adrift. They knew Sweet was still out there somewhere on the ice, and they lost no more time. They piled into their car and raced for the hamlet of Cross Village on the high bluffs of Sturgeon Bay ten miles to the south. There was little the Cross Villagers or anybody else could do at the moment to help, but the word of Sweet's dramatic plight flashed south over the wires to downstate cities and on across the nation, and one of the most intense searches for a lost man in Michigan's history got underway.