Delivering mail by the pail along the Detroit River

Delivering the Mail by Allen Abel

The Atlantic Huron, a 40-year-old, 736-foot-long, war weary hulk of battered red steel, is steaming along the Detroit River with Windsor, Ontario, off its starboard beam and the Motor City to port.

Four years after the ship’s variable-pitch propeller malfunctioned on the Fourth of July and the old tub slammed into a pier up in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., the vessel is fortunate to be shipshape at all.

It is 10 a.m. on a summer morning and the venerable bulk carrier has just glided beneath the almost-completed Gordie Howe International Bridge when a seaman heaves a black hockey bag over the rail. This is not a surprise — the Huron is registered in hockey-mad Montreal, after all — but its contents this day do not include ice skates, athletic supporters or elbow pads.

It’s the outgoing mail from the crew of the gigantic cargo ship, lowered by rope to a chugging little maritime workhorse called the J.W. Westcott II, America’s only floating post office and the only address in ZIP code 48222.

While Capt. Sam Buchanan, who has been at the helm of this converted tugboat for 39 years, holds her steady just a few inches from the Huron’s looming flank, a deckhand named Walt Cochenour detaches the hockey bag, replaces it with an official USPS plastic sack and belays it up to the waiting Canadians. Then Buchanan helms the Westcott back to U.S. waters and waits for the next passing customer to bark for mail call on his dockside radio.

“Mail by the Pail,” as it is nicknamed, is a 19th-century riverine ritual virtually unchanged in the 21st century. J.W. Westcott himself began performing this service from a rowboat here in 1874. The modern Westcott’s 220-horsepower engine is a considerable upgrade.

“It’s very important to the people who work on the Great Lakes,” Buchanan said back indoors while Cochenour sorted the contents of the Atlantic Huron’s hockey bag. “We are a lifeline for the people who are on these ships.”

From picture postcards to prescription medicines, from Amazon orders to hotDetroit pizza, the Westcott ferries incoming and outgoing post, perks and parcels to the crews of a dozen or more ships a day as they transit between lakes Huron and Erie. This is far fewer than in the glory days of coal and coke and iron ore, but still an essential service for sailors who might not set foot on dry land for weeks. (And, yes, the Westcott serviced the doomed Edmund Fitzgerald on its final northbound voyage in 1975. She never made it back to Detroit.)

“It’s not like ships dock at the same place every trip,” Buchanan explained. So, if a daughter wants to send her daddy a Father’s Day card, or if a deckhand needs to mail a check, the only location to do so is a small building on the Detroit riverbank that offers full postal services to its maritime clientele and adds the flourish of a special postmark as well.

For Buchanan, life on the bank of a busy and historic waterway has brought decades of bobbing skillfully among the giant freighters punctuated with harrowing moments of heroism and horror. He has retrieved corpses from the brown green murk and talked would-be suicides from going under.

In July 2023, the captain and his crew rescued a maintenance worker who accidentally had plummeted 152 feet from the deck of the Ambassador Bridge. The man hit the water head first and survived the impact but was too stunned to stay afloat.

Alerted by people in a nearby park, Buchanan and two deckhands got the Westcott started, found the alert but disoriented worker, and carried him back to shore.

“He just had his second kid, so I guess he’s doing OK,” Buchanan said.

And then there was the fatal accident 16 years earlier.

Before dawn on an October morning in 2007, the Westcott, piloted by a back-up crew, got too close to the stern of a Norwegian tanker, took water in the wheelhouse and sank with its propeller still whirring, killing the helmsman and mate. Capt. Buchanan was off that day, taking his mother to a medical appointment. The vessel was raised a few days later.

So, there is fate afloat in these dark waters, among the looming ships. But on this clear calm day, tragedy seemed far astern. There are big boats in the river, and after 150 years of service, the Westcott sails on.

Connect with Linn’s Stamp News: 

    Sign up for our newsletter
    Like us on Facebook
    Follow us on Twitter