Carpe Diem, a Tribute

Daniel “DBoy” Kerstetter came to the River the way so many of us do, by family, and by a shared love for the River itself, its steady pull, its patience, its quiet authority in shaping our lives. A Motor Carrier Officer, Dan was a devoted father, husband, and public servant who passed away on September 15, 2024, from injuries sustained in the line of duty. His cruiser was tragically rear-ended during a routine traffic stop. Which gives one pause for reflection.

Though his story may have ended in Grosse Pointe, MI, it began in Auburn, NY’s Finger Lakes, shaped by summers spent on the River. His grandmother purchased the family camp, Carpe Diem, on Round Island, next to the Post Office, where his lifelong love of the water first took hold.

It remained in the family for over sixty years, becoming a kind of inheritance, not just of land, but of memory and orientation. It was his mother who brought his father, George, to the River, and he never left, later owning a cottage on Grennell Island with his second wife, Jean. This is how the River gathers its people. Quietly. Permanently.

My wife and her family led me to a life on the River thirty-five years ago. After college, we met and married on Idle Isle; coincidentally, just weeks after the ‘95 wind shear, weather being a constant rite of passage on the River. Our three children have never known a summer – or a life – without it. My daughter recently married at Casablanca, on Cherry Island.

All of this has always led me to believe we don’t choose the River. We’re chosen, in some way. It answers questions we carry deep within ourselves, no matter how we get there. It draws us in through people, through chance, through family, until one day we realize we speak its language without ever being taught.

Dan and I understood this. Though we didn’t see each other often, we recognized it immediately in one another. We were kindred spirits, our friendship always rooted in the River: freighters, islands, cadence, the unspoken: if you know, you know. When you meet someone who carries the same place inside them, even far from where it runs, conversation skips the surface. In Grosse Pointe, there are only a few of us who know.

It’s no wonder those few of us found our way here, seeking a way to raise our families on the Great Lakes system. Dan’s home, Grosse Point, sits near Lake St. Clair, a connector lake between Huron and Erie. It flows like a river, so much so that its water fully turns over every three days. The same freighters that move through the St. Lawrence often pass through here, too. This place keeps us connected, and carries us back through the waterways, the current, that unfold like a familiar line on a map.

My favorite times with Dan were simple ones: a few beers in a storage area off Cadieux Road, where he helped me store my boat, or long stretches at our mutual friend Rob Rahm’s workshop behind Ace Hardware, talking River life the way River people do. Over the years we knew each other, we always found our way back to that shared language. Not just one of nostalgia, but of recognition.

I didn’t find the River until I was a young man attending St. Lawrence University, which remains a paradox to me. I wasn’t born there, but my wife and her family were. Her parents met one summer evening in Clayton, and her mother’s summer home was in Densmore Bay, directly across from what would later become her family’s island, Idle Isle. When I consider the sheer improbability of it all, I can’t fully explain how those paths crossed – or how any of it brought us all there.

Like Dan’s family, Amy’s family has never known a life without the River. To witness that is to see life in its natural state, and it stirs in me something I know I’ll never fully have as origin, but will always embrace as belonging. I keep learning where we come from matters, but so does where we recognize ourselves in others.

The River never loosened its hold on Dan. A few weeks before he passed, we ran into each other at the local market and caught up our usual way. I had just returned from three weeks at Idle Isle. It was the last time I saw him.

You never know where the course of a single day may carry you, or which roads it will make you cross. But it always led Dan back to the River, where he found that resonance few are lucky enough to know. The River doesn’t explain itself. It doesn’t justify why it gathers some and not others. It simply receives them – quietly, completely.

I know now that beginnings sometimes matter more than endings. The River understands this. And it will remember Dan always, as it will all of us.

By Mark E. Russell, Idle Isle, NY.

Mark Russell is a graduate of St. Lawrence University and the Western New England School of Law, and has applied legal precision and narrative clarity to every venture he’s led, from early startups to global agencies and now to CatalystXL, the software-as-a-service company he founded to simplify how organizations communicate and operate. Russell has written for multiple publications — among them Detroit’s TBD Magazine — and contributed to Mastering Communication at Work along with two chapters in the New York Times bestseller, Spend Shift. He lives in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan, with his wife, Amy Saunders Russell, their three River Rat children — Emma, Sam, and Trey — and their miniature schnauzer, Stella. The Russells divide their time between their home overlooking Lake St. Clair and their summer island retreat, Idle Isle, on the St. Lawrence River.