AN ESPECIALLY SAD 50th ANNIVERSARY

Half a century ago this week, the 729-foot SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a violent Lake Superior storm, killing all 29 hands.

I feel justified in self-identifying as a "Great Laker" because my father moved our family from western Massachusetts to a small town on the southern shore of Lake Ontario when I was five years old. 60+ years later, I vividly recall my first glance from that shore toward Canada... in particular, that the lake was too vast to see across and thus, to a young child's eyes, seemingly infinite. The history and importance of our Great Lakes was part of our education from early on. My siblings and I soon learned in school that for all its apparent vastness, Lake Ontario was but the smallest (at least in surface area) of the five Great Lakes; the biggest, by far, was Lake Superior-- nearly 32,000 square miles of open water (more than four times the surface area of Ontario) nearly 3,000 cubic miles of water, and over four football fields deep at its maximum... truly an "Ice-Water Mansion." (more on that later.)

A system of locks and canals known as the Great Lakes Waterway links the quintet of Lakes for large-scale water-borne commerce and connects to the St. Lawrence Seaway, a passage to the Atlantic Ocean and thereby to the rest of the planet. The journey from Duluth to the Atlantic covers over 2,300 miles of water, and yet much of the Great Lakes shipping has long been from port-to-port within the Lakes themselves. For instance, the good ship SS Edmund Fitzgerald, christened in 1958 and known colloquially as "The Fitz," was purpose-built for transporting 26,000 tons per trip of iron ore from the Minnesota Iron Range to the multiple steel mills in Detroit (at the intersection of Lakes Huron and Erie) that supply the U.S. auto industry; or to the gigantic Gary Works mill in Gary, Indiana, at the southern tip of Lake Michigan; or else to one of the plants in Toledo, Ohio, in Erie's southwestern corner. (HERE is must-see video of the spectacular and terrifying launch of the gigantic ship.)

I recall watching a classroom film in 4th grade (that would be 1967-8) about the Great Lakes shipping industry and specifically its annual race against the onset of unforgiving and dangerous winter weather. Appropriately, perhaps, with Halloween comes the increasing likelihood of encountering the notorious "November Witch," a nearly inevitable late-autumn Lake Superior storm packing gale-force winds that results from the collision of lingering warmth from the south and the season's first arctic blast from up north. The ship in our classroom film made it out of Superior just in time... and so too did the Edmund Fitzgerald safely deliver its cargo more than fifty times a year for seventeen years, logging over a million incident-free miles.

But then came the especially powerful November Witch in late 1975... and the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

At the age of 63, Captain Ernest McSorley was regarded by his peers and fellow sailors as the finest, most talented captain on the Great Lakes... strict but fair with his crew, confident and aggressive at the helm; a man who always delivered his cargo on time. Nearing the end of his third season piloting the Fitz, did this confidence and aggression lead him into the teeth of a major storm that everyone knew was coming? Not exactly, because he altered his course mid-trip to hug the Canadian shore more closely in order to travel in calmer seas.

That being said, some sources suggest that he knowingly flirted with the deadly November Witch because he would receive a substantial monetary bonus for the extra trip at season's end, money he would use to pay mounting medical expenses for his ailing wife. Tragically, Captain McSorley's decision to alter his course added 14 hours to the usual 30-hour trip... additional time that ultimately put him, his crew, and the Fitz in grave peril from which they did not escape, breaking up and sinking barely fifteen miles from the calmer and safer waters of Whitefish Bay.

There is a library shelf full of books written about the Edmund Fitzgerald. (See HERE.) And yet most of us know what we know about this event from the famous Gordon Lightfoot ballad... in our humble opinion, one of the most perfect pop songs ever recorded. Delightfully poetic in a meter akin to a sea shanty, it is historically accurate (mostly), it pithily describes Lake Superior as an "Ice-Water Mansion," and it is set to a haunting guitar track that suggests that eternal rhythm known to all who sail-- the steady rise and fall of the sea.

As a self-described "Great Laker," I experience a spell of grief every November on the anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald tragedy. As a truck driver, I am reminded anew that death rides shotgun for all who professionally transport tonnage from Point A to Point B whether by land, sea, or air. But most of all I feel deeply for the surviving family members-- "the wives and the sons and the daughters," in Lightfoot's lyric-- whose lives were so suddenly and permanently altered by that encounter with the November Witch half a century ago. I'm glad to see that so many fond and touching remembrances are popping up on social media this week, honoring those 29 sailors and keeping their memory alive.