On a perfect blue-sky day in late July, the SS Wilfred Sykes was on northern Lake Michigan, approaching the pristine shore of Wisconsin’s Door County peninsula. It gave a horn blast, shimmied through a narrow canal and soon was gliding placidly past the raised bridges and marinas of Sturgeon Bay.
Then, suddenly, a faint strain came floating up from a passing pleasure boat. A keening guitar line. A stoic beat. And that rich baritone relating the familiar tale of a mighty ship loaded with iron ore, a captain “well seasoned,” the gales of November and 29 men lost in the ice-water depths of Lake Superior.
New England has “Moby-Dick.” The Mississippi has Mark Twain. And the Great Lakes have “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Or so it can seem to those who grew up on Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 folk-rock shanty, a surprise hit that has had a long afterlife not just on the airwaves, but also through bumper stickers, beer labels, Lego kits and memes.
Many who hear the song, with its opening invocation of Chippewa legend, assume it’s about a 19th-century shipwreck, or perhaps a fictional one. But it was a real disaster and one much closer to our own time. It happened on the evening of Nov. 10, 1975, when the Fitzgerald, one of the biggest and most modern freighters on the lakes, lost contact during a sudden ferocious storm and then vanished beneath the waves.
Today, the Fitz, as many call it, is a touchstone of regional identity and tourism around the Great Lakes, where the 50th anniversary of the wreck will be commemorated in multiple locations next month. It’s a kind of Midwest Titanic — the largest of the more than 6,000 ships swallowed by the lakes over the centuries.
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