On this day in 1975 a freighter sank to the bottom of Lake Superior, taking with it a huge load of taconite and the lives of 29 crew members. The Edmund Fitzgerald was an amazing ship that people living along the various rivers of the St. Lawrence seaway would run to go see. Her captain and crew were no strangers to the fact that even the largest of ships could be taken by an aggressive sea, and were perhaps on edge for some of the journey so late into the fall in such an expanse of water so far north. They radioed that they had difficulty on the trip from Duluth that was meant for Detroit and Toledo, but gave no indication of being in mortal danger either. Only minutes before she sank, Captain McSorley radioed that his crew was holding its own despite the great waves and winds of Gichigami giving him a hard time. Then there was nothing. No bodies were ever found, and the ship lay broken 530 feet below the surface. Some have suggested that the ship hit an unmarked shoal, others suggested that a rogue wave broke the vessel in two. Still others have claimed that a design flaw was responsible.
Whatever the truth of the matter might be, the fact remains that she was sailing on Lake Superior, a body of water that more than rivals some of the most dangerous parts of the oceans in sheer ferocity. Superior does have shoals, some of which suddenly rise to within feet of the surface even while they are surrounded by well over hundreds of feet of water. Gitchigami (Gitchee Gumee), as the Ojibwe call Superior, is the powerful remains of the North American ice sheet embraced and cradled by some of the oldest rock in the world, parts of the Canadian Shield rippling with muscles of iron and granite that have withstood over a billion years of erosion. She bears hurricane force winds that blow with all the force of a Sandy or Katrina. She rolls along waves that can engulf entire ships. She is blue and gray and bitterly cold even after a hot summer. She makes her own weather, and both moderates and intensifies the local climate of her shores. She is home to some of the mightiest Lake Trout (Salvelinus Namaycush) on the planet, weighing over a hundred pounds. However, she is also gentle...
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| Taken at Pictured Rocks National Seashore, Miner's Beach. |
Her irons and granites are complimented by amethysts, agates, and various other lovely rocks and minerals. Her shores are adorned by the southern boreal forest, a peppering of birches, pines, spruces, and fir. Her waters remain pure, a lovely piece of art left to us by nature these thousands of years after her birth from the glaciers.
She serves as a reminder to us that while we may indeed be fertile, multiply, and come to have dominion over the earth, we are never her ultimate masters. Fortunately, though such lessons are learned painfully when disaster strikes as in the case of the loss of a great ship, Gichigami tends to inspire more than frighten. The first born living among her figured she was a divine spirit. The first French folk, including some Jesuits, who came to see her beating upon the ancient rocks for the first time with their astonished eyes were awestruck. These days, there are exploiters who want to channel her to the arid western reaches of the continent, most of whom have never even seen her in a photograph. That said, there are just as many people who have seen her that would just as soon die before letting her be channeled away. Gichigami, it seems, continues to have a powerful effect on those who would love her... or even come to fear her.
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