LLAKE SUPERIOR on a calm day has a depth clarity of over a hundred feet. In shallow waters, boulders appear to be just below the surface. Near shore, trash creates a timeline of occupation: plates, tires, bikes, phones. Old dock pilings dot the lake bed in even lines. And on days when her surface is glass-smooth, it’s possible to see some of the 350 wrecked ships resting on the lake floor. They all look blue so far down.
I grew up with the lake. I’ve visited her, lived by her shores, returned to her year after year. I’ve seen the ships underwater. They’re as real as anything. One has its toilet seat up. Everything sits in the same way as the day it sank. The lake’s cold water acts as a refrigerator—preserving the ships and sailors who went down with them. The bed of Lake Superior is part museum, part graveyard.
I’ve never seen the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, but I’ve seen her bell. Recovered and back on land, it sits in a glass case, polished and shining. Every year it tolls twenty-nine times.
THE Edmund Fitzgerald leaves port from northwestern Wisconsin on November 9, 1975. Her belly is heavy, loaded down with twenty-six thousand tons of taconite pellets. She is a giantess, one of the country’s largest freshwater ships, the so-called Queen of the Lakes, though in truth, her long body is less than glamorous—a dull maroon the color of dried blood. A workhorse on the water. After seventeen years, she breaks her own records, carries tremendous loads, and still, they push her forward.
The captain, Ernest McSorley, is on his last voyage before retiring, heading east once more across the vast expanse of Lake Superior toward is tired, but after forty years on nine different vessels, he’s got a certain steady confidence.
