Superior, It's Said, Never Gives Up Her Dead

Tomorrow marks the 30th anniversary of the day when the skies of November turned gloomy and the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank into Lake Superior. Even though it's a little corny in spots ("The big lake they call 'Gitche Gumee'"), I always liked Gordon Lightfoot's song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." Jen has both volumes of Lightfoot's greatest hits and once when we were visiting her mom in Hammond, we listened to Gord's Gold Volume 2, which has the song (in a rerecorded version). I'd never sat and listened to it from start to finish. Being stuck in a car on a six-hour drive is as good a place as any to do some serious listening, and I was struck by what an evocative tune it is. Knowing that it's based on an actual tragic event makes it all the more creepy. For me, dying via sinking ship seems like a really unpleasant way to go, even though I've read that drowning isn't painful at all.

This site has pretty much everything you'd ever want to know about the ship, the crew and their eventual fate.