I have many dad-like tendencies—being a fan of yard work and Tom Petty, for a few examples—but perhaps my greatest dad tendency is my lifelong obsession with The Edmund Fitzgerald.
If you were raised anywhere near Lake Superior, chances are you may share this obsession. You likely also know every word of Gordon Lightfoot’s absolute folk banger, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Beyond the requisite knowing of every haunting, poetic lyric of what is indisputably one of the greatest folk songs in the history of the genre (I will fight you on this), I’d also be willing to bet that many a Midwest kid has stood on the shore of Lake Superior in the fall or winter and wondered—amidst the pounding waves, the powerful sound of water carving rock—about the night that brought down the Edmund Fitzgerald. This one I’m less confident about, but being a self-identified shipwreck nerd and also an enormous sap, I have definitely done this myself.
The one experience that I am sure has been carved into the memory of every kid who grew up in the Upper Midwest is hearing The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald repeatedly every November. Early on, my memories of it exist solely in the fuzz of the radio in the front seat of my mom’s Blazer. Later, it was ceremoniously played on the jukebox at the local bar upon the arrival of the telltale gales of November, a pseudo sacrament that every bar in the greater Upper Midwest adheres to—if not in early November, then at the very least on the 10th of November, the anniversary of the sinking. The song is borderline gospel there, born not of religion but of place and grit and story—things that, in the Midwest, feel like religion in and of themselves.
I was especially fascinated by the song as a kid who was obsessed with shipwrecks (and also, apparently, tragedy). My gateway drug to this infatuation was—naturally—the Titanic; my parents begrudgingly let me watch the movie a few times in theaters (at 7 years old!), which subsequently resulted in me checking out every book I could find on it at the school library. After that, my time was spent drooling over the new Titanic selections at the Scholastic Book Fair, and begging my mom for money to get just one more Titanic book. With this unhealthy Titanic obsession as a backdrop, I was barely 10 years old when I asked my mom to drive me a half an hour to the CD store to get Gordon Lightfoot’s Greatest Hits. It was the first CD that I had ever bought with my own money, money procured from sweeping the kitchen and cleaning my room. In an effort to show you I wasn’t entirely a nerd, the second CD I bought was the Spice Girls. When my parents finally recognized the obsession and took me on a glass-bottomed shipwreck tour in Lake Superior one summer, it was all over for me. I was invested.
At the time, I think I was as equally fascinated with Gordon Lightfoot’s storytelling as I am now. The song stirs emotions in me now that I didn’t have the words for when I was a kid, but which feel similar in memory nonetheless. The Backstreet Boys and Britany Spears didn’t make me feel the way this shipwreck song did—even if I could barely discern what the song was getting at.
I still haven’t quite figured out why I was so drawn to it. I was an existential infant with probably an eighth of the prefrontal cortex I now have, and with barely any life experience to be able to conceptualize the distinct tragedy of that much loss, of the lyrics that painted a fictional—yet realistic—picture of those haunting moments that no living person had actually experienced.
When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck saying ‘fellas it’s too rough to feed ya.’
At 7 pm the main hatchway caved in, he said ‘fellas it’s been good to know ya.’
Gordon Lightfoot’s positing of that moment was a distinct fascination of mine—at first, I didn’t quite understand that he’d made it up. There were no survivors, I remember my parents telling me as I prodded about it more. I realize now that the story became all the more powerful, all the more lasting, for him having made up that one singular point—the most haunting lyric of the entire song, the thing you remember most. It forces you into the kitchen with the cook, with the men. It forces you to face what they faced, if only for a brief moment in your imagination; there was a fear in those words, the reality of accepting fate, the grappling with what might have actually happened in those last minutes as the ship went down.
Does anyone know where the love of God goes, when the waves turn the minutes to hours?
Our parents and grandparents talked about seeing it all play out on the news, equating it’s power with the assassinations of the 60s, with war, some of the biggest news of the era. To many, it wasn’t some faceless tragedy—these were men our grandparents could have had mutual friends with, men that could’ve been an uncle or a grandpa or a family friend.
Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings, in the rooms of her ice water mansion. Old Michigan steams like a young man’s dreams, the islands and bays are for sportsmen.
The song has always been alluring to me as an anthem of home, providing a deep sense of place, of pride, of shared tragedy. Since leaving Michigan, the song continues to provide that same sense of place, a reminder of home. It’s the undisputed anthem of the upper Midwest, something that can instantly harken me back to an old bar in northern Michigan—to neon lights and collegiate flags and the engrained odor of decades of Marlboros, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald humming out of the jukebox during the blustery, gray days of November.
The song has come to serve as a link to myself as a kid, to the unabashed infatuation with shipwrecks that eventually gave way to fascinations with World War 2, Pompeii and countless other fleeting (and admittedly dark) interests. I think about little me, with hardly a suggestion of a developed prefrontal cortex, listening to a 1970s folk artist on repeat on the 5-CD stereo my mom and stepdad got me for Christmas that year. I think about my distinct interest with the telling of this story, with recognizing the power of it even at that young age. I think about how his words haunted me as I considered what else the men may have been thinking about as the ship sank, as the water overtook them.
For all my wanting to leave my home in the Midwest, now that I’ve lived out west for five years I miss it deeply in a way that supersedes any wanting I’ve ever experienced. I miss the culture, which is so distinct from what I’ve experienced across the rest of the country. I miss my family, of course, not to mention the lakes and fishing and friends. All of it. Now, listening to Gordon Lightfoot feels like going home, like a brief reunion with the place that made me who I am, with the kid I once was and the obsessions that have persisted through it all.