On a perfect blue-sky day in late July, the SS Wilfred Sykes is on northern Lake Michigan, approaching the pristine shore of Wisconsin’s Door County peninsula. It gives a horn blast, shimmies through a narrow canal, and glides placidly past the raised bridges and marinas of Sturgeon Bay. A faint strain of music comes floating up from a passing pleasure boat. A keening guitar line. A stoic beat.
Accompanying it 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. And not just on the airwaves, but on 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 a fictional sinking.
It was a real disaster, 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 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 many locations next month. It’s a kind of Midwest Titanic, the largest of more than 6,000 ships swallowed by the lakes over the centuries.
It’s mystery, too, one that has inspired a long string of books, articles, documentaries and online debates about exactly why and how the celebrated steamer sank.
I was on the Sykes with John Bacon, the author of the newest entry, “The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” The book, drawn from extensive interviews and archival research, considers various theories. Bacon deliberately avoids what he calls a “whodunit” approach.
“Yes, I wanted to find out what happened, but I wanted to find out about the 29 people on the boat,” he said. “Who were they? What were their lives like? I wanted to return them to their full-fledged humanity, instead of just being victims.”
For Bacon, a veteran journalist from Ann Arbor, Mich., the “untold story” includes the beauty, danger and sheer scale of the lakes.
The Sykes, which turned 75 last year, is one of only a half-dozen steam-powered lake freighters remaining. For Fitz fanatics, it’s also what Bacon calls a VIB, a Very Important Boat.
It loaded up alongside the Fitz at an iron ore dock outside Duluth, Minnesota, on the unseasonably warm and sunny afternoon of Nov. 9, 1975, and was hit by the same sudden storm, with winds that whipped as much as 160 kph.
After the Fitz vanished from the radar, the Sykes joined the search effort.
Today, the 678-foot Sykes offers one of the closest approximations to the Fitz, and, for passengers, a surprisingly comfortable ride. It’s a throwback, not just in the engine room, but also in the guest quarters, a midcentury-modern time capsule from the heyday of the American steel industry, when shipping companies regularly wined and dined executives and their wives.
Bacon and I boarded early on a Monday morning in Burns Harbor, Ind., near Chicago. The plan was to sail up Lake Michigan and pass through the Straits of Mackinac, loading up at two quarries. Then we would head down Lake Huron, as the Fitz would have, and across Lake Erie to Cleveland.
Bacon, whose 13 previous books include one about a 1917 maritime explosion that killed nearly 2,000 people in Halifax, Nova Scotia, spent almost four years researching and writing “The Gales of November.” He tracked down and interviewed more than 100 people, including some family members and others connected with the crew who had never talked about their experiences with a writer.
The book includes a dramatic reconstruction of the storm, based in part on recent high-tech research. One computer model, drawing on historic weather data, shows how frigid air coming down from Canada collided with storm system coming from the southwest, creating hurricanelike conditions that turned the water “from calm to ferocious in just minutes,” as Bacon writes, with waves that may have spiked to more than 15.25 metres.
The wreck prompted many investigations and lawsuits. But it was Lightfoot’s song, which hit No. 2 on the Billboard charts, that drove it deep into cultural memory. It’s unforgettable.
Bacon interviewed the journalist who wrote the short Newsweek article that inspired Lightfoot and gave him some of the song’s phrases and beats, from the opening invocation of Chippewa and “the big lake they called Gitche Gumee” to the winds that came “slashing” to the church bell that rang 29 times at Mariners Church in Detroit.
Bacon was relieved to learn that Lightfoot was a standup guy, who formed close relationships with family members. When Jimmy Fallon wanted to use the song for a comedy routine, he said no. And when performing the song live, Lightfoot changed some lyrics, like one about the main hatch “caving in” that echoed a theory (later disproved) that the crew had failed to properly clamp it.
“Gord really wanted the families to have peace,” Rick Haynes, the bassist, told Bacon.
The shipping company, Oglebay Norton, was another story. Initially, Bacon writes, it offered victims’ families only their final paycheck, plus $750 for personal effects. And when Bacon went searching for the archives of the company (which went bankrupt in 2004), he learned that the boxes relating to the Fitz had gone missing. “How is that not fishy?” he asked.
Bacon, for his part, avoids definite conclusions about the wreck. He paraphrased the mother of Bruce Hudson, a 20-year-old deckhand from Cleveland, who, along with the rest of the crew, still rests 530 feet below the surface of the lake: “Thirty know, 29 men and God. And nobody’s talking.”
Tom Wiater, the president of Central Marine Logistics, which operates the Sykes, grew up in Detroit, where he was fascinated by lore of the sea. After graduating from the Great Lakes Maritime Academy in Traverse City, Michigan, he started on the Sykes as a deckhand.
“Today, when I come aboard the boat, the faces are different,” Wiater said. “But the personalities and the sounds and the vibe is the same.”
Wiater is a passionate advocate for the old steamers, and the history they represent. In the pilot house, he explained the mixture of old and new navigational tools: paper charts and the original brass Chadburn — it’s the telegraph system used to send speed instructions back to the engine room — alongside GPS and electronic charting systems.
The Sykes “is a floating, operating antique,” he said. “And it wouldn’t be running without the dedication of everyone involved.”
The Fitz disaster, which ushered in widespread safety reforms, was the last major shipwreck on the lakes. For today’s sailors, it stands as a symbol of the inherent dangers of the job.
The Sykes’s captain, Mike Grzesiek, who started 30 years ago on the boat, washing dishes, plans to retire next year. During this trip, he was a man of few words.
But after breakfast on our last full day, he talked about the merits of various boats he has worked on, the ups and downs of the industry, and his matter-of-fact approach to weathering storms that had left more panic-prone mariners “curled up in a ball.”
“You just deal with it, and get through it,” Grzesiek said. He laughed. “But you know, looking back, nothing’s ever been that bad.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
