Mark Millican: Remembering the Fitzgerald

Published 12:01 am Tuesday, November 10, 2020

As a young man, Jack Case remembers seeing the SS Edmund Fitzgerald going through the Soo Locks in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, between Lakes Huron and Superior. He was amazed by the size of the Great Lakes freighter as it carefully navigated the passage.

“It was so big it only had a few feet on each side going through the locks,” he recalled. “It was around a 700-foot boat; one side of the lock is Canada, and the other side is the United States. I was standing right there.”

Today marks the 45th anniversary of the sinking of the ship during a fierce storm on Lake Superior. “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by singer/songwriter Gordon Lightfoot has immortalized the tragic event.

Native Michigander Case, 85, noted what he witnessed decades ago is no longer possible in the post-9/11 era.

“Now you can’t do that because they’ve got fence all around it — you can’t get near the boats,” he said, and then recollected the sinking itself. “It was a real shock — a lot of people were just amazed that a big ship like that could go down full of iron ore. It could handle 15,000 to 20,000 tons.”

Much has been written about the Fitzgerald and why it sank, and speculation has been rampant through the years about what Capt. Ernest McSorley could have done differently. Almost half a century ago, however, weather forecasting and storm prediction was not as highly technological as it is these days. Although McSorley was in contact with the captain of a nearby ship — which made it to safe harbor — he never actually sent out a distress signal. Many believe that’s how quickly the ship began to break up, and eventually split in two.

The “Big Fitz” still lies in its watery grave in Superior, and its 29 crew members have never been recovered.

“The lake becomes shallow (where the Fitzgerald sank), but not as you and I would know it,” said Case, who’s lived in Ellijay more than 30 years with his wife, Margie. “It’s probably 50 or 60 feet deep right there, but that’s shallow compared to those boats if there’s a raging storm, which is what it was. He shouldn’t have brought the boat in there, from what I gather of the story. Due to the fact that the waves were so high — and they get higher as they come into shallower water, they build up — they think that’s what caused it to break in half.

“Nobody knows for sure.”

Case, who used to travel back home yearly to fish, remembers angling for salmon on Lake Michigan in the early 1960s.

“We were in about a 30-foot craft, and got a call over the radio that a storm was brewing and advised boats to come off the lake,” he said. “We got off, but some of the boats didn’t come off the lake. It was reported later that 15 or 16 people drowned when their boats went under. Those storms, when they come up on the lakes really quick, can be horrendous.”

A blog at Perspectaweather.com notes, “Storms on the Great Lakes can rival hurricanes in their intensity, and the one that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald had sustained winds of 67 mph, gusts up to 86 mph and waves reported to be 35 feet, according to another vessel in the area that survived the storm.”

Superior, the largest of the Great Lakes, is mentioned in Lightfoot’s 1976 balladic dirge as “the big lake they called Gitche Gumee,” an Ojibwe Indian name also mentioned in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, “The Song of Hiawatha.”

Lightfoot himself waxes poetic in the song for which he is best known: “The wind in the wires made a tattle tale sound and a wave broke over the railing, and every man knew, as the captain did too, ’twas the witch of November come stealin’ … The captain wired in he had water coming in, and the good ship and crew was in peril, and later that night when his lights went out of sight, came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

He continues, “Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours? … And all that remains is the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters.”

In 1997, Sebastian Junger authored “The Perfect Storm,” a nonfiction account of the sinking of the Andrea Gail, a swordfishing boat based in Massachusetts. It was made into a movie, but a scene left out of the film was when a prospective crewmen walked on board to speak with the captain as the boat was being readied for sea — and turned around and walked back onto the pier without saying a word. How did he know?

Being lost at sea is always a potential destiny for “those who go down to the sea in ships, who do business on great waters,” as the writer of Psalm 107 puts it.

The final resting place of the Edmund Fitzgerald is known, and at least one dive team has made it to the wreck. However, there are no plans to recover the bodies at this hallowed site.

Mark Millican is a former staff writer for the Daily Citizen-News.

Beacon lighting

The annual Edmund Fitzgerald Memorial Beacon Lighting will be solely online this year; it will be broadcast live from Split Rock Lighthouse today, the 45th anniversary of its sinking. The event begins at 4:30 p.m. The video stream of the beacon lighting will be provided on the Facebook pages of both KBJR-TV in Duluth, Minnesoata, and the Split Rock Lighthouse. It will be available as a recording on Facebook and YouTube. “It is also a time to reflect on the memory of all lives lost in Great Lakes shipwrecks,” according to a Red Lake Nation News (Redby, Minnesota) article about the lighting.