The Legend Lives On
The Memefication of a Disaster Reveals Our Humanity
November 10 marks the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, a freighter that went down suddenly in one of Lake Superior’s famously dangerous November storms, killing all 29 of her crew. Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald immortalized the event and, with this year’s anniversary, the song, and the story that inspired it, are once again in the news and in the public consciousness for reasons as mysterious as those for the vessel’s sudden disappearance shortly after 7:10 PM on November 10, 1975.
The capture of the imagination
As industrial accidents go, the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald was far from the most catastrophic in any quantifiable way: other disasters caused greater loss of life, greater economic loss, greater environmental destruction, greater long-term impacts in loss of productivity.
Even for maritime disasters on the Great Lakes, the loss of the Fitz nowhere matches the SS Eastland disaster, which caused 844 deaths when she capsized in the Chicago River in July 1915 with 2,500 passengers aboard, nor with the catastrophe of the 1913 “White Hurricane” on the Great Lakes, which sank a dozen ships, grounded or stranded over 2 dozen more, and killed 250 sailors. The song helps keep the memory alive, certainly, but there’s something in the nature of the event itself that continues to captivate the imagination.
A shipwreck is a sort of primal disaster, an event found recounted in ancient myths, ancient histories, and Biblical stories and parables. From the Odyssey to the story of Jesus asleep in the stern of the boat on the storm-tossed See of Galilee while his disciples cry out in fear for their lives, we have a fundamental sense of the sea as a perilous setting. It’s a place that humans aren’t meant to inhabit, yet it also extends an invitation and instills in us a desire to find out what it out there, beyond the waters on the other side. To answer that invitation is to set out in search of answers and requires courage and daring and competence to befriend some force larger than human will and human knowledge. A shipwreck is a potential result of that relationship turning adversarial.
The Great Lakes have their own special nature: to people who have not seen them or experienced them, they seem innocuous. It’s easy underestimate the size and power of these inland bodies of freshwater until you see them in person. Until you learn that the Great Lakes have within them an estimated 6,000 shipwrecks with an estimated 30,000 dead, it’s hard to think of them as fearsome.
The limits of human technology
The primal nature of a shipwreck makes it hard to imagine as an event of our time. Even people who have heard the Lightfoot song are surprised to learn that the wreck occurred in 1975, and not 50 or 100 years earlier. The loss of the Fitz
