The Witch of November

©PhilKuceraPhoto

Many thanks to my dear friend Phil. As he chases angry seas, I needn't.

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Be assured, we've tempted Lake Superior since first we arrived on the basin.

Yeah, it's likely the earliest peoples walked in. But shortly thereafter they went in, it's too long and arduous a way around. The relationship's been fraught ever since.

Visit the cold, deep waters of the big lake through enough seasons and you'll see her rage. Furies grip the wind and that whips the sea, which rises mighty against a sky turned every shade of roiled blue, slate grey and black. The ground trembles beneath you, when the lake hurls itself against the shore.

Forty-three years ago today, the Witch of November claimed the Edmund Fitzgerald and the 29 souls that rode her to Superior's bottom. The Fitz was no small boat. Longer than any puny football field. Bigger than the Great Republic pictured below.

Men stand small, beside that.

What's made by humans often dwarfs them. Put men in a boat that size, stuff the boat with 8,000 tons of shifting ore pellets and set it all out on the middle of Superior in a storm, then the Promethean feat of ingenuity and engineering that floats the lot of it might suddenly be rendered woeful insufficient. The men themselves, infinitesimal.

The sea neither notices nor cares.

Quickly! Quickly!

The waves rise up again. The distant view draws close,

Land ho, I call!

                                                                               - Goethe

The Edmund Fitzgerald suffered catastrophic failure during a gale somewhere out there, in open water. Well beyond anything like safe harbor.

At nearly 200 feet longer than the water there is deep, its bow might've crashed into the bottom at the same time the all but inverted stern still perched high above the waves. As the Mighty Fitz porpoised down and the tons of taconite inside her rolled, many if not all of the men inside her too, saw Death coming for them.

Until the moment the great ship broke under all that strain then in two ragged halves sank swiftly to the bottom and was still. Above, the sea raged on indifferent.

No S.O.S. was sent. Maybe, there wasn't the time. Regardless, those terrible moments ran long, for the men.

Don't think the Edmund Fitzgerald is a quiet, hallowed grave site. We've picked over its bones. Gone trophy hunting, for treasure and for knowledge. That's what we do. Ask most any Native American or any Egyptian about that, next time you see one.

Every November I think of the Fitz and its men. Once, it was the biggest boat on the lake. Today, it's the biggest boat on the bottom of it. Ever may that be so.

My own intimate relationship with Superior has, as of this writing, never turned terribly fraught. I've relished her when peaceful and serene. Have hunkered against the gale in awe when green water from the belly of the lake broke over the so-called breakwall like it wasn't there and from the heavens lightning flashed then the deep wave shattered upon unbroken wilderness and dissipated into tiny shards of ice. All ways, I love Superior.

I think of the Edmund Fitzgerald and the men and the stillness at the bottom of frigid Superior and trust that for them down there, the sea is forever calm.

Godspeed, all sailors.