Today is November 10th, 2025—fifty years since the Edmund Fitzgerald met its demise, and roughly forty-nine years since Gordon Lightfoot released his six-minute tribute ballad—an ear worm, even without a chorus. As I walk my rural neighborhood along the edges of Lake Wissota, the sky hangs low and gray, the first snow of the season swirling at 22 degrees. All the warmth and joviality of Wisconsin have retracted, pulled inward like a breath before a plunge. The summer people have left for the season, their docks dismantled and piled on shore, their second homes possessed of that singular shuttered coldness—felt even from the street—of a house with no life inside. The one neighbor who braves the day is hunched over a log splitter, focused as the squirrels racing to bury the last of their treasures.

There is a particular kind of silence on a November day in the Upper Midwest. This time of year, it’s said, the veil is thinned, allowing spirits of the departed free passage. I can’t speak on that, but I can speak on the way that memories gather—not unlike spirits—as winter draws near, each one obscuring the previous like layers of gauzy cloth. They collect and compound with interest. Most days, I forget my age, and my mind is twenty-two. Not the case today, crunching through wayward drifts of leaves that have lost their vibrant fires. Today, I carry the years. And because of the song, my thoughts are with the Edmond Fitzgerald.

On November 10, 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald—loaded with 26,000 tons of iron ore and carrying twenty-nine souls—went down in a Lake Superior storm without issuing a distress call.

The ship itself was named after the president of the company that commissioned her construction in 1957. A humble man, Edmund Fitzgerald didn't want the ship to bear his name, but the board voted unanimously, and so the greatest ore carrier on the Great Lakes carried a reluctant man's name into history, into musical legend, and into the cold deep where neither he nor the men aboard would ever have chosen to go. The sinking haunted him until his death in 1986.

Two weeks after the wreck, Gordon Lightfoot read an article about it in Newsweek, and wrote a song that was a hit less than a year later. By November 1976, the first-year anniversary of the disaster, the song was unavoidable. I wonder at the emotions felt by the families of those who had died. Did a young widow, hearing it for the very first time on the dashboard radio, toddlers in the back seat, pull her Pontiac to the side of Highway 61 and sob? Did a father, his son lost to the waves, hear it first from a jukebox in a waterfront bar in Duluth and silently order another round?

I can’t know these things, but I do know how it affected me. Only a child in 1976, I misunderstood the context and pictured the wreck of a three-masted sailing ship from centuries past. My imagination missed the mark, but the emotions hit home. At that time, my mother—determined as any captain—was sailing our family through storms violent and gloomy as those gales of November. Her efforts were similarly fated. The plight of the Fitzgerald’s sailors sinking into the murky deep resonated with me—a nine-year-old suburban girl from the Central Valley of California—and offered a kind of kinship. At eleven, gifted with a Christmas guitar from JC Penny’s, I learned to play the song.

The first time I saw Lake Superior, at fifty, Janna and I wound our way down to the lake after nearly sinking ourselves during a stormy canoe crossing of Lac La Croix in the Boundary Waters. We were exuberant, thrilled (and pleasantly surprised) to be among the living. My first view of the big water—Gitche Gumee to the Ojibwe, who have the right of naming—was love at first sight. She was implacable, vast beyond my comprehension, and entirely unconcerned with me. Ah, the lure of unrequited love. I insisted on blasting Gordon Lightfoot all the way through Two Harbors and Duluth. Our marriage survived, but The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, once again, stitched itself into memory.

Gordon Lightfoot died on May 1, 2023. He was 84. I was shocked when I heard the news, as he had remained frozen in my mind as the soulful looking 30-something man staring out from the front of my parents' record collection. For nearly fifty years, his song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald has kept the plight of her sailors alive in memory. Now he's gone too, adding another gauzy layer of memory.

The Mariners’ Church in Detroit rings the bell 29 times every November 10th, and they added a 30th the year that Gordon Lightfoot died. Without his song, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald might be a footnote. One of six thousand ships lost in the Great Lakes. A tragedy that makes the news for a week, maybe a month, and then fades. But the song made the wreck unforgettable, gave the twenty-nine men a kind of immortality, and created a communal memory for millions who never knew them.