Tomorrow is the 30th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I mentioned it last year and the year before, and because anniversaries that end in zeroes are always more noteworthy, I've already seen some articles this year.
I'm not sure why I return to this every year. I'm not obsessed. I have no theory as to why the ship sank. I have no particular interest in ships or shipwrecks. I have sympathy for the families of the men, but no ties to them.
When the ship sank, she was on her way to a foundry on Zug Island in the Detroit River (not Cleveland, as the song said). The iron ore would have ended up as steel for cars.
Sometimes, when I hear the song, or on days like today when I'm thinking about the 29 lost crew, I think about how many people do dangerous jobs to produce things I generally take for granted.
I thought of this when I read The Perfect Storm. I wasn't sure if I ever wanted to eat swordfish again. But if people don't eat swordfish, what happens to Gloucester?
So tomorrow I'll think about where the steel in my car came from, and remember not only the Edmund Fitzgerald crew, but the more than 30,000 mariners who died in 6,000 shipwrecks in the Great Lakes.
The memorial service by the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum will be available as a webcast tomorrow evening. For more information on the mariner memorial, see the Great Lakes Mariners Memorial Project.
Posted by Nic at November 9, 2005 03:12 PM | TrackBack