Insolent postillions

I've gone down a rabbit hole - or maybe, a whirlpool - over the last month. In November, I started watching videos about maritime ghost stories. And from there maritime tragedies.

I've always loved a good ghost story. And ghost stories are often rooted in tragedy. 

And there's nothing so terrifying and desperately lonely as tragedy striking on the sea.

Or in the Great Lakes, which are, for all intents and purposes, a freshwater sea. 

This November was the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. 

I used to watch those CD compilation commercials in the late 90s and there was one for the classics from the 70s and I remember hearing a snippet of Gordon Lightfoot's "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." At some point, somewhere, I'd come across the fact that it was based on a true story. 

But I never looked into it, until recently.

And it took hold of me. For a couple of reasons, I think. 

One reason being that it happened in 1975, in a time when we, societally, thought we were so modern, so advanced. That we had it all figured out. We had these beastly ships that could carry thousands of tons of ore year over year. We had weather satellites to keep us ahead of storms. And yet, one of these beastly ships - a maritime rock star so robust in size and build people thought it was unsinkable - disappeared into a storm within 10 minutes of its last radio contact with the Arthur M. Anderson. 

The other being how capitalism destroys things. The push to break records, to haul more, to haul faster, to keep going through storms...all of that so shareholders could make profit, led to the loss of 29 lives. 

In the few decades prior to the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, there were great wrecks and large losses of life (the SS Daniel J. Morrel in '66 and the SS Carl D. Bradley in 58 - and that's just in the few decades prior), but in the 50 years since the Fitz went down, no commercial ships have sunk on the Great Lakes. 

It took not just a tragedy, but a repeat tragedy buoyed by a beautifully haunting song to make a change to the commercial shipping industry.