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| Split Rock Light House overlooking Lake Superior
Photo by J. Harrington
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The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald has been memorialized in song by Gordon Lightfoot; in video on the History Channel; and in numerous books. Last year we did a more extensive posting about the storm and the wreck and the song and the history.
In reviewing our November postings on this blog, we've been disconcerted by the number of pictures and mentions of snow and cold. We persist in our belief that, even in the North Country, that kind of weather is supposed to hold off until after Thanksgiving, despite this morning's temperatures in the mid-teens. Could it be that our beliefs may have developed some errors over the years? Might our memories be of how we wish things were rather than how the actual occurrence?
An additional memorial occurs this weekend, tomorrow in fact, it is the centennial of the WWI Armistice (an event that even precedes our time). That's when we had the "war to end all wars." Didn't we?
Today we're grateful we never had to fight in trench warfare nor sail into a November gale on Lake Superior.
Diving into the Wreck
First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone. There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it is a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment. I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin. First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element. And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here. I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters. This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body. We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.
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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.
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