Superior, it’s said, never gives up its dead.

[ via Medley ] Nigel Campbell remembers the Edmund Fitzgerald, a Great Lakes ore hauler that went down with all hands in a storm on Lake Superior in November of 1975. Gordon Lightfoot wrote and sang a ballad about the Fitzgerald, which is why everyone in my generation knows about the wreck.

The Great Lakes ore haulers were a peculiar type of ship, narrow-beamed because of the mass they carried and the glacier-carved inland seas on which they sailed. When I saw one during an Easter trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in 1988, I was struck by the proportions.

Compared to other freighters, the skinny ships looked longer than they should. My overactive imagination mapped them to the long, narrow-beamed spaceships from popular culture: The Discovery from 2001 and the Valley Forge (Silent Running).

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This entry was written by Bill Humphries and posted on December 1, 2002 at 12:00 am and filed under culture. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the Atom feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.