I remember listening to this song when it first came out. I knew nothing about the events it was commemorating.
But after moving to Minnesota, I have spent a lot of time in Duluth, on Lake Superior. I have watched "great lakes freighters", similar to the Edmund Fitzgerald, on the lake ,coming into port, or leaving port -- the same port the Edmund Fitzgerald departed from. And I have seen what storms on that Lake can be like, even from the relative safety of a port city's bay.
The Edmund Fitzgerald almost made it into Whitefish Bay, which would hopefully have been calmer than the waters of the open lake. The song means more to me now, and the whole story strikes me as more tragic, simply because it now seems more real to me.
And The Edmund Fitzgerald is not the only ship that Lake Superior has claimed:
(Whitefish Bay is at the extreme southeast. The ship was rounding Whitefish Point when it sank.)
@bijouxbroussard Except that unlike the Bermuda Triangle, there is no great mystery to it: just bad storms! Lake Superior is calm most of the time, but it can get really rough. And as you can see from the map, the wrecks are all over the lake.
