What the Edmund Fitzgerald still says about men and their feelings

It's been more than 50 years since the Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior. Over the last 200 years, there have been more than 6,000 shipwrecks in the Great Lakes, but even for the most Midwest of us Midwesterners, we only regularly talk about one. And boy oh boy, do we love talking about it.

We can thank legendary singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot for that. His 1976 hit put the story of the Great Lakes' most famous maritime disaster on the airwaves. The Fitzgerald was a 729-foot iron-ore freighter that went down with all 29 crew members, making it among the deadliest and costliest wrecks on Lake Superior. The exact cause and final moments are a mystery to this day.

Few songs capture a season like "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," with its haunting lines about the November gales and a lake that keeps its dead. Here in Milwaukee, home of Northwestern Mutual, whose former head was the ship's namesake, November has definitely arrived. It's dark, damp and cold. My whole life has been sandwiched between Lake Michigan, Lake Superior and the mighty Mississippi. As beautiful as each of them is, when this weather hits, there's no chance in heck I'd want to be out on any of them.

So what is it about this particular ship, and the mystery surrounding its sinking, that still holds our attention today, particularly for men?

Michael Sebastian of Esquire has a theory: shipwreck stories give men a socially acceptable way to feel deeply. In them, he writes, we see "elemental themes of struggle, bravery, camaraderie, and loss."

There's probably some truth to that.

In the final radio transmission from Captain Ernest McSorley, we see a bit of the stoicism, and the vulnerability, that sounds all too familiar for men in deep struggle. The Fitzgerald was taking on water, had developed a dangerous list, had lost both radars and was facing hurricane-force winds in blinding snow, with rogue waves reported anywhere from 25 to 60 feet.

When another ship asked, "How are you making out with your problems?" McSorley simply replied, "We are holding our own."

Five words. Nothing more, nothing less.

The ship rests at the bottom of Lake Superior, split in two, 530 feet down. It was just 17 miles from the safety of Whitefish Bay.

If you want to go deeper, Sebastian's Esquire piece is worth a read, and this documentary from Local 4 in Detroit is excellent. And of course, there's Lightfoot's classic song. It's racked up tens of millions of streams on Spotify. A good 30 of those are mine.