Shipwreck season
A proposal for the post-Halloween, pre-Thanksgiving time of year
A postcard of the steamers Daniel J. Morrell and Leonard C. Hanna in Ashtabula Harbor, about 1907. Via Wikimedia Commons.
It bums me out when Halloween is over, but I’m never ready to jump right into the winter holidays, not until the trees are actually bare, the days truly dark. Winter in the Midwest already lasts like eight months. Why drag it into the last few weeks of lingering fall? We still have shining afternoon sun and good bonfire smells and brightness in the trees. We don’t need the holiday sparkle yet.
But I do want to mark the time, especially leading up to Thanksgiving, which just does not seem to me like a holiday to anticipate, a holiday with a spirit. A “Thanksgiving season?” Thanksgiving is a day. An inflatable yard turkey doesn’t do it for me! (An actual yard turkey: Yes.)
Then a friend shared this meme on Instagram. I laughed at it. And then days later I found myself thinking: But actually, yes. That’s it. It’s shipwreck season.
The sound is obviously “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Original post here.
The gales of November: You’ve heard of ‘em. They sank the Edmund Fitzgerald on November 10, 1975, on Lake Superior. They broke the Daniel Morrell in half on November 29, 1966, and snapped the steel of the Carl D. Bradley on November 18, 1958.1 There was the Armistice Day storm of November 11, 1940, which sank three freighters on Lake Michigan in an hour — the Novadoc, the Anna C. Minch, and the William B. Davock, killing 59 sailors between them. (The Armistice Day storm was also deadly for duck hunters.) The White Hurricane of November 9, 1913, still the worst inland maritime disaster in U.S. history, killed some 250 people on a dozen shipwrecks: the Regina, the Isaac Scott, the James Carruthers, the Argus, the Charles S. Price, the Wexford among them. (Here’s the Nov. 13, 1913 front page of The Detroit News as the world began to calculate the cost of the storm.)
Is it a little grim? Somber? Sure! But on the heels of Halloween’s campy morbidity — and before we head into weeks of relentless, sometimes torturous cheer — maybe we could use a transitional season, a contemplative mood, a time to remember lost souls and play songs of the terrible sea and the awful power of the weather. (You know why we have a National Weather Service? Because notable Milwaukeean Increase Lapham kept sending clips of deadly Great Lakes shipwrecks to his Congressperson is why!)
Shipwreck season: It’s a time for freighter watching, or to put on a flannel and take a walk by a river or dock with a friend and some hot coffee. It’s a time for nautical puzzles or building a model ship or curling up with “Harborless,” a beautiful book of shipwreck poems by Cindy Hunter Morgan, or any one of dozens of other gripping Great Lakes shipwreck books. (My son and I love this one.) There are of course several long-standing Great Lakes memorial services that happen this time of year. The Dossin Great Lakes Museum hosts a Lost Mariners Remembrance this Friday, Nov. 10, by the Fitzgerald’s anchor. Mariners’ Church gives its annual Great Lakes Memorial Service next Sunday, Nov. 12, where they’ll ring the bell that rang 29 times the night the Fitzgerald sank. The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum also hosts an annual Edmund Fitzgerald Memorial Service that will be virtual this year, no trek to Whitefish Point required.
It’s not a decorative season, really, but you could put up a life preserver where your skully wreath was or throw a slicker on your lawn skeleton, if you really wanted to go all in. My heart would be cheered to see it.
It occurred to me this week to look for live cams of the busy Great Lakes ports I have been getting to know through Marine Traffic, the app that blessedly replaced much of my Twitter scrolling this year.
That’s how I found this video of the Arthur M. Anderson — the ship that sailed beside the Edmund Fitzgerald the night that it sank — passing into Duluth harbor at night, through a peaceful snow, just a week ago. There’s some pleasant radio chatter, and then the ship gives a master salute. The algorithm could not come up with more soothing shit if it tried. This is it, this is exactly it, I’ve thought every one of the last dozen times I’ve watched it. The spirit of the season.
The wreck of the Morrell was a lot like the wreck of the Fitz except that it was not memorialized by a Gordon Lightfoot guitar ballad and thus did not become a myth. But Lightfoot did have the old cook on board the Fitzgerald say, “Fellas, it’s been good to know ya” — reportedly uttered by Norm Bragg the night the Daniel Morrell sank. Bragg had survived another wreck, of the S.S. Henry Steinbrenner, in 1953.