The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

I suppose that today I should be talking about Hillary's speech or at least something that has to do with peace and justice or something. But today what is on my mind is the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

I'm taking guitar lessons and was looking around on the internet to see if I could find some song to work on next, and somehow I ended up at this website that had a bunch of folk songs, including Gordon Lightfoot's famous song by this title.

Now, I've known this song. I actually got to see Gordon Lightfoot perform it last year in concert. I don't actually own it though; my only album of his is Gord's Gold (volume one--I guess it is on volume two). I went to YouTube to see if I could find the song, and found a number of postings.

I sort of had the idea that it was based on a real story, but didn't ever think too much about it. For some reason I thought it happened a long, long time ago. So I was sort of shocked to see that it happened in 1975, when I would have been eight years old. Probably not old enough to have thought much about it, but old enough to have heard.

Somehow, I don't know why, it makes the whole thing feel very different to me, and it's on my mind today. They were carrying a full load of taconite, a source of iron ore, destined for a mill outside of Detroit when the storm came and the Edmund Fitzgerald capsized.

It makes me think of all the people who have died and continue to die trying to make a living; certainly nothing new but also a problem that modernization has failed to solve. Regulation has helped lower the death rate for workers, but still an average of about 15 workers die on the job every day in America, and cutbacks in regulatory agencies have meant heightened hazards at work. Now, shipping has always had its hazards and I don't mean to imply necessarily that any government regulation could have saved the Fitzgerald; it just makes me think. I have always been pretty safe at work, I think (except maybe for the summer they were tarring the roof. That was terrible!) But I know that's not true for many, many people.

I thought this was a beautiful tribute to the men who died on the Edmund Fitzgerald that cold November day in 1975:



Links:
Article about the SS Edmund Fitzgerald on Wikipedia
Article on OMB Watch website about cutbacks in the OSHA budget