The Gales of November Came Early

A few thoughts on the fiftieth anniversary of one of the world's most famous shipwrecks.

When I was first learning to play guitar, I found a notebook of chord sheets my dad had hand-charted for some of his favorite songs from the 60s and 70s. Among those songs was “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Like the others in the notebook, I tried to learn the tune, the sad story of a ship that sank in Lake Superior on November 10, 1975. Singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot bought stacks of newspapers shortly after the tragic loss of the mighty ship, drafting the haunting dirge and recording it in a single take.

Recently, I don’t know if it’s something in the water or something in the air or just an algorithmic rabbit hole, but the Edmund Fitzgerald has become a thing again ahead of the 50th anniversary of its sinking. A whole niche on social media talks about it and makes memes and TikToks and reels.

The five Great Lakes entomb the liquid graves of thousands of ships, and even more individual sailors’ lives. But the Edmund Fitzgerald is a cultural stand-in for all of them. We remember the ship because a man wrote a poem, he put that poem to music, and he played it and sang it. When Lightfoot’s lament was stamped into vinyl it was simultaneously stamped into our cultural memory.

I’ve been sort of nerding out about the Fitz recently, repeating the song, watching documentaries, listening to stories. A few things have been resonating with me as I’ve thought about the story and the song.

The Sacred Power of Story and Song

First, stories and songs have a power to preserve and make sacred. As an undergraduate student, I learned a saying attributed to Socrates (he didn’t actually say it, but it’s still worth thinking about): “Let me write a nation’s songs, and I don’t care who writes its laws.“ God has wired something about narrative, song, story, melody, harmony, into our nature as humans. We are storytellers and story-hearers. We are singers and songwriters. We are makers and shapers.

Obviously, this most profoundly relates to Scripture, which is a collection of stories and songs and poems. In an important way, we remember Israel, and Israel matters, because we have Israel’s book. Actually, we have Israel’s collection of books. We have Israel’s library, Israel’s hymn book, Israel’s music catalog, Israel’s community of sacred, true tales. The sacred nature of these writings is special among the works of the world, of course. They tell of Abraham and sons and Abraham’s Messianic Son (Jesus) and those in Him, the peculiar people descended called to be a light to the nations, a kingdom of priests. Their (and our) tales and songs have inspired countless lesser works.

The Lord tells us we should sing new songs. We preserve stories in the memories of our lives, our communities, and what God is doing in our lives. When I first heard “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” I thought the story was from a far-away maritime world of wooden hulls and pirates and high seas. Not from a decade and a half before on the outskirts of Michigan. Songs and stories have a way of preserving and making timeless the things they tell.

The Necessary Practice of Lament

Second, the Edmund Fitzgerald resonates because lament is a necessary feature of our lives. I understand the criticism that the song is a beat down, most humorously captured by Tim Hawkins, as Pastor Bart Barber pointed out to me on Twitter. Yet, more deeply, Lightfoot’s song haunts in an emotionally, spiritually, psychologically cathartic way. Because we need lament in a world broken by tragedy.

One-third of the Psalms are the genre of lament. An entire book of the Bible is named after the practice, Lamentations. Our churches are marked by celebratory, neo-charismatic worship focusing on victory and overcoming. We should rejoice when God wins, but as Christians we often experience weakness and loss. Sometimes, we need simply to sit in the sadness and sorrow, and say, “This is what happened.” We need to name the tragedy. We need to tell the story, and let the tension ring out like the recurring wailing guitar riff on “The Wreck.”

The Onramps into Wider Worlds

Third, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” has become an entry point into a larger awareness of the story of the Great Lakes, the shipping industry, and more. As one author of a history of the Edmund Fitzgerald and freighters on the Great Lakes said, if the song hadn’t been written, his book wouldn’t have been written either. In telling stories and singing songs, we invite people into wider worlds and larger stories. Such stories and songs are keyholes of understanding and resonance, gateway drugs into new connections. Good stories and songs open up ways into new worlds like Lucy’s wardrobe opened the way to Narnia.

This applies, for example, to our own stories, spiritually called our “testimonies.” Such witness can invite others into the wider world of the gospel and the work of God in the world beyond just our own individual lives. The story of the martyrdom of missionaries Jim Elliot and Nate Saint sparked missionary commitment for decades. We can also find personal connections that interweave our own stories with layers of meaning. The nickname for the Fitz was “the Toledo Express” because it so often shipped into Toledo, Ohio. My own father-in-law was born in Toledo before moving here to South Florida, where I married his daughter. Such connections remind us that we do indeed live in a small world, and remind us that God is threading connections for his glory and our good that we don’t yet perceive.

May the gales of November be kind to you this year.