One of the greatest and most Canadian of all Canadian songs is Gordon Lightfoot‘s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Quite typically, it’s a story about a tragedy that actually took place in the US, affecting primarily Americans and it is more or less successfully attempting to pass as a Yank tune.

It’s the accent.

The ship went down in a storm on November 10, 1975. The ship had been in grave trouble, and in constant radio and visual contact with a fellow ship, for many hours when it vanished in a sudden squall. No trace of the ship has surfaced…until now.

Now, from exotic Conklin, Michigan comes news that bits of the wreckage have begun to wash up on the shores of Lake Superior. Well, 20 feet up from the water line, about as high as the waves were the night she went down. Unfortunately, the constituent parts of a Great Lakes shipping vessel are not exactly the glamorous New World equivalent of the gold of Spanish galleons.

Joe, an apple farmer from Conklin, Mich., was agate hunting with his family midway between Horse Shoe Harbor and High Rock Bay in Keweenaw County Friday when he discovered a life ring off to the side of a blown-down tree. The ring was found 100 feet from the waters edge, up a rocky slope, 20 feet higher than the lake level, three feet into the trees, Joe said. The ring was not visible until he went up the bank, he said. Thinking nothing of it, Joe rolled the ring down the hill to his daughters. Joe’s youngest daughter Elizabeth, 10, caught the ring in her hands and turned it over. What was printed on the ring, they had never imagined: Edmund Fitzgerald.

“It sent a chill down my spine,” Joe said. “It’s the last thing I thought it was.”

Lyrics over the jump: Continue reading →