“Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?” – Gordon Lightfoot, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald ”

On Friday morning, I opened TikTok and typed “Edmund Fitzgerald” into the search bar. A plumage of memes filled my screen. I tapped the first search result and let the algorithm take me away. An hour later, I came up for air believing I had finally found the most satisfying part of the Internet—that involving the Edmund Fitzgerald .

Tomorrow, November 10, is the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior. It was a national news story at the time—the lake had swallowed a 729-foot iron-ore ship, killing all 29 men aboard—but it was the Gordon Lightfoot song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald ,” which came o

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