Edmund Fitzgerald on my mind

"Does anyone know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?
The searchers all say they’d have made Whitefish Bay
If they’d put 15 more miles behind her.
They might have split up or they might have capsized
May have broke deep and took water
And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughters"

- Gordon Lightfoot, 1976

Gordon Lightfoot’s Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, which tells the tragedy of the 29 men who died in November '75 on this “big lake they call Gitche Gumee’’, has haunted me for many years. How ironic, then, that we're here on the calmest of summer days, watching the girls play D-O-N-K-E-Y in a lake that can turn from dead calm to deadly in the blink of an eye. Later, as the sun goes down and the temperature starts to plummet, I think of the ghosts Superior will never give up and I'm grateful my girls will never know what it’s like to wait, and hope, for a daddy missing at sea.