Originally appearing on his 1976 album, Summertime Dream, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is a haunting ballad written and performed by folk singer Gordon Lightfoot. The song hit #2 at the time (behind Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright).”) The lyrics are a masterpiece, but the one line that always stood out to me: “The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead.” Recently, the song hit #1, almost 49 years after its release. Listening to it again after all these years, I was inspired to research what that line meant and if there was any truth to it.
It turns out that the line is not just poetic license. It’s physics.
When 29 souls went down with the Edmund Fitzgerald on November 10, 1975, they stayed down. Not because of some mystical property of the Great Lakes, but because of a perfect storm of temperature, pressure, and biology that we can model mathematically.
The families of the crew unanimously asked that the site remain undisturbed, and both the U.S. and Canada treat it as a grave. However, that decision relates to recovery attempts such as divers going down to remove the bodies or raising of the wreck. This post specifically deals with the fact that the bodies have not risen to the surface on their own.
“The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead / When the skies of November turn gloomy”