Gales of November Remembered

And the blizzards...and this year, the election day Flu-that-would-not-die. Being sick for the best part of the month is my main excuse not commenting in a timely manner. Being sick in bed on the last two glorious days of fall before the rotten weather came to stay doesn't seem to stack up with the disasters this month can visit on the Great Lakes area, but while being miserable I was thinking about folks who were in more misery than I hope to ever see.

Comes to November, many folks think first (and last) of Gordon Lightfoot's grand song about the Edmund Fitzgerald. What I found myself wanting to hear is the lovely "It's quiet where they sleep" sung by my friend Katy Early. Being easily musically distracted, I found myself on a fruitless quest - it wasn't to be had in my house - and so the liner notes are only in my head at this point - the song was a poem written by a diver in the team that found the remains of the Edmund Fitzgerald at the lake's bottom, later put to a haunting tune. The images it conjures are kin to the views of the Titanic wreck that were shown in the last movie about that ship. Now I've got to get m'self a replacement copy of Cooper, Nelson & Early's "Love and War" album so I can listen to it again (and keep my CNE collection intact, egad!)

In the interim, I found m'self listening to another friend's music that Great Lakes lore - heavy on the shipwrecks and ship ghost stories - Lee Murdock. That had me digging out a long ago borrowed book Ghost ships of the Great Lakes (sorry, Chuck!)by Dwight Boyer. Lee sings of ships like the Bannockburn and Fitzgerald and all the exotic sounding place names scattered through the lakes from the Keweenaw Penninsula to all the familiar sounding port names on Lake Erie. If there's a good month to be home sick, tucked in a warm bed, this just might be it.