Reporter's Notebook

The big lake they call Gitche Gumme

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<!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:”"; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;}…Or better known as Lake Superior, is not where we’ll be going this week aboard the Freedom. Our trip takes us up Lake Michigan, under I-75 at Mackinaw into Lake Huron, and then past Detroit into Lake Erie, where we’ll tie up in Cleveland.The Navy hasn’t built many warships on the Great Lakes since World War II, so the main cultural reference that everybody keeps making is to Gordon Lightfood’s 1976 folk-jam “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” the earnest hit about the freighter lost with all 29 hands in a storm in 1975. This is not an encouraging song for someone about to embark upon a Great Lakes voyage in a large ship.

Capt. James Murdoch, program manager for the littoral combat ships, first brought up the song at a Surface Navy Association event last week in Arlington, Va. He was driving north in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with his wife, he said, when they came over a rise and saw the lake spread out ahead on the horizon. The Freedom had just sped west to Duluth at its 40-knot top speed to escape a storm front coming from the northwest, Murdoch remembered, and when he saw Lake Superior all he could think about were some choice lines from “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald:”

“And the searchers all say/ she’d have made Whitefish Bay/ if she’d put 15 more miles behind her.”

The anecdote got a chuckle out of the SNA crowd, but I thought it was a little eerie. I thought it was really eerie when I was enjoying a cold beverage last night in a bar, and after a normal assortment of silly Irish call-and-response tunes, the man onstage played “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

But no reason to get too much out of sorts.  These Navy guys know what they’re doing, so long as the gales of November don’t come early this year.