Split Rock Lighthouse, which is lit each year for about two hours and 15 minutes to honour the lives of the men who died aboard the Edmund Fitzgerald. Photograph: Alex Kormann/Star Tribune via Getty Images
“We are holding our own,” Ernest McSorley, the captain of the Edmund Fitzgerald said as the famous freighter made its way through a treacherous evening on Lake Superior. But they weren’t.
His words, sometime after 7.10pm on November 10th, 1975, closed what was the last transmission from a ship that has become the abiding symbol of a sense of community, courage and separateness among the people whose working lives revolve around the Great Lakes. Twenty-nine men went down with “The Fitz”.
Crossing the Mackinac Bridge, the 8km structure that connects northern Michigan to the Upper Peninsula (UP), is one of the more extraordinary travel experiences in North America. I was there last year in the closing weeks of the election: it was late autumn and both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump were bombardi
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