TWO HARBORS — On Sunday night, a bell at Split Rock Lighthouse again "rang 29 times," as Gordon Lightfoot sang, in memory of the sailors lost aboard the Edmund Fitzgerald. Then, however, the bell rang a 30th time — and that bell represented even more.
"A final toll," Ed Maki announced after reading the names of each Edmund Fitzgerald crew member, "for all those sailors that were lost on the lakes."
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Forty-nine years since the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, not only has that tragedy become the best-known foundering in the history of the Great Lakes, but also in the popular imagination. It's come to evoke not just every shipwreck, not just all maritime activity, but the power of the lakes themselves.
As Nov. 10 approached, it seemed like everyone in sight of Lake Superior recorded a TikTok or an Instagram reel coupling the sight of the lake with Lightfoot's song, as enduring a historical ballad as any the rock era has produced.
(Not that there are many competitors. Does "We Didn't Start the Fire" count?)
The lake lay quiet on Sunday night during a concise memorial ceremony that also included a performance of the Navy Hymn by "the Lighthouse Quartet," a group featuring Duluth Mayor Roger Reinert.
"We've been coming together once a year since 2013," said Reinert, who simply introduced himself as "Roger" and didn't mention his elected office. "The hymn has a long tradition in the civilian context ... and it is regularly invoked by ships' chaplains and sung during services like the one here today."
The ceremony also included remarks by Hayes Scriven. He is the site manager at the lighthouse, which the Minnesota Historical Society operates as a property. Before the ceremony, Scriven told me that Nov. 10, 2019, was his first day on the job.
"I was shocked at how emotional I would get because I don't have a personal connection to the crew," he said. "I'd never seen the lighthouse turned on either, and so that really did strike me. It really put a lot of things in perspective."
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"I grew up with the song, and the song is such a visual. You really feel it," said Kimberly Alexander of Duluth, among hundreds who attended Sunday's ceremony. "Being here, it gets really real, (especially) on a day like today, a foggy day."
Illuminated at the end of the "Muster of the Last Watch" — the nautical term for the name-and-bell ceremony — the lighthouse beacon cut through the fog, a beacon the Edmund Fitzgerald crew would have been desperate to spot five decades ago on the other end of the lake.
"Split Rock wasn't even active at the time that it went down," Scriven observed about the Fitz. Still, a shared connection to the lake is more than enough for the wreck to resonate at the lighthouse, which ceased operations in 1969. "Anybody that lives around Lake Superior, it feels like one big community to me."
David Meyer, who traveled from the Twin Cities suburb of Apple Valley to attend Sunday's ceremomy, speculated that not only Lightfoot's song, but also the widespread contemporary media coverage helped solidify the Fitz in local memory.
"Newspapers were in their heyday at that point. Television would have been pretty common in the '70s," he observed. "Now it's gotten so much worse, with 24-hour cable news. It's a constant drumbeat: any tragedy, no matter how big or small. This is just the leading edge of that."
The Split Rock beacon lighting has been a Nov. 10 tradition since 1985, when keeper Lee Radzak spontaneously responded to Lightfoot's song. A few years after that, the annual Gales of November conference was launched in the Twin Ports.
While the conference's name isn't simply a Lightfoot reference, shipwrecks have historically been a hot topic at the conference and will be again next year, the 50th anniversary of the Fitz sinking. This year, though historical talks were also in the mix, there was a focus on the future.
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"There's been, in the last decade, $50 million-plus in capital that's been plowed into the terminal to continue to grow capacity, keep it modern and be able to handle all of the needs of the different cargo opportunities that are thrown our way," said Jonathan Lamb, speaking about Duluth's Clure Public Marine Terminal during Friday's keynote address at The Garden.
Lamb, president of Lake Superior Warehousing Co., cited the terminal's recent handling of Canada-bound wind turbine components as an example of what the Port of Duluth-Superior can offer to a catchment area that includes much of the continent's central landmass.
"We have a greener supply chain," Lamb said, comparing maritime shipping to transporting goods by highway. "We have access to four railroads. That is also an improvement over trucking to and from coastal locations."
Following Lamb, Sam Hankinson of the Port of Monroe (Michigan) proudly cited his team's success in convincing a nearby steel mill to ship its product to the Twin Ports by freighter rather than truck.
"In August of 2022, we pulled the Paul R. Tregurtha up to our riverfront dock, and we loaded the ship with over 600 tons of steel bars that came up here," said Hankinson, who estimated the transport by lake obviated several dozen truck trips from Michigan to Minnesota.
Hankinson cited his port's commitment to continued partnerships in hopes of driving further win-win scenarios for shippers and their clients.
"The maritime industry, especially on the Great Lakes, is a very, very tight, intimate circle," he said. "Everybody knows everybody."
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Roger LeLievre, editor and publisher of the "Know Your Ships" reference guide, was at the conference selling his books. Whether it was sailors on the Edmund Fitzgerald or other vessels plying the Great Lakes, he said, people in the maritime industries have provided an invaluable service.
"What I really would like to see happen is people become more aware of the importance of Great Lakes shipping in their everyday lives," LeLievre told me. "They don't realize, perhaps, that the iron ore, the taconite pallets to make the steel to make your car, your refrigerator, your whatever, probably got carried by Great Lakes freighter."
Hankinson recommended LeLievre's book, to which he contributed.
"I hope you see the types of stories that we're trying to tell on behalf of our entire industry," Hankinson said, "trying to get more people to think about the maritime mode and how it can contribute to future innovation in our region, in our country. We wouldn't be able to do that without the access to history."
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