Men's Lifestyle November 10, 2025 0 Comments

Unlock the Untold Emotional Workout Hidden in The Edmund Fitzgerald – Prepare to Feel Like Never Before!

“Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?” That haunting line from Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” sticks with you—long after the last note fades. So, why does a tragic shipwreck from 50 years ago still grip so many of us, especially men, like some sort of magnetic tug pulling us into the depths? Just last Friday, I dove headfirst into TikTok hunting for “Edmund Fitzgerald” and found myself swimming through a sea of memes, videos, and genuine heartbreak wrapped in humor. This isn’t just a story about a ship swallowed whole by Lake Superior’s wrath—it’s a tale etched deeply into American history and into the threads of human emotion. It’s about struggle, loss, camaraderie… and, yes, even love. Hang tight, because this isn’t your typical history lesson; it’s a voyage into why this shipwreck, paired with one unforgettable folk ballad, has become a strange sort of obsession—and how it hits way harder than you might think. LEARN MORE

“Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?” – Gordon Lightfoot, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”

On Friday morning, I opened TikTok and typed “Edmund Fitzgerald” into the search bar. A plumage of memes filled my screen. I tapped the first search result and let the algorithm take me away. An hour later, I came up for air believing I had finally found the most satisfying part of the Internet—that involving the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Tomorrow, November 10, is the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior. It was a national news story at the time—the lake had swallowed a 729-foot iron-ore ship, killing all 29 men aboard—but it was the Gordon Lightfoot song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which came out in November 1976, that transformed the tragedy into an unforgettable moment of American history.

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The Edmund Fitzgerald pictured in 1972, three years before it sank during a storm on Lake Superior.

For countless men, including me, it’s a minor obsession. What is it about this song and this event and shipwrecks of all kinds that seems to enrapture so many men? Yes, there’s rich storytelling and adventure and stoicism and the romance of battling the elements. But here’s the real reason men embrace the story of a shipwreck: It’s a vehicle for emotion—sadness, loss, friendship, even love. One meme I saw on Friday morning, for instance, shows an image of the Edmund Fitzgerald with text saying:

Women: “Do you even have emotions?”

Below the question is a video of Vince McMahon choking back tears and the words “Men every November 10.”

In other words, you try to not cry when you listen to that damn song.

“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is a nearly seven-minute folk ballad that rose to no. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1976, defying expectations, considering it’s, you know, a nearly seven-minute folk ballad about a shipwreck. My parents had a seven-inch single of the song that I stumbled upon as a kid. In the age of cassettes, I would sit cross-legged in front of their turntable and listen to the story of the doomed ship over and over.

The Big Fitz, as it was known, left the rough, working-class town of Superior, Wisconsin, on November 9 loaded with taconite pellets, or little balls of iron ore, bound for an island near Detroit. The weather was beautiful, but Fitz’s captain, Ernest M. McSorley, noted that bad weather lay ahead. It was November in the Upper Midwest, where big storms with howling winds stalk the Great Lakes. Lightfoot calls it “the gales of November” and, hauntingly, “the witch of November.” The next day, a strong storm kicked up on the lake, producing hurricane-force winds, blinding snow, and waves up to 25 feet high. Amid the brutal conditions, everything seemed to go wrong for the Fitz. Its decks were soaked as the ship took on water; it began to list and lost both its radars.

Another ship, the Arthur M. Anderson, was traveling in the same direction, trailing only a handful of miles behind the Fitz. Her crew kept in regular contact with McSorley. “It’s the worst sea I have ever been in,” he said in one of the transmissions. McSorley had 54 years of experience, a sick wife, and three stepchildren at home.

The ship battled the conditions for hours. At 7:10 p.m., the Anderson’s first mate asked McSorley, “By the way, how are you making out with your problem?”

McSorley answered: “We are holding our own.”

It was Fitz’s final transmission. After they signed off, the snow created blinding conditions. Around 7:25 p.m., the snow stopped and the crew of the Andersonnoticed that the lights of the Edmund Fitzgerald were gone.

All 29 crew members went down with the ship. Their bodies were never recovered. (“The lake it is said never gives up her dead,” Lightfoot sang.) It’s among the ten deadliest shipwrecks on Lake Superior and the costliest. A two-and-a-half-year National Transportation Safety Board investigation blamed the sinking on a sudden, massive flooding of the cargo hold, the result of at least one blown hatch cover. People have challenged those findings.

TV news stories captured Lightfoot’s attention, as did a Newsweek story on the wreck called “The Cruelest Month.” Soon he sat down to write, and he agonized over the accuracy of his song. “I was having trouble with the conjecture I was putting in the middle of the song,” Lightfoot told the Chicago Tribune in 2000. “A couple conjectures, actually, about a hatchway cover breaking and the one about the old cook. Well, how could anybody know what the old cook said, or even if the old cook came out on deck?” Then his lead guitarist advised him to think like Mark Twain and “just tell a story.”

When new research emerged challenging the NTSB findings, Lightfoot changed a few of the lyrics in live performances of the song. For instance, instead of singing “At 7 p.m., when the main hatchway gave in”—which suggests crew error, a point the families of the victims have disputed—Lightfoot sang, “At 7 p.m., it grew dark, it was then he said …”

For Lightfoot, the song was more than a chart-topping hit. “What really matters,” he told the Chicago Tribune, “is they’re all gone, and the people care. And that song brings memories back to them. It gives me a responsibility, and I try to live up to that responsibility as much as I can.”

My obsession with the seven-inch single waned quickly, but the song had etched itself into my brain. As a teenager, I paid a small fortune for a ten-CD set, The Sounds of the Seventies, which I bought from an infomercial. Of course, Lightfoot’s song was on the 1976 disc. After listening to the song on repeat—while driving around not far from the shores of Lake Michigan—my friend Billy and I made a plan to work on a Great Lakes ship after high school. (It never happened.) By the time the 1977 disc arrived in the mail, I had already moved on.

Then I met the woman who would become my wife.

Sally grew up in Duluth, Minnesota. Her childhood home was on a hill from which you could see the gunmetal-gray waters of Lake Superior—if a fog didn’t roll in and obscure the view. Then she would hear foghorns blowing from the ships. Not long after we met, in Chicago, I asked whether she knew about the Edmund Fitzgerald. After all, Duluth is not only on Lake Superior but also next to Superior, Wisconsin.

“Of course,” she said matter-of-factly. “They taught us about it in grade school.”

I don’t think I fell in love with her in that moment, but it sure encouraged the feeling. And once I saw Lake Superior for the first time, on my first trip to Duluth to meet her family, I understood that anyone who’d grown up around such a violent and moody body of water, one that could sink a giant iron-ore ship, has a depth of emotion beyond that of most people, including someone who grew up on the blue and relatively placid waters of Lake Michigan. Twenty years after that first trip, I can see I was right.

Thankfully, she’s humored my ongoing interest in the Edmund Fitzgerald.

During our many visits to Duluth, I’ve dragged her and our daughters to the Lake Superior Maritime museum, where I’ve bought books about Greak Lakes disasters (including November’s Fury, about the Great Lakes Hurricane of 1913) and a small wooden replica of the Edmund Fitzgerald. It broke into pieces during one of our moves.

Men love shipwrecks. That’s what the writer Jason Diamond—who wrote the excellent book Kaplan’s Plot—told me when I called him last week. Diamond had been posting on Instagram about the Edmund Fitzgerald, so I rang him up to bullshit about the ship. He told me about his grandfather taking him out on Lake Michigan, telling him about shipwrecks and describing to him the winds of November: “The witches are howling.”

Jason then pointed me toward TikTok.

On my phone, I saw a video that went viral last month of a guy who dressed up as the Edmund Fitzgerald for Halloween. I discovered a drinking game (drink 29 beers, one for every man on the Edmund Fitzgerald). I watched a British man express his shock in learning about the story (“Forget the Titanic. Why aren’t we talking about this?”) I found conspiracy theories about the wreck (of course), clips from documentaries, and mournful pictures of the ship in the years before it sank. With a few swipes of my finger, the algorithm took me further down a path of shipwreck posts, all with the same tone—humor mixed with sadness. Jokey dirges. All of it proved that yes, men, even young men, love shipwrecks. But it didn’t reveal why.

Men love shipwrecks because in them we see elemental themes of struggle, bravery, camaraderie, and loss. We’re thinking about our efforts to beat the odds. We’re considering our partners and kids and friends when the odds beat us. We’re all Captain Ernest M. McSorley.

“By the way, how are you making out with your problem?”

“We are holding our own.”

This story appeared in the weekly email Newsletter from the Editor, which is sent to Esquire subscribers. You can subscribe here.

Pictured at the top of the story is a seven-foot model of the Edmund Fitzgerald.