Great Lakes, a mysterious fog

Not since Gordon Lightfoot sang of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald off Superior's southeast shores in 1971, has the true nature of the Great Lakes been captured. Lightfoot, a Canadian, who loved Georgian Bay, the "sixth great lake" [which is virtually unknown in the US] explored the history and drama of the lakes naming each lake and linking them back to native legends. At right: looking out onto L. Ontario from Salmon Ck. as it flows into Braddock Bay, NY.

Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
In the ruins of her ice water mansion
Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams,
The islands and bays are for sportsmen.

And farther below Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
With the gales of November remembered.

In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed
In the Maritime Sailors' Cathedral
The church bell chimed, 'til it rang 29 times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
Superior, they say, never gives up her dead
When the gales of November come early.

From "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" by Gordon Lightfoot

But the entire Great Lakes Basin with its continental divides, class five+ rapids and whirlpools in the Niagara River, the many, many islands, shoals, submerged wrecks, rivers, streams, creeks, beaches and rocky shores, is in serious need of a consciousness-updating. The Voyagers and their canoes did get some play in "Black Robe" which at least opened up the Huron history to contemporary thinking, a little. Oh, there is Hemingway's 1925 "Big Two-Hearted River" based on the real Two-Hearted River in upper peninsula Michigan; Paddle to the Sea by Holling Clancy Holling which actually is a true cross-border story; and Carl Sandburg who wrote this haunting poem . . . .

The Harbor

Passing through huddled and ugly walls

By doorways where women

Looked from their hunger-deep eyes,

Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands,

Out from the huddled and ugly walls,

I came sudden, at the city's edge,

On a blue burst of lake,

Long lake waves breaking under the sun

On a spray-flung curve of shore;

And a fluttering storm of gulls,

Masses of great gray wings

And flying white bellies

Veering and wheeling free in the open.

More!! Why not stories of both/either the "Thousand Islands" at the entrance to the St. Lawrence R. or the "Thirty-Thousand Islands" in Georgian Bay? Time to find what inspires, what tells the true tale. I'm on a journey, I know it. . . . . . .