Unusual Day
Oct. 21st, 2025 09:47![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bill_schubertI had a fasting blood draw this morning. Could not have been more convenient, though. The clinic is five minutes from our house if I drive slowly. My coffee drinking was delayed but not by much. My appointment was at 7:45 and I was back by 8 and on the porch with my coffee.
My next event is at 4PM today. I do not much like having anything scheduled after noon unless it is lunch but this is a volunteer event with Beaux's shelter. They need a couple of people to help with the adoption van which will be set up at Pets Mart. They just need hands to be with the dogs. I'm qualified. It is only for a couple of hours so I'll be back home by 6:30.
During my morning walk around the block with Toby and Beaux I started listening to the first in a series of five podcasts put together by the Duluth News Tribune about the Edmund Fitzgerald. They are timing the podcasts so they end on the 10th of November, fifty years after the ship sank. This has a personal significance to me as I obviously was around when Gordon Lightfoot made the whole thing famous a year after it happened. And I've seen the Great Lakes blow up a vicious storm faster than anything in my experience as I was on a Navy ship moored in Michigan.
I was aboard USS Antrim in 1988 as we sailed through the Great Lakes on a recruiting cruise giving tours to interested citizens and potential sailers. One calm night when we were steaming down Superior heading back from Duluth I was standing the evening watch (8 to Mid) on the bridge. The pilot who was assigned to the ship came up next to me. As we stood looking out at the dark and vast flat water ahead of us he asked if I'd heard of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I said I had and he said we were coming up on where it went down. And he told me his story. To set the scene you have to understand that no one speaks full voiced on the bridge at night unless they are giving an order so the story was that much more dramatic as it was relayed quietly so that only I could hear.
During his own return voyage from Duluth to hime, he was on the ship ten miles behind the Fitz in the middle of that November storm. He was in occasional communication with the pilot on the Fitzgerald. The seas were equally rough where he was astern of them and both ships were running for Whitefish bay where the seas would be calm. The Fitzgerald was closer and nearly to safety while the ship he was on had another hour and a half or more in the severe seas.
As he watched, the light from the Fitzgerald went out and as he looked down the radar blip disappeared and that was all hear ever saw or heard of them.
That night on the evening watch we passed over the graveyard of the Fitzgerald and, of course, the entire Lightfoot song played through my head.
Twenty eight years later I'm walking down the street listening to the podcast that tells the story all over again.
My next event is at 4PM today. I do not much like having anything scheduled after noon unless it is lunch but this is a volunteer event with Beaux's shelter. They need a couple of people to help with the adoption van which will be set up at Pets Mart. They just need hands to be with the dogs. I'm qualified. It is only for a couple of hours so I'll be back home by 6:30.
During my morning walk around the block with Toby and Beaux I started listening to the first in a series of five podcasts put together by the Duluth News Tribune about the Edmund Fitzgerald. They are timing the podcasts so they end on the 10th of November, fifty years after the ship sank. This has a personal significance to me as I obviously was around when Gordon Lightfoot made the whole thing famous a year after it happened. And I've seen the Great Lakes blow up a vicious storm faster than anything in my experience as I was on a Navy ship moored in Michigan.
I was aboard USS Antrim in 1988 as we sailed through the Great Lakes on a recruiting cruise giving tours to interested citizens and potential sailers. One calm night when we were steaming down Superior heading back from Duluth I was standing the evening watch (8 to Mid) on the bridge. The pilot who was assigned to the ship came up next to me. As we stood looking out at the dark and vast flat water ahead of us he asked if I'd heard of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I said I had and he said we were coming up on where it went down. And he told me his story. To set the scene you have to understand that no one speaks full voiced on the bridge at night unless they are giving an order so the story was that much more dramatic as it was relayed quietly so that only I could hear.
During his own return voyage from Duluth to hime, he was on the ship ten miles behind the Fitz in the middle of that November storm. He was in occasional communication with the pilot on the Fitzgerald. The seas were equally rough where he was astern of them and both ships were running for Whitefish bay where the seas would be calm. The Fitzgerald was closer and nearly to safety while the ship he was on had another hour and a half or more in the severe seas.
As he watched, the light from the Fitzgerald went out and as he looked down the radar blip disappeared and that was all hear ever saw or heard of them.
That night on the evening watch we passed over the graveyard of the Fitzgerald and, of course, the entire Lightfoot song played through my head.
Twenty eight years later I'm walking down the street listening to the podcast that tells the story all over again.