THE GALES OF NOVEMBER - November 10, 2017

'THE GALES of NOVEMBER: The wind curls it's icy hand round my neck as I stand on an exposed red sandstone outcrop above the Silver Bay Marina staring down into an ever shifting aquamarine sea swirling around boulders fringed with creamy surf. The sky is indigo against which rise huge clouds of ice-coloured steam from piles of hot iron ore pellets emptying from the dryer chutes of the Cliffs processing plant. The waves slap as they froth up along the shore and hiss as they recede. The rising wind whistles in the bare branches of leafless trees and susses through the tall dry grass. And on the wind comes a line from a Stan Rogers ballad, The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald - "the gales of November came early." As we head south again towards Duluth, the light has faded to the almost dark of a late fall evening when ahead through the trees a beam of light, strong, warm and welcoming, marks the site of the Split Rock Lighthouse. Intrigued because we have never seen the beacon of the lighthouse lit before, we pause to admire it. Around the next bend we encounter hordes of other people also stopped and we realize that we have inadvertently stumbled onto the Edmund Fitzgerald Memorial Beacon Lighting honoring the crew of a freighter lost in Jackfish Bay on Lake Superior November 10, 1975. Life has a way of singing truth and beauty to us if we just pause long enough to hear it. Image courtesy of Minnesota Historical Society.'

 The wind curls it's icy hand round my neck as I stand on an exposed red sandstone outcrop above the Silver Bay Marina staring down into an ever shifting aquamarine sea swirling around boulders fringed with creamy surf. The sky is indigo against which rise huge clouds of ice-coloured steam from piles of hot iron ore pellets emptying from the dryer chutes of the Cliffs processing plant.

The waves slap as they froth up along the shore and hiss as they recede. The rising wind whistles in the bare branches of leafless trees and susses through the tall dry grass. And on the wind comes a line from a Stan Rogers ballad, The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald - "the gales of November came early."

As we head south again towards Duluth, the light has faded to the almost dark of a late fall evening when ahead through the trees a beam of light, strong, warm and welcoming, marks the site of the Split Rock Lighthouse. Intrigued because we have never seen the beacon of the lighthouse lit before, we pause to admire it. Around the next bend we encounter hordes of other people also stopped and we realize that we have inadvertently stumbled onto the Edmund Fitzgerald Memorial Beacon Lighting honoring the crew of a freighter lost in Jackfish Bay on Lake Superior November 10, 1975.

Life has a way of singing truth and beauty to us if we just pause long enough to hear it.

Image courtesy of Minnesota Historical Society.

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