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Great LakesOctober 16, 2006 A story in this morning's online New York Times begins thus:
The third paragraph disclosed that the Coast Guard plans to use 34 areas of Lake Michigan "as permanent, live fire shooting zones for training on their new 7.62 mm weapons, which can blast as many as 650 rounds a minute and send fire more than 4,000 yards." My pocket calculator confirms my mathematical hunch: 4,000 yards is well over two miles. I had a hunch I knew where the story was going: the reporter was going to find some people to say that the Coast Guard was overreacting and some to say that we can't underestimate the terrorist threat, or assume that the Canadian border is safe (subtext: even though they're mostly white people who speak the same language as and look a lot like we do). The edge would go to the latter: it's best to err on the side of caution. That hunch was pretty close to the mark. You probably have a hunch about where this blog is going: Uh-oh, here we go again. More pontification about "risk, the unexpected, and the war on terrorism," and while we're at it she's probably going to toss in that "iatrogenic" word she's so enamored with. You know: how the war on terrorism is creating more terrorism, and maybe is terrorism all by itself? Got it in one! But read on anyway. There's a bend in the road up ahead. This weekend I spent some time on the Keelaghan board, catching up on threads I'd missed during several months away. One was about "Woodsmoke & Oranges," an Ian Tamblyn song that James Keelaghan frequently performs in concert and covered on his 7th CD, Home. I love the song, so I jumped in. "Woodsmoke & Oranges" draws on numerous canoe trips the songwriter has made on Lake Superior. In one line he evokes the power of the lake: it "ripped the lighthouse door." I recalled a story that Keelaghan sometimes tells to preface the song: the image came from the same 1975 storm that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald, whose loss with all hands Gordon Lightfoot commemorated in "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." By the end of the day, Clinton Hammond, a Canadian musician who frequents the Keelaghan board, had contacted Ian Tamblyn and posted Ian's much fuller account of the storm, the lighthouse (whose keeper lost three fingers trying to hold a door against wind and waves), and the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. By then I'd spent almost an hour browsing the Web trying to find out the location of the lighthouse. Never did find it, but I learned a lot about the Edmund Fitzgerald and the storm that sank it. By the time I read Ian Tamblyn's account, I knew what the 728-foot ore carrier looked like and could, almost, glimpse the power of the storm that destroyed it. So this morning I read that the U.S. Coast Guard plans to mount machine guns on its Great Lakes cutters and conduct weapons practice on Lake Michigan. What is the juxtaposition trying to tell me? Maybe it's just easier to obsess about hypothetical terrorists swarming over the Canadian border than to think about winds and waves that can rip doors off lighthouses and send the Edmund Fitzgerald to the bottom at nearly 40 mph. Ian Tamblyn wrote that the "Fitzgerald was literally bending and torquing in the peaks and troughs of these much larger waves. It was reported from 7 pm on that she was flexing in the troughs and each time she did the hatch covers yawed open, taking on water each time." Machine guns and Homeland Security can't do much against that.
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