Sunday night, Northwestern launched fireworks for the graduating seniors, a special treat, since they all started college in quarantine. All the various public spectacles are returning to the lake, like that all-shirtless-hunks-all-day tai-kwon-do class—check them out, stretching their limbs along the breakers—, the young intensive lovers pretzeled at dawn after last night’s violent delights, the newly-single sad dudes with their heads bowed down into the depths of the water wondering, “Was it something I said?”, the Santeria bird/fruit sacrifice ceremonials, and this guy, who also eats fire and walks on stilts. I suppose the lake is a great avenue for the distraction that is no distraction.
There’s spectacle below, too. Superior has its wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, made famous by the bard Gordon Lightfoot, but Lake Michigan has 1,500 shipwrecks down there in the gloom. I have dreams of the things crews push overboard in order to stay afloat, like the thousands of Christmas trees thrown off the Rousse Simmons or the 50 cows pushed off the Lady Elgin, ghost trees & cows forever searching for land that never arrives, doomed to haunt the Laurentian system forever. The survivor of the SS Carl Bradley swear they saw the boat split in two when it went down, but for 40 years nobody would believe them until they found the sunken hulk with modern radar. I would totally haunt you if you didn’t believe me as a survivor.
In K.A. Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Miranda survives the 1918 flu epidemic only to find out her boyfriend died taking care of her; “Death always leaves one singer to mourn.” That describes the ending of pretty much every single shipwreck tale and horror movie. “I only am escaped to tell thee.” I would totally haunt you if you didn’t believe me as a survivor.
“I’m the last of the Irish Rover!”