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In the fall of 1976 I was a young boatswain with the U.S. Coast Guard in Boston. One weekend I joined some crewmates for a camping trip to the Maine woods. Sunday evening as we headed home it began to rain, the interior of the car turning moodily dark and the radio crackling with the static of distant thunderstorms. But over the din I heard something through the speaker that caught my attention, the tail end of a haunting lyric: "… twenty-six thousand tons more than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty."
"Hey, quiet!" I shouted, and the driver pulled the car to the shoulder. The four of us sat in the darkness straining to hear, the song paralyzing us with awe. It was a song of shipwreck, of fear and of the perils of the sea. It was a song about us!
The ballad was of course "The Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald," by Gordon Lightfoot, who died Monday at 84. And even though I had been familiar at the time with Gord's body of work up until then, I instantly became one of his greatest admirers. Over the next 40 years I would develop an even deeper appreciation of his music — his ballads of ships and sailors, of Canada, of lost love, and especially his songs about freight trains.
A few years later, now a civilian and living back home in Minneapolis, I fell in with a pack of like-minded dreamers who called themselves "Boxcar Buffoons." Every September we Buffoons would heed Gord's call and set off to see the world from the vantage point of a westbound freight train. Along the way we sang the refrains of songs like "Early Morning Rain," "Steel Rail Blues," and "Alberta Bound." Gord's anthem to his native country — the Canadian Railroad Trilogy — became our anthem, too, as we rolled through the mountains singing:
"There was a time in this fair land, when the railroad did not run,
When the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun.
