On a perfect blue-sky day in late July, the SS Wilfred Sykes was on northern Lake Michigan, approaching the pristine shore of Wisconsin’s Door County peninsula. It gave a horn blast, shimmied through a narrow canal and soon was gliding placidly past the raised bridges and marinas of Sturgeon Bay.

Then, suddenly, a faint strain came floating up from a passing pleasure boat. A keening guitar line. A stoic beat. And that rich baritone relating the familiar tale of a mighty ship loaded with iron ore, a captain “well seasoned,” the gales of November and 29 men lost in the ice-water depths of Lake Superior.

New England has “Moby-Dick.” The Mississippi has Mark Twain. And the Great Lakes have “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Or so it can seem to those who grew up on Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 folk-rock shanty, a surprise hit that has had a long afterlife not just on the airwaves, but also through bumper stickers, beer labels, Lego kits and memes.

Many who hear the song, with its opening invocation of Chippewa legend, assume it’s about a 19th-century shipwreck, or perhaps a fictional one. But it was a real disaster and one much closer to our own time. It happened on the evening of Nov. 10, 1975, when the Fitzgerald, one of the biggest and most modern freighters on the lakes, lost contact during a sudden ferocious storm and then vanished beneath the waves.

Today, the Fitz, as many call it, is a touchstone of regional identity and tourism around the Great Lakes, where the 50th anniversary of the wreck will be commemorated in multiple locations next month. It’s a kind of Midwest Titanic — the largest of the more than 6,000 ships swallowed by the lakes over the centuries.

But it’s also a disaster with no survivors and no obvious iceberg, which has inspired a long string of books, articles, documentaries and online debates about exactly why and how the celebrated steamer sank.

I was on the Sykes with John U. Bacon, the author of the newest entry, “The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” The book, drawn from extensive interviews and archival research, considers various theories. But Bacon deliberately avoids what he calls a “whodunit” approach.

“Yes, I wanted to find out what happened, but I wanted to find out about the 29 people on the boat,” he said. “Who were they? What were their lives like? I wanted to return them to their full-fledged humanity, instead of just being victims.”

For Bacon, a veteran journalist from Ann Arbor, Mich., the “untold story” is also the beauty, danger and sheer scale of the lakes.

“Why was I surprised to learn the five Great Lakes are bigger than all New England, plus the state of New York?” he said. “I grew up on these lakes, and I did not know that.”

In the Fitz’s day, there were more than 300 Great Lakes freighters on the water. Today, they are fewer than half that, including the Sykes, which I rode for a week across nearly 1,000 miles and three lakes, to see how the reality of Great Lakes shipping intersects with the mythology of its most famous wreck.

The Sykes, which turned 75 last year, is one of only a half-dozen steam-powered lake freighters remaining. For Fitz fanatics, it’s also what Bacon calls a V.I.B. — a Very Important Boat.

It loaded up alongside the Fitz at an iron ore dock outside Duluth, Minn., on the unseasonably warm and sunny afternoon of Nov. 9, 1975, and was hit by the same sudden storm, with winds that whipped as much as 100 miles an hour. And after the Fitz vanished from the radar, the Sykes joined the search effort.

Today, the 678-foot Sykes offers one of the closest approximations to the Fitz and, for passengers, a surprisingly comfortable ride. It’s a throwback not just in the engine room, but also in the guest quarters, a midcentury-modern time capsule from the heyday of the American steel industry, when shipping companies regularly wined and dined executives and their wives.

The bulky stereo cabinet in the lounge still holds 8-tracks of Guy Lombardo and Mantovani. There’s also a buzzer, sadly defunct, for summoning another martini. These days, the boat is dry, and the occasional guests eat — very well — in the galley with the crew.

The current kings of the Great Lakes are the newer 1,000-footers, introduced in the 1970s and ’80s. But the Sykes, with its elegant curves and distinctive front pilot house, is beloved by both boat nerds and the mariners who keep it humming.

“It’s a privilege to sail on a boat like this,” said Billy Geoffroy, the boatswain, or head of the deck crew. “You can ride on the footers all day. But there ain’t nothing like an old steamer.”

In Fitz Country

In the spring and from late fall into early January, the Sykes hauls pelletized iron ore from mines around Lake Superior. Summer is limestone season, with runs between huge quarries in northern Michigan and steel mills along the lower lakes.

Bacon and I boarded early on a Monday morning in Burns Harbor, Ind., near Chicago. The plan was to sail up Lake Michigan and pass through the straits of Mackinac, loading up at two quarries. Then we would head down Lake Huron — as the Fitz would have — and across Lake Erie to Cleveland.

Great Lakes freighters are long and skinny, designed to maximize loads while being able to pass through rivers and locks. As we waited to set off, Bacon stood at one end of the deck and described how 30-foot waves would have swept across it during the storm that sunk the Fitz.

That all seemed very far away as we steamed up Lake Michigan, nothing but sunshine and calm, cobalt-blue water. But an unexpected layover in Sturgeon Bay gave us a chance for an overnight road trip five hours north to the western edge of Lake Superior, where the Fitz began its fateful voyage.

Duluth, Minn., with its sister city of Superior, Wis., is one of the largest inland ports in the world, and, at 2,300 miles from the Atlantic via the St. Lawrence Seaway, the farthest accessible to oceangoing vessels. It’s also Fitz country, where you’ll find tributes in parks, restaurants, bars and the local Best Western, where a 10-foot scale model of the boat looms near the swimming pool.

At Split Rock Lighthouse, about 50 miles from Duluth on Superior’s northern shore, Hayes Scriven, the site’s manager, walked us to the edge of the 130-foot cliffs. Next month, nearly 2,000 people are expected to gather there for the annual commemorative lighting of the beacon.

Scriven estimates that 75 percent of annual visitors to the lighthouse arrive already knowing about the Fitz. “About once a week, I’ll find someone up here playing the song on their phone,” he said. Among locals, however, thoughts about the song vary.

“A lot of people up here will say they’re sick of it,” said Tom Byrnes, a retired bartender, told us during a stop at the town bar in nearby Silver Bay, a regular watering hole for crew members on the Fitz. “It was pretty cool for a while, but it’s gloomy and doomy and it just goes on and on and on.”

Byrnes was a few months out of high school and working at the bar on Nov. 10, 1975, when someone came in from the driving rain to say the Fitz was in trouble. He compared it to his school principal announcing that President Kennedy had been shot. “It was just one of them days you remember,” Byrnes said.

Bacon, whose 13 previous books include one about a 1917 maritime explosion that killed nearly 2,000 people in Halifax, Nova Scotia, spent almost four years researching and writing “The Gales of November,” He tracked down and interviewed more than 100 people, including some family members and others connected with the crew who had never talked about their experiences with a writer.

The book includes a dramatic reconstruction of the storm, based in part on recent high-tech research. One computer model drawing on historic weather data, shows how frigid air coming down from Canada collided with storm system coming from the southwest, creating hurricane-like conditions that turned the water “from calm to ferocious in just minutes,” as Bacon writes, with waves that may have spiked to more than 50 feet.

The wreck prompted multiple investigations and lawsuits. But it was Lightfoot’s song, which hit No. 2 on the Billboard charts, that drove it deep into cultural memory.

Bacon interviewed the journalist who wrote the short Newsweek article that inspired Lightfoot and gave him some of the song’s phrases and beats, from the opening invocation of Chippewa and “the big lake they called Gitche Gumee” to the winds that came “slashing” to the church bell that rang 29 times at Mariners Church in Detroit.

Bacon also talked with two musicians who played on the song. The song was recorded in one take — which also happened to be the first time Lightfoot (who died in 2023) had ever played it with a band.

Bacon was relieved to learn that Lightfoot was a stand-up guy, who formed close relationships with family members. When Jimmy Fallon wanted to use the song for a comedy routine, he said no. And when performing the song live, Lightfoot changed some lyrics, like one about the main hatch “caving in” that echoed a theory (later disproved) that the crew had failed to properly clamp it.

“Gord really wanted the families to have peace,” Rick Haynes, the bassist, told Bacon.

The shipping company, Oglebay Norton, was another story. Initially, Bacon writes, it offered victims’ families only their final paycheck, plus $750 for personal effects. And when Bacon went searching for the archives of the company (which went bankrupt in 2004), he learned that the boxes relating to the Fitz had gone missing. “How is that not fishy?” he said.

Bacon, for his part, avoids definite conclusions about the wreck. He paraphrased the mother of Bruce Hudson, a 20-year-old deckhand from Cleveland who, along with the rest of the crew, still rests 530 feet below the surface of the lake: “Thirty know, 29 men and God. And nobody’s talking.”

A Floating Antique

After we got back to Sturgeon Bay, the Sykes resumed its journey, steaming toward the northern reaches of Lake Michigan, past forested islands ringed with beaches and no sign of habitation beyond the occasional lighthouse. There were no icy winds blasting in from Canada, just wildfire smoke, which turned the sun into a reddish orb.

At twilight, we passed under the Mackinac Bridge, which connects the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan, one of the longest suspension bridges in the Western Hemisphere. On the rear top deck, a deckhand played the beat-up boat guitar. In the pilot house, the Butthole Surfers came on the satellite radio.

Around 2 a.m., we reached Drummond Island, near the Canadian border, where we would pick up half a load of dolomite limestone the next morning. Geoffroy and Sean Erhardt, the second mate, prepared to drop the anchor. “Get ready for seven seconds of controlled violence,” Geoffroy said, passing out earplugs.

In the late 1960s, the Fitz was known for its “D.J. Captain,” Peter Pulcer, who liked to announce baseball scores, play Mozart and tell stories over the ship’s loudspeaker when passing through rivers and locks. Those days are long gone, but in populated areas, boats like the Sykes can still draw a crowd.

“This is one of the only jobs where people like to watch you work,” Erhardt said. “You don’t get that at McDonald’s.”

Tom Wiater, the president of Central Marine Logistics, which operates the Sykes, grew up in Detroit, where he was fascinated by lore of the sea, and not eager for a life of holdups at the family liquor store. After graduating from the Great Lakes Maritime Academy in Traverse City, Mich., he started on the Sykes as a deckhand.

“Today, when I come aboard the boat, the faces are different,” Wiater said. “But the personalities and the sounds and the vibe is the same.”

Wiater is a passionate advocate for the old steamers, and the history they represent. In the pilot house, he explained the mixture of old and new navigational tools: paper charts and the original brass Chadburn (the telegraph system used to send speed instructions back to the engine room), alongside GPS and electronic charting systems.

The Sykes “is a floating, operating antique,” he said. “And it wouldn’t be running without the dedication of everyone involved.”

The Fitz disaster, which ushered in widespread safety reforms, was the last major shipwreck on the lakes. For today’s sailors, it stands as a symbol of the inherent dangers of the job.

Erhardt recalled how at his graduation from the maritime academy, the cadets all sang “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” at karaoke. But on our trip, a passenger who started singing a line in a jokey voice one afternoon was shushed.

Talk turned, and not for the first time, to “the blackout”: an incident last January, on one of the last runs of the season, when the Sykes lost power on Lake Superior, not far from where the Fitz went down.

The emergency lights came on, but the boat was left with limited controls (and no heat). A cellphone video shows it rocking in big swells, the deck full of snow, as a crew member swore like, well, a sailor.

Another ship arrived and lashed itself to the Sykes lengthwise, towing it into a cove for safety. And now it’s just another story.

“A good sea story is one where everyone survives, but it was terrifying going through it,” Mike Helmer, a mate’s assistant from Mackinac City, Mich., said.

Lake Huron Rolls

Today, both shipping and shipwreck tourism are big business on the lakes. After we loaded at Drummond and headed to another quarry, Wiater pointed out remnants of rusted wrecks poking up above shallows in the DeTour Passage, one of more than a dozen diving preserves in Michigan waters, encompassing some 2,300 square miles and 200 wrecks.

We picked up more stone at Calcite, an open-pit quarry covering more than 8,000 acres near Rogers City, Mich., so big it’s visible from space. And then we were headed, as the song puts it, fully loaded for Cleveland. (The Fitz was actually headed to less rhyme-friendly Detroit.)

As we headed down Lake Huron, Saturday night steaks as big as your face were grilling on deck. Down in the engine room, where it was hotter than 100 degrees, Al Oswald, a Navy veteran with an exotic New Jersey accent, pointed out a faint breeze coming from one corner.

“You have to live like a cat,” he said. “You find the warm spots in winter and the cool spots in summer.”

After sunset, we entered the St. Clair River. Around 3 a.m., just south of Detroit, we passed the now-closed steel mill at Zug Island, where the Fitz would have unloaded, and crew might have stopped at some of the more memorable sailor bars described in Bacon’s book. (“The Honey Bee was for country alcoholics,” one retired sailor recalled, “and the Hinky-Dink was for psychotic alcoholics.”)

On Sunday morning, a week after leaving Burns Harbor, we entered Lake Erie and headed to the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, where the crew would navigate 13 tricky turns through downtown Cleveland.

The captain, Mike Grzesiek, who started 30 years ago on the Sykes washing dishes, plans to retire next year. During the trip, he had been a man of few words.

But after breakfast on our last full day, he talked about the merits of various boats he has worked on, the ups and downs of the industry, and his matter-of-fact approach to weathering storms that had left more panic-prone mariners “curled up in a ball.”

“You just deal with it, and get through it,” Grzesiek said. He laughed. “But you know, looking back, nothing’s ever been that bad.”