Friday night ended a quarter-century's passage since the Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior, and it began a weekend of remembrance for 29 mariners lost in a tragedy that, for scores of relatives, is not yet receding into history.
Some of the commemoration will be solemn: the annual service at the Mariners' Church in downtown Detroit, a ceremony at the Great Lakes Maritime Academy in Traverse City, Mich., the lighting of the beacon at Split Rock lighthouse on Superior's Minnesota shore.
Less somber observances, including a folk-music concert, are planned by the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum. The museum was established 15 years ago in Whitefish Point, Mich., the safe harbor for which the Fitzgerald was struggling, and it does a tidy business selling the ore boat's image on coasters, playing cards, T-shirts and refrigerator magnets.
Such commercialization is understandably offensive to the widows, children and siblings of the Fitzgerald crewmen. It is also, of course, inevitable. But another effort has gone beyond the merely crass and entered the realm of the grotesque.
A few years ago, another Michigan entrepreneur hired a miniature sub and made seven dives to the wreckage, hoping to produce a hot-selling video and book. As a promotion for his products, he offered a photograph of a crewman's perfectly preserved body lying on the lake bottom.
The governments of Michigan and of Canada, which has jurisdiction over the Fitzgerald's resting place, responded by outlawing photography of corpses in the Great Lakes. That blocked one particularly tasteless attempt at exploitation, but has not eased fears that advancing deep-dive technology will enable many others.
Under pressure from Fitzgerald families, the Canadian government has considered putting the wreckage off-limits to anyone but government-approved researchers. There is some precedent. The U.S. government has created two marine sanctuaries to preserve shipwrecks - a tiny one around the ironclad Monitor, sunk in the Civil War off North Carolina, and a brand-new, 448-square-mile zone in northern Lake Huron that protects a trove of at least 116 lost vessels.
Naturally, divers don't like this idea. They point out the long tradition of leaving shipwrecks open to salvage by whoever gets there first, and note their own considerable contributions to the history of shipping disaster. ''We don't allow people to desecrate cemeteries,'' one Great Lakes diver told The New York Times, ''but we don't prevent people from visiting cemeteries.''
That's a reasonable distinction, but one that divers sometimes seem too casual about blurring. To treat a 25-year-old shipwreck in Lake Superior like a Spanish galleon off Florida is an affront not only to good taste, but to ordinary compassion. Legislating against such abuse seems a measured and reasonable response. But if the divers want to offer an equally effective guarantee, let them bring it forward.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com.)
