Lakes Don't Wreck Freighters, But Seas Do

Whitefish Point — Lake Michigan isn’t a lake. Neither is Lake Superior, Lake Huron, Lake Erie, or Lake Ontario. No, they are something else, and they are not lakes. “Lake” is a linguistic misnomer. It confuses people and misrepresents what these great bodies of water actually are.

People from all over the country look at maps and see those five big blue blots on the paper, but for some reason don’t actually fully comprehend the size. They can see clearly with their eyes that Lake Michigan is bigger than Maryland, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island—but still they don’t actually realize how big they are. They don’t grasp that you can’t see across them, what it feels like standing on the shore, or how big the waves are on a windy day.

I’ve talked to so many people not from here and almost every single one says the same thing after seeing the Great Lakes for the first time. “They aren’t really lakes. You can’t see the other side. They are more like inland seas.”

Technically, it might be scientifically correct to call these bodies of water lakes, but these great masses of blue freshwater do not embody what Michiganders understand lakes to be. We are all so used to calling them lakes that it sometimes takes an outsider to correctly see the truth that we are too close to accurately see. These colossal bodies of water are not, in fact, lakes; they are seas.

Thusly, our Great Lakes should be re-classified and re-named as freshwater seas. This reclassification is due to the sheer size and surface area, but also, just as importantly, due to the nature of the water that fills them. Our great freshwater seas are not soft glassy puddles of water to splash around in. Yes, of course, there are otherworldly summer days where the water is smooth as ever for as far as the eye can see. But they aren’t all that way. There are real waves, real undertow, and real rough waters.

When the weather gets cold the water gets rough. November tends to be the roughest time of the year on Michigan and Superior with waves surging to 20 to 25 feet during heavy storms. I’ve taken a boat out to Beaver Island in the middle of November riding 15-foot waves most of the way there and it’s no sweet little sunset cruise on the local pond out there in November. A majority of the people threw up on the ship from Charlevoix. It felt like 60 minutes of a roller coaster, up and down. The ship bowed back and forth, the water sprayed the windows. Lakes don’t have 25 foot waves and they don’t make people lose their lunch.

And with these waves come shipwrecks. Over the years of recorded history, somewhere around 6,000 ships have sunk in our great and terrifying freshwater seas. These weren’t just dinky canoes, pontoon boats, or fishing charters doomed to the bottom. These were large vessels, ships and freighters with great steel hulls carrying thousands of pounds of cargo from east to the west. Lakes don’t sink freighters.

Way up at the eastern tip of the Upper Peninsula is Whitefish Point. It’s most well-known for being mentioned in the 1976 song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot. It’s where there Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum is and where the original bell from the Edmund Fitzgerald—retrieved from the sunken ship in 1995—hangs on display today.

While of course the bell of the Edmund Fitzgerald is the most famous artifact on display at the museum—Lightfoot’s classic does indeed play on repeat all day with only little breaks once in a while—it’s not only the Edmund Fitzgerald up there. There’s a bunch of displays detailing other ships that sank on Superior over the years. There is accouterment from the ships, details about their sizes and routes, numbers of people lost to the water, and other history about Whitefish Point, where the oldest operating lighthouse on all of Superior still stands. There aren’t old lighthouses or shipwreck museums on lakes.

We are so close and familiar with these great bodies of water and are so used to saying Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, the big lake, lake town, and lake house that we don’t realize how truly unique they are and how much they are not lakes despite what we have learned in our textbooks. The only other places in the United States where there are lighthouses, shipwrecks, big waves, roaring winds, and real sailing are the Pacific and the Atlantic; San Francisco and Maine.

There are vast open expanses in our county where there are mountains and plains and beautiful little lakes with little ripples on the water from a breeze in the evening. And for hundreds of miles in-between the oceans of the East and the West this is how the country is. But in the middle, separating east from west, are the five great freshwater seas of the Midwest.

The Superior Sea, The Sea of Michigan, The Sea of Ontario, The Erie Sea, and the Sea of Huron.