Growing up around here you get so used to living around the Great Lakes that you don’t appreciate them.

Recently, in reading a book about the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, it hit me again about how significant this watershed is. The Great Lakes make up 80% of the freshwater in North America and over 20% of all the freshwater in the world.

When Alexis De Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831, he described the Great Lakes as one of the wonders of the world–and he only saw the smallest of the lakes, Lake Erie.

I remember, as a kid, our parents taking us to go swimming at Lake Erie State Park. We looked out at the water, at the expanse, and couldn’t see the other side. It was described to us like seeing the ocean, which, at that time, we had never seen.

Lake Erie seems commonplace to those of us who live around here. Our neighbors in Dunkirk, Fredonia and Westfield often see the lake. Those of us living across the “great divide” in the Jamestown area might see it at a distance as we get to the top of the Chautauqua Ridge on our way to Buffalo. Yet, our greatest attention to Lake Erie seems to come in mid-winter when we hope that it ices up thus slowing down snowfall in the hills.

My Dad told me one time that he had always wanted to spend a summer as a deck hand on a Great Lakes ship…a dream that he never realized. Yet, in this book by John Bacon titled “The Gales of November,” maybe it is just as well that his dream didn’t come true.

Over the decades, there were many ship wrecks and sinkings of these Great Lake freighters…one of the reasons being that they were built not so much for the weather and waves they would encounter but for the dimensions of the locks through which they had to pass.

The locks at Soo St. Marie were especially influential in boat/ship construction–ships were made long and narrow to just fit into them. The ships are also flat bottomed so that they can traverse the relatively shallow waterways that connect the lakes themselves, which can mean that they are less stable in heavy seas.

Millions of tons of iron ore have been shipped using these vessels over the decades to such places as Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland and Buffalo…all made possible by the shipping highway of the Great Lakes. Shipping by water costs significantly less than by rail. The book’s author argued that World War II could not have been won, had not the United States been able to ship the iron ores of Minnesota to the factories further east which were making the ships, tanks, and guns needed to win the war.

Today, the Great Lakes seem to be in better shape than ever. Pollution has pretty much been tamed, and, around here, fisherman by the hundreds go to Lake Erie to catch perch, salmon and walleye.

Yet, the book was a good reminder that storms and wind can come up quickly on the Great Lakes. The fact that fresh water forms the waves, and that the waves are confined by the topography surrounding them…means that the waters of the Great Lakes can become deadly if not respected.

We have better technology and weather prediction capabilities than we did when the Edmund Fitzgerald went to the bottom in that storm on Lake Superior in 1975. Yet, it still holds a lesson–those using the Great Lakes must be on guard for wind and high waves when storms are strong.

There is nothing in the world that compares with the Great Lakes. We are lucky to live along their shores.

Rolland Kidder is a Stow resident.