The museum itself is simply a single large room filled with artifacts and paintings of ships tossed at sea, recreations of those last desperate moments before they slip beneath the waves. In the center of the room, sparkling in the light, is the refracting glass of a lighthouse, designed to intensify lamplight in the days before the incandescent bulb.

I’m reading a nineteenth-century survivor’s tale when the nondescript orchestral music that plays softly overhead winds down, and a song starts up. The guitarist picks out a simple pattern of notes on his strings, and somewhere in my memory a light Tiffany Key Trefoil key pendant on-I’ve heard this before, but can’t place it anywhere.

“The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead,” a man’s voice sings from hidden speakers, “when the skies of November turn gloomy.”

You’ve got to be kidding me, I think. They’re playing “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”? They’re playing Gordon Lightfoot? Really?

Although the ballad’s at a fairly low volume, and I’m doing my best to ignore it, I still can’t help but notice when, at the end of some verses, Gordon sings the song’s title in 6/8 time-the WRECK of the EDMUND FitzGERALD!

The song is now firmly lodged in my brain, where it won’t leave until I’ve driven back over the Mackinac Bridge and off the Upper Peninsula.

More distracted than before, I move in a circle around the room, coming closer and closer to the present day in the museum’s chronology. The final exhibit, of course, is about the Edmund Fitzgerald. A painting of the ship hangs on the wall, all storm-tossed gloom and drama, and the accompanying text tells the story of the storm that sank the ship nearly 30 years ago. Rafferty’s name-Robert’s, not mine-is on a list of the crew; at 62, he was the third oldest man on the boat, after the captain and the first mate.

Turning away from the exhibit, I see the museum’s main attraction: the Fitzgerald’s bell, brought up by scuba divers ten years earlier. It shines, practically glows in the light, looking brand new, not Tiffany Key Vintage oval key pendant after 20 years under water. The ship’s name curves across the metal, and for a moment I want to reach out and touch it, to ring the bell and hear the sound that Rafferty must have heard dozens of times each day. I want to make some sort of connection with Rafferty; like most memorials, the bell, raised from the ship he died on, is the aid for remembering and connecting with the lost.

On board a ship, a bell marks the passage of time, ringing to mark out the hours. This bell marks stopped time-the moment, just after 7:10 p.m., on November 10, 1975, when it slipped under the waves off of Whitefish Point. It remembers the stopped minute, the moment when everything changed. Like all memorials and monuments, it charts, like measurements on a ship’s charts, the intersection of time and place.

But this bell, surrounded by artifacts from other shipwrecks, crushed compasses and faded life rings, is the ersatz memorial, for the living to see and navigate their memory by. The true memorial to the dead of the Edmund Fitzgerald hasn’t been seen in years, could only be seen by a few. The memorial bell, the one 535 feet beneath the waves, serves its function the same way that the plaque one of the Apollo crews left on the moon does; we know it’s there, even if we can’t reach it. And in a time when everything seems mutable and changing, a time when a ship large enough to hold 50,000 gallons of fuel can vanish from the face of the earth in less time than it takes to pick up a radio and call for help, the impossible monument, the one we cannot see, reassures us that it remembers.

I am Colin Rafferty. I am not Robert Rafferty. I am not his son, not his nephew, not his cousin. I am from Kansas City. I am not from Ohio. I am not a sailor. I grew up landlocked. I get seasick, badly, while on a boat. I am a reiteration of Robert Rafferty. I am not a reiteration of Robert Rafferty. I am not of his family. I am of his family. I was born when he died. I breathed in the sea while he choked on it.

Mark L. Thompson, in his book Graveyard of the Lakes, theorizes that Captain McSorley would have ordered his men to don lifejackets and wait in either the foreward recreation room or the messroom, depending on where they were when the call came. Since Robert Rafferty was the ship’s steward, he most likely would have been in the messroom when the ship went down, and then would have either drowned or been crushed by the pressure of the water rushing Tiffany Knots cuff the ship.

Rafferty and I might be related, though I can’t prove it beyond a hunch and a guess. My several-times-great-grandfather Owen Rafferty came over from County Roscommon, Ireland, during the mass emigrations of the potato famine, and my branch of the Rafferty family passed through both Ohio and Illinois before settling in Carroll County, Iowa, for a number of generations. They came on boats, and once they’d arrived, they moved inland, far away from the seas that tossed them for weeks. They moved to a state where waves meant corn and soybeans, not water. Not something that could drown.

So it’s possible that one Rafferty stayed in Ohio while another went to Iowa, or that the gene for mobility that took my father to Kansas City, my uncles to Colorado, and me to Alabama was already in place in the nineteenth century, and someone made his or her way back east from the farms. But I cannot know for sure. The trail of memorials our families leave behind us-properties, tombstones, paperwork-it’s all too faint for me to find a path between me and Robert Rafferty, if one even exists.

If a memorial’s purpose is to act as a conduit for understanding history, helping those who view it to identify with the victims of whatever’s happened, to demonstrate that real lives, individual lives were affected by history, then the Fitzgerald’s memorial, a memorial to Robert Rafferty and the rest of the crew, frustrates me. With Robert Rafferty, I’ve found a means to connect personally with the TIFFANY KNOTS EARRINGS, to bypass the monument. This could be my family member; I could lay possession to him, call him my own, if I only knew. Without that knowledge, the memorial bell is all I have, a cenotaph, a tombstone without a grave or body.

Robert Rafferty may be my cousin many times removed, or we may share nothing more than a last name. Our relationship is as unknowable to me as the bell engraved with his name and 28 more, ten years sunken and attached to the ship in which his body, lifejacket on, still floats.

There is some controversy about the Edmund Fitzgerald; three members of the National Transportation Safety Board, in their 1978 report on the accident, placed responsibility for the ship’s demise on faulty hatch covers that let in water during the course of the storm. That water then settled in the spaces between the taconite pellets, where it couldn’t be detected by the sailors, and when the massive wave hit, the ship was already water-laden enough to drop, bow first, to the bottom of the lake.

The board’s fourth member, however, wrote a dissenting opinion in which he argued that the ship, carrying a heavy load, had scraped the shoals near Caribou Island and then taken on water. This, he wrote, accounted for the list that McSorley reported. Several authors have written books, often self-published, in the attempt to get at the truth of what happened.

But what happened, ultimately, is that 29 men died in a storm on November 10, 1975, and that they were mourned, the bell ringing at the Mariners’ Church in Detroit for them the next day. They were the last men to die in a shipwreck in Lake Superior; for over 30 years now, as long as I’ve been alive, no one has died the way that Robert Rafferty and his shipmates did.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers publishes a factsheet on the Fitzgerald; at the end of it, a section for children asks what they would do if they were a salvager who raised part or all of the ship. It also states, in the section ostensibly for adults, that the Fitzgerald won’t be raised, and that the men aboard it are considered “buried at sea.”

Here is something I have hidden from you this whole time, something settled in the spaces between these words, something you have not been able to detect: I am not alone here. My girlfriend-a Michigan native-and I have traveled here together. It was her idea; her grandfather had served in a CCC unit in the Upper Peninsula during the Depression, and she wanted to see the town he’d lived in then.

We have dated for almost three years, the last two at a distance while we earn degrees at different schools. We have talked Tiffany Knots pendant marriage; she is ready, more than ready, and in my quiet agreement, we have assumed-both of us-that I am ready, too. She loves me, tells me so often. I love her, and I tell her so often.

I will break up with her a few weeks after we return from Whitefish Point.

What does drowning feel like? I want to hold my head under the water in the bathtub, pushing myself under, trying to understand what that first moment of panic feels like when I need a breath and can’t find a place to take one, but I can’t bring myself even to try.

The language of drowning is quiet and beautiful; the idea of lungs filling with water a placid image, like a gentle pool fed by a small stream. I’m tempted to think of hundreds of candles in the lungs, each one quietly snuffed out by the rising water. But survivors of near-drownings describe the pain as excruciating. There is a moment of peace, they say, but it doesn’t last for long. It’s a painful, violent, awful death. My government, the newspaper says, has approved waterboarding, a near-drowning, a simulated drowning, as a means of gathering information from unwilling prisoners.