[SML] Pat Kight

[Dave Vick]

As promised earlier:

I was living in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, barely a year out of
college and two years into my first newspaper job, covering everything
from school board meetings to snowmobile races for the small daily
paper there.

The fall weather had been... strange, for that part of the world,
where it usually starts snowing on Halloween and doesn't thaw out
until May. Snow had fallen, but only in spits; the town had gone all
gray and cold, waiting for the white blessing of true winter.
I lived with six other women in a far-too-small house in a fairly
typical student ghetto... only in our case, we were at the end of a
short street that dead-ended at a decaying bridge over the power canal
which cuts downtown Sault Ste. Marie off from the rest of the town and
the small college up the hill.

The wind had begun rising early in the day. Not much rain, but what
there was threatened to turn to sleet. Two of my room-mates (friends
liked to call us the She-Demons, but that's another story) and I sat
huddled around the gas stove in our living room, old army blankets
tacked up over the doorways to conserve the heat, reading and
listening to Joni Mitchell. I remember that the wind was loud, louder
than I'd ever heard it, and managed to sneak through the smallest
cracks around the windows and doors, making the little house whistle
around us.

Robin had just said something about it being quite a storm when
suddenly the lights went out. It wasn't quite dark yet, so Jamie went
to the front door to see if the lone street-light on the block was on.
The wind almost ripped the door out of her hand, and she yelled for us
to come look.

At the end of the block, just at the barricaded bridge, the power line
had been ripped loose, and snapped in the wind like some giant whip,
sparking and crackling - and when it came in contact with the metal
structure of the old bridge, it made a sound like the devil snapping
his fingers. About that time Robin noticed that each time the power
line hit the bridge, *sparks* flew from the electrical outlet near the
door.

We decided to get the hell out, so we flipped off the circuit breaker,
hastily packed some overnight bags and piled into Robin's '57 VW
bug... I don't recall where we were headed - some friend's house or
another - but when we turned the corner a few blocks from the house,
we found ourselves up to the hubcaps in gray, swirling water.

As it really wasn't raining, we were perplexed... until we got closer
to the St. Mary's River, which connects Lake Superior (via the Soo
Locks) to Lake Huron, and saw that the wind was actually *pushing the
lake* up over the locks and into the streets, to a depth of about a
foot. Understand that the lake level is normally many feet *lower*
than those streets, and you'll know why I decided they'd better drop
me off at the newspaper.

Now, this paper only had five reporters, including the sports guy. We
were all frantically working on storm coverage when Shine Sundstrom,
the city editor (and one of the best damn newspapermen it's been my
privilege to know) looked up from where he'd been monitoring the
police and maritime radio bands and announced, “Sounds like we've lost
a ship out there.”

A quick geography lesson: Michigan's Upper Peninsula is sparsely
populated. I mean *sparsely*. The Soo, as it's called, had about
15,000 residents at the time (I doubt it's much bigger now) and it was
the biggest town for miles, other than its substantially larger
Canadian sister across the river. As it became clear that a huge
maritime disaster had happened, it also became clear that it would be
impossible to cover, in the normal sense of the word. In the best of
weather, the part of the Lake where the Fitz was last reported was
remote and inaccessible. The closest “big” news media were hundreds of
miles away in southern Michigan.

So it fell to us - five green reporters, an editor and a couple of
high school kids who normally typed sports stats - to let the outside
world know what was happening in the first 24 hours or so after the
ship was reported missing.

Never let anyone tell you reporters don't get involved in their
stories... or that they don't care about them. We cared passionately
about that ship and its men. We *knew* them - or men like them. You
don't live in a small Great Lakes town without knowing guys who make
their living on the freighters... or their children and wives. The
Lake, its shipping, its weather - they're all woven in so closely to
life in that part of the country that they become part of you, whether
you've ever set foot on a freighter or not.

They sent me down to the shipping company offices, to a big, cold
warehouse near the surging water, the place where the supply boats
usually put out to restock the freighters with food and mail and other
necessaries. That night, and for days to follow, it became something
like a church, or a hospital waiting room, as women and children and
men whose loved ones were on the Fitz began arriving, by ones and
twos, hoping for some word that the ship was safe.

Not exactly the kind of situation where a person can walk in, ask the
typical stupid newspaper question (“so, how do you *feel*?”) and
leave. I knew some of these people. I wound up holding hands and
making coffee and chain-smoking in the parking lot, almost as anxious
as those who had an honest stake in the outcome... and at the same
time feeling somehow like a vulture, with my little notebook at the
ready just in case news came in.

I think I went three days without sleep. I also wound up being the one
stuck arranging motel rooms and a helicopter and phone lines and stuff
for the “real” reporters when they were finally able to get flights up
from Detroit and Chicago... a service which, a year later, contributed
to my being hired by the Associated Press Detroit bureau... which, in
a convoluted way, put me where I am today, wherever that is...

It was also the night - the series of nights - when I began to
understand the kind of reporter I *didn't* want to be... when I
decided the work wasn't worth doing if it couldn't be done with
compassion, and that the detachment and “objectivity” most reporters
are taught to espouse are really kind of a load of crap... You try
looking into the eyes of a 24-year-old woman who's just been told that
her husband is dead at the bottom of an icy, treacherous lake... that
she'll never even get his body back... and try remaining detached. Me,
I'm not ashamed to admit that I cried with her.

To all whose loves are sailors, and who wait for news beside the cold
and unforgiving waters. I raise my glass to you every November 10th.

   -Pat Kight, date unknown