By KAREN ALLEN, Scripps Howard News Service

In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed,

in the "Maritime Sailors' Cathedral."

The church bell chimed 'til it rang twenty-nine times

for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.

-- Gordon Lightfoot, "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."

WHITEFISH POINT, Mich. - The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down

of the big lake they called "Gitche Gumee."

The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead

when the skies of November turn gloomy.

-- Gordon Lightfoot, "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."

The old man appeared suddenly, strolling out of a line of terraced olive groves, answering our tentative chorus of "Buongiorno" with a rapid stream of Italian. Gesturing, cell phone in hand, he pointed up the path away from us to the coastal cliffs towering over the blue-green Mediterranean Sea.