When the gales of November came early and the 729-foot freighter the Edmund Fitzgerald snapped in half and rocketed to the bottom of Lake Superior, with its 26,000 tons of iron ore and 29 crewmen, the first presence over the vanished vessel was a Coast Guard helicopter that choppered out of Traverse City, Michigan, or what today is arguably Michigan's leading winemaking region. At the time of the shipwreck memorialized by Gordon Lightfoot in his 1976 pop hit "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,...