Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  A decade before “Now I Lay Me,” the first American to be wounded in Italy in World War I wrote a four-page letter to his parents from his bed at the American Red Cross hospital in Milan. This was August 4, 1918. Hemingway, whose career as an ARC ambulance driver was over almost before it had begun, was sleepless, very scared. But he didn’t focus on this. He said: “The rainbow trout up in Hortons Bay can thank the Lord there’s a war on. But they will be all the bigger next summer. Gee, I wish I was up there fishing.” Hemingway told his parents he’d been recommended for a medal. And as we know, he got it—and wore it on his tunic as he limped around Oak Park after he got home, telling fantastic stories about his bravery. It was the Silver Medal of Military Valor from the Italian government. The total wartime experience of the silver-medaled lieutenant Ernest Hemingway had lasted eight months, and six of those months had been spent in the hospital. But the intensity of the experience was enough. It’s not the duration of a sensation but its intensity that counts. And if it is intense enough, the sensation will last forever.

  It was most likely Horton’s Creek Hemingway had in mind when he wrote, in a Nick Adams story called “On Writing,” “All the love went into fishing and the summer. He had loved it more than anything.… It used to be that he felt sick when the first of August came and he realized that there were only four more weeks before the trout season closed. Now sometimes he had it that way in dreams. He would dream that the summer was nearly gone and he hadn’t been fishing. It made him feel sick in the dream, as though he had been in jail.”

  Horton Bay, Michigan, is still just a wide spot in the road, with a couple of fine old country houses sitting under spreading trees. Long ago they paved the main road that runs through the town. The old Methodist church, where the wedding was, isn’t there (a new church has taken its place on the east edge of the village), but the combination general store and post office is, right in the middle of the town. It’s the same wooden building, with the same high front cement steps and “high false front” that Hemingway spoke of in “Up in Michigan.” East of the store, there’s still a side road, no longer sandy, paved now, running down through the trees to the blue bay, and on the left of this side road, as you go down, are two old white-frame cottages, Pinehurst and Shangri-La. A wedding breakfast was held for the just-married Hemingways at Pinehurst resort cottage.

  But best of all, Horton’s Creek is still there, still just the little hop-across thing not quite half a mile out of town, as you’re heading west on the Charlevoix–Boyne City Road, still icy cold, clean as silver, riffling over stones, alive with fat, pulpy rainbows. I know this for a fishing fact.

  Antecedents. Eventually, before he forsook the state, there were many other Michigan trout streams in his life and imagination: the Boardman and the Rapid and the Bear and Schultz’s and the Manistee and the Minnehaha and the Sturgeon and the Pigeon and the Black and the Murphy and the Brevoort and, not least, the Two-Hearted, which is a river that Hemingway most likely never fished but only appropriated its storybook name for the water in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that he did fish, the Fox. The writer in Paris took the Two-Hearted and put it where the Fox geographically is and added on the word “Big” and then proceeded to make the river immortal in a story.

  Some Michigan trout rivers are finely pebbled at their bottom, almost as if you’re stepping not on stones but birdshot. Some are sandy-bottomed and pancake-soft under your shoes, and their imperceptibly swift-moving water will sweep and circle around you, suctioning your waders to your thighs. Some are dark brown and yet exquisitely clear, almost as if they’d been put through a strainer. “Tea water” is what such streams are sometimes called. They get their color from their high iron content.

  The Black is such a river. It’s part of what’s now known as the Pigeon River State Forest and is about a ninety-minute drive southeast of Horton Bay and Walloon. I’ve driven deep inside this forest; have skinned into my waders at Tin Shanty Bridge; have rodded up; have tied on a dry fly with trembling fingers; have coated it with the ointment that’ll make the fly float on the surface; have attached one end of my old hickory net to the magnet clip that’s hanging down between my shoulder blades on a lanyard (so that I’ll be able to reach around and snap the net free from the clip with my left hand when I’ve got my dreamed-of defeated fish close to my boots); have walked into the stream and tried to feel something of what Hemingway might have felt in the summer of 1919, when, home from the war, he fished it with pals for two extended periods. In Hemingway’s time, this region was known as the Pine Barrens. It was woods and swamp and lake and ponds in the process of making its way back from the ravages of the nineteenth-century loggers—“wild as the devil and the most wonderful trout fishing you can imagine,” as Hemingway wrote in a letter to a fishing partner. That summer, recovering his legs, his mind, he’d fished the Black and the Sturgeon and the Pigeon in the Barrens, catching them by the hundreds, sometimes landing two fish simultaneously. (On one hook was a wet fly, on the other a grasshopper.)

  I remember the day I drove to the Upper Peninsula to see the Fox, at Seney. Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted. On the way up, I spotted some wild turkeys, a pheasant, a couple of hawks, sandhill cranes. I arrived about four in the afternoon. The sun was brilliant. It was early fall. The town was very small. There was a burnt oil smell on the railroad ties. The railroad bridge was right where it was supposed to be, and the river was there, flowing under the bridge, and its surface was still “pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge.” I looked down to the sandy bottom, and just as he had said in the story, the trout were “keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins.” Just as he had said, they “changed their positions by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again.” I stood there for a long while watching these probable descendants of the trout Ernest Hemingway had watched.

  Antecedents. In June 1915, in his sophomore summer of high school, not quite sixteen, Hemingway and an Oak Park schoolmate named Lewis Clarahan got their parents’ permission to go on a hiking and camping trip in Michigan. They rode the Manitou’s sister boat, the Missouri, across the lake, disembarked at the town of Frankfort, and then spent the better part of a week hiking through the northwest corner of the Lower Peninsula to Walloon Lake, past little towns and bigger burgs, through woods and fields, but especially via trout streams they’d plotted out ahead of time on their maps. They were living on fish and beans that get simmered in a saucepan till they bubble. It all went so well that the following June, start of his junior summer, when he was almost seventeen, Hemingway and Clarahan did it again. This time, to make their trek last even longer, they disembarked farther down the Michigan coast, at a port called Onekama. This time Hemingway kept a detailed journal and took rolls of pictures. In them are two blissful boys wearing dress shirts and ties on their way across the lake on the steamer. Two boys, shed of city clothes, hanging from boxcars in a rail yard, or walking through the woods with their packs and hiking sticks, or leaning over a rock and dangling worms and flies into the current, or standing up to their waists in the middle of a stream, with the water swelling smooth against their trousers.

  Four decades ago, in the biography from which every Hemingway biography descends, Carlos Baker used a small part of the journal to sketch an account of the trip. Two decades ago, the executive director of the American Museum of Fly Fishing, which is in Vermont, wrote a much longer account of the 1916 hike, again using the journal, but this time in full. Donald S. Johnson, an angler, got the permission of the Hemingway family to reproduce the diary in the museum’s journal, The American Fly Fisher, along with some of the photographs. It was an obvious labor of love.

  Hemingway entered his notes in a pocket-size ledger book whose pages bore the imprint of the Old Hartford Fire Insurance Company. On Saturday, June 10, the starting-out day, he’d written down the time that he and Lew had agreed to meet at the Hemingway home (“4 O’clock here”) in order t
o catch the L into the city (“Avenue Station at 5”) for their overnight ride to the Michigan shore. In the days before leaving, the doctor’s son had made a long list of things to gather and bring on the hike, and these got entered in the Old Hartford ledger book: matches, an ax, a can opener, postcards, a pedometer, adhesive tape, and so on. There are checkmarks beside many of these items. “Dig worms” was on the to-do list, but there’s no checkmark beside the entry. The crawlers got dug in Michigan instead of Oak Park.

  “Creek clean and must be waded. Caught 4 trout. 1 that was 14½ inches long and 1 that was 18 inches long. Great fighters. Took 15 minutes to land the big one,” he wrote at 2:30 p.m. on Monday, June 12, on the second day out. They’d camped the night before at Bear Creek. Through the week, he wrote down where they camped, when a thunderstorm came up, where they stopped in for dinner, what the cost was of supplies bought along the way. “Dinner .30.” “Sat. Eve. Post 0.5.” “Chocolate .15.” “Fare Mayfield to W.J. .25.”

  “Great fun fighting them in the dark in the deep swift water,” he wrote on Friday the sixteenth. It could almost be a sentence out of “Big Two-Hearted River.”

  At Kalkaska, Michigan, the fishing partners said good-bye: Clarahan was catching a train south, to return to Oak Park, while Hemingway was continuing north by rail to Petoskey and Walloon and friends at Horton Bay. The family would be up later in the summer. That Saturday night, in Petoskey, the boy who’d been roughing it took a room at the Hotel Perry, which was right across the street from the railroad terminal. “Bed at Perry’s .75,” he entered in the journal.

  “Good night’s sleep,” the journal keeper had written as part of the recap of his first day. “Had a good sleep,” he said of an afternoon nap the next day. “[S]lept well Tues. night,” he noted the following day. “Slept well at Dilworths,” he reported on the following Monday, having arrived at Horton Bay.

  Insomnia, as already discussed, is a deep swift current running through most of Hemingway’s life—it’s there in the fiction, the nonfiction, his correspondence. But we tend to connect his sleep anxieties, or the rise of them anyway, to his experiences in World War I. Sometimes, as in “Big Two-Hearted River,” the water is so swift and dark and deep that you almost aren’t aware of it as an anxiety having to do with sleep per se, and at other times the current is named for what it is, as in the Nick Adams stories “A Way You’ll Never Be,” “In Another Country,” and “Now I Lay Me.” Each is about the suffering of the blown-up man. “Imagine a young fellow like you not to sleep,” Nick’s bedmate says in “Now I Lay Me.” The bedmate himself is in terror about his sleep. Nick answers, “I’ll get all right. It just takes a while.” And the bedmate responds, “You got to get all right. A man can’t get along that don’t sleep.” But I’ve come to think that some kind of deep worry about sleep was inside Ernest Hemingway well before the war—which then got magnified to nightmarish degrees by what happened to him during the war. He seems very glad to say in his camping journal that he’d slept well. Just casual mentions? Maybe. To me, the mentions suggest that even or especially up in Michigan, even for an exuberant boy who’s not yet seventeen, getting your sleep is critical, and not only for physical reasons. Without it, darkness is already visible, if just barely.

  Edens lost. Nearly the entire upper half of Michigan was lost to the clear-cutters by the time the Hemingway family arrived at Walloon Lake at the start of the twentieth century. The slaughter of the Michigan forest had started in the 1840s, and the saws didn’t really cease their whine until about 1925. The peak years of the decimation were probably between 1860 and 1910. Yes, the second- and in some cases third-growth timber had come, and the old pine and hardwood forests were reclaiming themselves, and there were genuine wilderness areas, such as the Pine Barrens, that you could get to—but Michigan was nothing like it used to be, and it would never be so again. The scholar Frederic Svoboda, who has spent many years studying Hemingway’s Michigan life, has put it eloquently:

  While the Hemingways planned their cottage to be an Eden-like retreat, nearby were destitute Indians, once lords of the woods, now living in an abandoned lumber camp. All about Windemere lay the evidence of an orgy of clear-cutting that had raped the Michigan woods and sent its forest products through Chicago to build settlements on the prairies. [Hemingway] may have imagined a pristine north woods, but the evidence around him told a far different story.

  What I think Svoboda is saying is that the writer at those marble-topped tables in Paris, re-creating Michigan in his invented memory, was caught somewhere between the Michigan he wished it to be and the Michigan he knew it was—or that a lot of it was.

  In the photographs of Hemingway’s camping trips, you begin to notice the open fields. You see all the stumps, the cut-over woods, the strange emptiness. The Barrens wasn’t called the Barrens for nothing. He put the raped woods in the stories, even as he was re-creating the more primitive Michigan he wished it was or could be. In “Fathers and Sons,” for instance, the narrator has Nick bitterly thinking about the waste of it all—of how the loggers in some cases weren’t even really interested in the trees themselves: “[T]he peeled logs lay huge and yellow where the trees had been felled. They left the logs in the woods to rot, they did not even clear away or burn the tops. It was only the bark they wanted for the tannery at Boyne City; hauling it across the lake on the ice in winter, and each year there was less forest and more open, hot, shadeless, weed-grown slashing.” And yet, for all that, you hear the hope. In the next sentence the narrator says: “But there was still much forest then, virgin forest where the trees grew high before there were any branches and you walked on the brown, clean springy-needled ground with no undergrowth and it was cool on the hottest days.”

  The word “slashing” is a Hemingway obscenity. He uses it several times in “Fathers and Sons.” In “The Last Good Country,” Nick Adams is talking to his kid sister, whom he calls Littless. They’ve escaped into the woods, like Huck and Jim down the river. “We have to go through some long bad slashings,” he says. “All this beyond was hemlock forest,” he says. “They only cut it for the bark and they never used the logs.” Two pages later: “This is the way forests were in the olden days. This is about the last good country there is left.”

  In A Farewell to Arms, the lieutenant in Italy who’s hiding in a barn, about to make his separate peace with war, is thinking about far-off Michigan, although Michigan isn’t named: “The hay smelled good and lying in a barn in the hay took away all the years in between. We had lain in hay and talked and shot sparrows with an air-rifle when they perched in the triangle cut high up in the wall of the barn. The barn was gone now and one year they had cut the hemlock woods and there were only stumps, dried tree-tops, branches and fireweed where the woods had been. You could not go back.”

  If you can’t go back, is your only real alternative to go farther out? As already said, that’s one core way to understand Pilar.

  In “Big Two-Hearted River,” the first image, in the first sentence, is of something burnt and lost, something going away: “The train went on up the track out of sight, around one of the hills of burnt timber.” Two sentences later: “There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country.”

  A lost Eden. For at least two decades before the Hemingway family arrived, Walloon Lake had been a summer resort for families from lower Michigan and Illinois and Indiana and Ohio. After the clear-cutting orgy was done, or the bulk of it, the railroads understood that the new way to dollars lay in recreation and tourism. Starting at midcentury with the development of Mackinac Island, the Michigan tourist industry had taken rapacious hold of the northland. So the boardinghouses and the tourist hotels got erected on the rim of the beautiful lakes in the northwest corner of the Lower Peninsula, and the railroads—which came in the 1870s—began hauling up the downstaters, the Chicagoans and Indiana-politans and Cincinnatians. The lake-crossing steamers joined in the gold rush to the region of beautiful water and cool summers. “T
O HAY FEVER AND ASTHMA SUFFERERS. THE CLIMATE OF NORTHERN MICHIGAN! SPEEDY AND PERMANENT RELIEF FOR YOUR AILMENT!” So ran the rail advertisements for the Grand Rapids & Indiana. Following the tourist hotels, there came, in the new century, the rise of the family cottage. Again to quote Professor Svoboda: “Cottaging was a new and modern idea at the beginning of the twentieth century, replacing an older style of vacation that centered on resort hotels where all needs were provided for by a professional staff. Cottagers expected to be more involved with the requirements of everyday life … more directly engaged with the natural world.”

  Hemingway kept out of his fiction Walloon’s resort hotels and yacht clubs and two-decked service boats delivering groceries to the family dock because they didn’t represent the Michigan he wanted it to be. It wasn’t the Michigan that jibed with his imagination. To quote Professor Svoboda once more:

  [W]hen Hemingway sat down to write about his Michigan summers, what emerged was not a snapshot. Neither was it an exact recreation of the Petoskey or Walloon Lake that existed between 1900 and 1920. The northern Michigan Hemingway created was something different: it often evoked feelings similar to those people still express today when they talk about their trip “up north.” At other times Hemingway recreated the older, rougher Michigan of loggers and rail men that he knew partly by experience, partly through the tales of those who had lived the pioneer life. Neither sort of story was precisely journalism, but each one represented the spirit of the place more accurately than could any strictly historical account.