Hemingway's Boat (45 page)

Yes, he'd grow into a much more sophisticated angler, would put his line in some far streams and oceans, would come to own expensive reels, custom-made rods, hand-tied flies, and deep-sea lures the size of a tennis shoe. But a core part of Ernest Hemingway would always be the five-year-old night-crawler fisherman with the overlong cane pole flying them over his head at Horton's Creek. The hell with fly-fishing—it was too dainty, too effete. (Which isn't to say he didn't get awfully good at it.) The might-against-might tuna theories on Bimini have their font in the cane-pole horsing at Horton's. Indeed, Horton's explains so much of the fishing part of him—his addiction to it, the primitive joy he got from it. If the sensation has enough intensity, it'll last forever.

But Ed Hemingway gave that, too, it needs be added. In “Fathers and Sons,” the author has Nick Adams meditating on how “someone has to give you your first gun or the opportunity to get it and use it, and you have to live where there is game or fish if you are to learn about them.” Nick “loved to fish and to shoot exactly as much as when he first had gone with his father,” says the narrator. “It was a passion that had never slackened and he was very grateful to his father for bringing him to know about it.”

Regarding the flying of them into the air over your head: in a long unpublished fragment of a novel—which Hemingway worked on through the fifties but could never finish, and which was posthumously published in
The Nick Adams Stories
as a lengthy short story titled “The Last Good Country”—Nick Adams says to himself, having just caught a fat trout on worms: “Damn, didn't he feel like something when I horsed him out though? They can talk all they want about playing them but people that have never horsed them out don't know what they can make you feel. What if it only lasts that long? It's the time when there's no give at all and they start to come and what they do to you on the way up and into the air.”

There's a wonderful passage in
A Moveable Feast
when Hemingway describes going down to the Seine to watch the old Parisians working their long cane poles.

Toward the end of the passage, the author says, as if trying to get down a truth of his life in eight words, “I could never be lonely along the river.”

The fine chestnuts are still there, below the Pont Neuf, and the head of the Île de la Cité still comes to a point as sharp as the bow of a ship, and you still go down a stone stairway to get to the little park, and the old fishermen, who might be the great-grandchildren of the ones Hemingway watched and felt himself bonding with, are still there, working their long cane poles, trying, as Hemingway wrote, to take “a few
fritures
home to their families.”

Take another look at the photograph at the start of this chapter: The helmet-haired five-year-old at Horton's with the straw sombrero and comically large wicker creel, clad in his favorite fringed cowboy get-up, is eyeing the lens at an off angle while he waits to swing with all his force. That left hand isn't holding lightly the stick in front of him. He's ready. And he's got that flat-lipped expression, as if to say: Go away, you're much in my way. This cedar-fallen and hemlock-strewn little stream belongs to me.

Horton Bay sits on Lake Charlevoix, which is west of Walloon and is a much larger body of water than Walloon. (It's the third-largest lake in the state and was known in Hemingway's time as Pine Lake.) Lake Charlevoix drains into Lake Michigan, just as Horton's Creek flows into Lake Charlevoix. Lake Charlevoix's color, as opposed to Walloon's, is deep blue, stunning in its own right. Horton Bay, which is on the lake's north shore and is the only real “town” between Boyne City and Charlevoix, used to be listed on Michigan maps as “Horton's Bay.” In his writing Hemingway calls the place “Hortons Bay.” Sometimes he refers to the creek as “Horton's Creek” and at other times he'll leave out the apostrophe. No matter how they're written, town and creek, and no matter how the current locals themselves
tend to confuse the issue, both village and stream thread through some of Hemingway's finest Michigan stories. They are just in his imagination in a way Walloon isn't. In the Nick Adams story “The End of Something,” Hemingway begins: “In the old days Hortons Bay was a lumbering town. No one who lived in it was out of sound of the big saws in the mill by the lake. Then one year there were no more logs to make lumber.” By the third sentence he has you hooked like a fish. He's already reached the swing point of the story.

As a teenager, Hemingway usually got to Horton Bay and its creek by oaring one of the family rowboats across Walloon. He'd tie up on the opposite shore, directly across from Windemere, hide the oars in the weeds, then walk the three miles into town through open fields and along the sandy Sumner Road. By then his family knew a lot about the opposite shore, because, in 1905, a forty-acre farm was being sold at auction for back taxes across the lake, and Grace Hemingway had bought the place with her inheritance. They named it Longfield Farm. A tenant was put on the land to manage things, with Ed paying the bills and earning the right to a third of the crops. But all the Hemingways pitched in to farm the place. To say it mildly, Ed and Grace's second-born preferred to be fishing in Horton Creek or idling with friends in the village rather than to be digging potatoes or harvesting peaches or cutting alfalfa in twelve-hour workdays out at Longfield. In “Fathers and Sons,” the narrator says: “His father had frost in his beard in cold weather and in hot weather he sweated very much. He liked to work in the sun on the farm because he did not have to and he loved manual work, which Nick did not.” Hemingway spent a lot of his adult life avoiding manual work.

Horton Bay is where Hemingway met and grew to be fast friends with Bill Smith and his sister Katy (who became the wife of John Dos Passos). Horton Bay is where he married Hadley Richardson at the Methodist church on Saturday afternoon, September 3, 1921. Horton Bay is where a writer in Paris, still an apprentice, placed his bawdily titled 1923 story “Up in Michigan,” which Gertrude Stein famously called
inaccrochable
, unpublishable, like a painting not to be hung. The story is about a drunken seduction/rape on the rough planking of the dock that reaches out into Lake Charlevoix. That “vulgar, sordid tale” is the way his moralizing sister Marce spoke of it, so many years later, in her family memoir, which was only an echo of her moralizing parents.

The little hop-across trout stream at Horton Bay, the one flowing fast and sure down into Charlevoix, can be thought of as the primal Hemingway
trout stream. The following passage is from the Nick Adams story “Now I Lay Me,” written in 1927, nine years after Hemingway was wounded in the war. Nick is lying in his Milan hospital bed. He can't sleep. Just the thought of closing his eyes in the dark fills him with terror. In his waking nightmare, the blown-up man tries to comfort himself with the memory of boyhood trout streams. Hemingway doesn't name Horton's but he's at Horton's Creek, all right. We know this because he talks about the mouth of the creek; where it comes into the lake is where Hemingway always found some of his best fishing.

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.)