Hemingway's Boat (46 page)

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 to 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:

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. “
TO 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:

I suppose that's another way of saying he told beautiful lies about the place he put behind him when he was twenty-two.

But there is another and more personal sense in which Edens were already lost and darkness visible—and not so barely. By Hemingway's teens, his father was a man starting to go down, yielding to his nerves, his wife, his freezing and polarizing mind. It was evident by Hemingway's teens that Ed Hemingway had mostly lost the battle of wills to Grace. The marriage had always been grievously mismatched, if nonetheless respectful and loving, at least in the beginning. In 1912, the doctor who ministered to Oak Park's sick had to go away for his own “rest cure.” His son had worshiped him as a boy—and withdrew from him as a teenager, which is what many teenagers do. But mixed in with this withdrawal, it seems clear, were condescension and pity and a certain anxiety, even amid the love; anxiety that he, too, might turn out in such a way. The Nick Adams stories are full of conflicting filial emotions, none more so than “Fathers and Sons,” which is written from the vantage point of Nick's own fatherhood. There is such love and gratitude in the story for what his father has bequeathed in terms of the natural world. “His father came back to him in the fall of the year, or in the early spring when there had been jacksnipe on the prairie, or when he saw shocks of corn, or when he saw a lake,” Hemingway says toward the back of the story. But the paragraph concludes coldly, “After he was fifteen he had shared nothing with him.” At the front of the story, Nick thinks: “Like all men with a faculty that surpasses human requirements, his father was very nervous.… [H]e was both cruel and abused.” His father “had died in a trap that he had helped only a little to set, and they had all betrayed him in their various ways before he died.” That is a sentence about Grace as much as about Grace's husband.