Rico's rants: When Hemingway was a young fisherman

The New York Times has an article by John O'Connor about Hem:

In 1898, the year before Ernest Hemingway was born, his parents bought two hundred feet of frontage on Walloon Lake in northern Michigan, out in the backlands of Petoskey, a coastal resort town. The Hemingways were fresh off a luxury steamship from Oak Park, Illinois, looking to chuck the suburban grind for the seasonal joys of lake country. For $400 they soon had a twenty-by-forty-foot clapboard cottage built that was short on nearly every amenity except peace and quiet. It was not a pioneer life (they had brought along a maid) but the surrounding woods were populated by Ojibwes, black bears, lumberjacks, and bootleggers. Most crucially for Ernest, who would eventually pack all this stuff into his fiction, the fishing was extraordinary.
“Absolutely the best trout fishing in the country. No exaggeration,” he later wrote to a friend about the Petoskey area, perhaps exaggerating a tad, but hitting on an essential truth of summer in the Michigan boonies: “It’s a great place to laze around and swim and fish when you want to. And the best place in the world to do nothing. It is beautiful country, and nobody knows about it but us.”
By all accounts, northern Michigan had a seismic effect on Ernest Hemingway and his future work. He spent his first twenty summers there, fishing, hunting, drinking, and chasing girls. It was a place where men lived hard and lean, ran trotlines, and considered bilge water a beverage. “Good stuff for essays,” he wrote in a 1916 journal entry, recording fishing trip details he would later channel into Nick Adams stories. “Old Couple on Boardman,” he wrote, referring to a river. “Mancelona-Indian girl, Bear Creek … tough talking lumberjack, young Indian girl, kills self and girl.”
It’s an odd juxtaposition to think of Hemingway, years later, sipping espresso in Paris cafes while writing about Nick Adams, a semi-autobiographical stand-in for the author’s own manly wanderings in the Michigan wilds. Take the famous Adams story, Big Two-Hearted River: “Holding the rod far out toward the uprooted tree and sloshing backward in the current,” he wrote, “Nick worked the trout, plunging, the rod bending alive, out of the danger of the weeds into the open river.”
Many of those 25-odd Adams stories, including extraordinary nuggets like The End of Something and The Last Good Country, as well as his first published novel, The Torrents of Spring, are set in and around Petoskey. And Michigan pops up again and again in later works such as The Snows of Kilimanjaro and A Moveable Feast, to name a few.
Yet even Hemingway fans might draw a blank on his Michigan connection. Havana, Key West, Ketchum, Paris, Pamplona, these locales tend to conjure vintage Papa: a kerchiefed, bloated, rum-drunk Nobel laureate. Petoskey? Not so much. The gatekeepers of Hemingway’s legend have largely ignored the place. As a native Michigander, I feel I can pose the question: perhaps northern Michigan, despite its inexhaustible beauty, isn’t that sexy? But if you want to understand the writer, you have to start here. Michigan-era Hemingway is threshold Hemingway; young and raw, before the fame and subcutaneous padding and sixteen-daiquiri lunches. It’s where he experimented in delinquency, learned to cast a fly rod, stepped unmoored into the wilderness, and first tinkered with a prose style that would one day make him famous.
Despite having grown up three hours south of Petoskey, and having fished many of the local waters that Hemingway did, I couldn’t recall ever setting foot in the town. Nowadays I live out East and rarely find my way back home. And so, in June of 2015, I finally made it to Michigan, intent on tracing Hemingway’s boyhood orbit and seeing the country where Nick Adams came of age.
Driving up the east coast of Lake Michigan to Glen Arbor, I cut across the pinkie of Michigan’s mitten to Traverse City, then bent north, chugging through terraced farmland dusted with pollen and yacht-filled beach towns jammed with fudge shops and lighthouses and broad, sugary dunes sliding into the water. In Petoskey, which sits on a bluff overlooking Little Traverse Bay, a warm breeze swept off the lake and wheeled and skidded through the streets.
Petoskey is the kind of place where, at least in summer, everyone seems to be wearing tank tops and eating ice cream. The year-round population count, six thousand, is the same as it was in Hemingway’s day, and in some ways, little has changed. My hotel, Stafford’s Perry, even hosted the great man for a night in 1919. There is a photo from that time of a teenage Hemingway, corncob pipe in his mouth, holding three good-size trout. Taken right after he returned from Italy, where he had been wounded during World War One, it captures a cataclysmic moment in American literature. You can’t quite tell from his goony smile, but Hemingway was gathering himself, nurturing a different kind of wound, one that would soon find expression in his fiction.
In the morning I drove out to Walloon Lake, ten miles south of town. The water, a pure cerulean, seemed to have been piped in from Bermuda. I took off my shoes and waded in.
Walloon ranked low among Hemingway’s hallowed fishing spots, as it fell within his mother’s jurisdiction; the two maintained testy relations for much of their lives. He preferred Horton Bay on nearby Lake Charlevoix and trout streams like the Black, Pigeon, and Sturgeon rivers near Vanderbilt. (He was late for his first wedding, in Horton Bay, because the fishing on the Sturgeon was so good.)
Probably the river most people associate with Hemingway is the Two-Hearted in the Upper Peninsula, thanks to Big Two-Hearted River. An archetype of minimalism, the story depicts Adams as a veteran wrestling with the trauma of war while trout fishing in deepest Michigan. It’s tough to fathom it today, but in 1925, these staccato lines were the literary equivalent of a knife fight: “It had been a hard trip. He was very tired. That was done. He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him.”
Of course, no true fisherman would give up his spot so easily. Except for a spring steelhead run, the fishing on the Two-Hearted has never been great. Hemingway liked the name for its metaphorical resonance. A section of the Fox River, near the town of Seney, was his actual model for the story.
I kept my distance from the Hemingway cottage, called Windemere, which is still in the family (a Hemingway nephew, Ernie Mainland, summers there) and is not open to the public. Over the years this has produced some confusion, with Mainland occasionally emerging from his bathroom to find strangers— convinced they had discovered an unlisted Hemingway museum— riffling through his belongings.
“People have taken divots out of the lawn,” said Michael R. Federspiel, a professor of history at Central Michigan University and the author of the coffee table book Picturing Hemingway’s Michigan. “It’s literally sacred ground.”
Federspiel and I were drinking iced teas at the City Park Grill, a former Hemingway haunt in Petoskey. I sat on the second stool from the left end of the bar, Hemingway’s favorite perch, or so some would have you believe; others contend it was the third seat, or maybe the fourth. Regardless, I could see Papa holding court here, tossing back whiskys while placing wagers on the bare-knuckle boxing matches out back. Or perhaps not: Fderspiel reminded me that Hemingway’s days at the City Park Grill overlapped with Prohibition, when the hardest thing on tap, at least officially, was lemonade.
“Many people wouldn’t recognize the Hemingway from up here,” he said, pointing above the bar to a reproduction (photo, top) of Yousuf Karsh’s iconic 1957 photo of Papa in which the author, wearing a turtleneck sweater, very much resembles a longshoreman about to take a swing at you. “. It’s the drunken Hemingway, the four-times married, loutish guy he was at the end of his life,” Federspiel lamented. “The Hemingway we had here was a thoughtful, observant young man.”
A few blocks away, at 602 State Street, was the old Eva Potter’s boardinghouse, today a private home, where Hemingway rented a room in the fall of 1919 and where, Federspiel said, the budding writer was tinkering with a fresh approach.
“Nick Adams wasn’t born there,” he said, adding that it wasn’t until Paris in the 1920s that Hemingway tacked a Michigan map to his wall and mined his early life for fiction. “But it was the genesis of that tight, concise, impressionistic style. Northern Michigan was his first Eden, and it got seared into his emotions. From that came great stories.”
The village of Horton Bay, which zips by in a flash on County Road 56, was a major fixture of Hemingway’s adolescence. At pains to escape his mother, he often walked the four miles from Walloon to fish and swim there. Horton Bay makes cameos in several stories, including Summer People, Up in Michigan, and Wedding Day. Hemingway was a regular at the Horton Bay General Store (photo, bottom), now in its 140th year, and at the Pinehurst and Shangri-La cottages (now a vacation rental), where his 1921 wedding reception was held .
Halfway down Lake Street, before I reached the bay, I found the spring from Summer People in which Nick Adams imagines soaking his war wounds. It was just as Hemingway describes it:

“The water came up in a tile sunk beside the road, lipping over the cracked edge of the tile and flowing away through the close-growing mint into the swamp,” he wrote. “Nick thought, I wish I could put all of myself in there. I bet that would fix me.”
Lots of people dislike Hemingway for some pretty good reasons, like machine-gunning mako sharks from his boat, or the ugly vein of misogyny, homophobia, and anti-Semitism that litters his fiction and personal correspondence. But the man burned relentlessly from one end of his life to the other, trying to tap into something we all feel in danger of losing, whether it’s the vitality of youth, the security of a childhood home, or simply our memories of a vanished world. So much of his early work has a special poetry to it, a song of summer, you might say, that is in every way alive to youth’s inevitable, sad decline.
Except for a single night in 1947, when Hemingway passed through Michigan on his way out West, he never saw Petoskey again after his Horton Bay wedding. The thinking from scholars is he didn’t want to ruin his memory of a place he loved so much. With him, intimacy increased with distance. I can relate. Sometimes the impulse is to keep things encased in glass, to cling to the memories that are your starting point. The Last Good Country, another Nick Adams ramble through Petoskey’s outback, was a story Hemingway worked on right up until his death in 1961.
“This is about the last good country there is left,” Nick tells his younger sister in the story as they flee into the woods, dodging a pair of surly game wardens. The quiet dark of the trees puts them in mind of religion. “That’s why they build cathedrals to be like this,” Nick says, echoing a sentiment that saturates the author’s writing on the region. It’s a perfect example of how, in an important way, Hemingway spent his whole life returning to northern Michigan.