Hemingway Adventure (1999)

by Michael Palin

  Petoskey, ten miles around the bay, is the opposite of Harbor Springs. It has railway tracks but no station. The tracks don’t lead anywhere but they’re relics of a past which Petoskey knows is good for business. Not for nothing was it voted sixteenth Most Beautiful Small Town in America. We’re on a BBC budget so we turn our backs reluctantly on the white columns and elegant terraces of the Perry Hotel and put in at the local Best Western.

  A television in the lobby is permanently tuned to the weather. A girl with a back-pack is enthusing to the boy at reception.

  ‘You know, I got to see that fantastic sunrise this morning!’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Yeah, they replayed it on the Weather Channel.’

  We’ve finally reached the shores of Walloon Lake. A raw and strengthening wind is funnelling down its eight-mile length straight into our faces. This would have been the last lap of the Hemingways’ summer odyssey.

  Here at Walloon Village they would have unloaded everything from the train that ran from Petoskey onto the steamer that plied the lake.

  I unload myself into a tiny aluminium dinghy captained by Strat Peaslee, in his eighties, short, with neatly trimmed silver hair just visible between a jauntily angled nautical cap and the upturned collar of a thick plaid jacket.

  Strat’s family were summer vacationers here - ‘fudgies, they called us’- and he remembers the Hemingways. Dr Hemingway was ‘a big man, a hunter’. He once took a bee out of Strat’s ear.

  Strat laughs at the memory. ‘He never charged.’

  His father was with him, suddenly, in deserted orchards and in new-plowed fields, in thickets, on small hills, or when going through dead grass, whenever splitting wood or hauling water, by grist mills, cider mills and dams and always with open fires.

  ‘Fathers and Sons’

  Six miles from the village, on the eastern shore of the western finger of the lake, Strat points to an unassuming green and white cabin set above a narrow beach backed onto a tall screen of pine and hemlock trees. This began life as a twenty- by forty-foot cottage, built in two and a half months, between September and November 1899, and christened by Grace Hemingway ‘Windemere’, after a location in a novel by Sir Walter Scott. It was gradually enlarged over the years as the Hemingway clan itself was enlarged but it is nowhere near as grand and showy as some of the mansions built around the lake since.

  It’s still in the family, owned by Hemingway’s nephew, Ernie Mainland, who runs an insurance business in Petoskey.

  There’s no one there today. The jetties have been pulled up, the storm windows are in place and the house has been closed ahead of the long, hard winter when the lake will be ice-bound for six months. I’m quite glad to see it this way. In the silence I can indulge my imagination, try and feel the truth of the many stories that Hemingway wrote about his alter ego, Nick Adams, and how he learned lessons in life among the shores and the streams and the dark woods that surround the lake.

  One year, after he’d quarrelled with his mother yet again, Hemingway stayed up here at the end of the season, and after the house was shut up for the winter he went to live with friends in nearby Horton Bay.

  One of Hemingway’s earliest, boldest and most controversial short stories was written from his Horton Bay experiences. It’s called ‘Up in Michigan’ and its clinical description of the sexual act led Gertrude Stein to deem it unpublishable, his big sister Marcelline to describe it as ‘a vulgar, sordid tale’ and Bill Smith, one of Ernest’s buddies, to suggest he write a sequel called ‘Even Further Up in Michigan’.

  ‘Horton’s Bay, the town, was only five houses on the main road between Boyne City and Charlevoix,’ wrote Hemingway, recalling it from a cold and draughty apartment in Paris, in 1922.

  Seventy-six years on it pretty much matches his description. The two-lane blacktop from Charlevoix bridges Horton Creek and curves right, past the ‘general store and post office with a high false front’ and the 117-year-old Red Fox Inn, close by a grove of basswood and maple trees, old enough for Ernest to have walked beneath them.

  We push open the door of the inn to find ourselves in a big front room on whose tables is arranged a dusty selection of Hemingwayana. There is no one there except a boy of maybe nine or ten, who, on seeing us, snaps into a terrific sales spiel covering all the Hemingway connections with Horton Bay and the relevant books in which we might find them - including ‘Up in Michigan’. It doesn’t come as a complete surprise to find out the boy’s name is Ernest. Or that his father, Jim Hartwell, is the son of Vol Hartwell, who taught Hemingway to fish.

  The Horton Bay Store next door has a nostalgic Norman Rockwell feel to it - the sort of place where they make TV ads for processed food - and as Betty Kelly makes us coffee I admire her collection of Hemingway photographs and newspaper cuttings. One of them, from the Detroit News, reports the return of Hemingway the famous writer to the area in the late forties. He told the paper that no, he wouldn’t be visiting Horton Bay. He said it would spoil his memories of the place.

  Tonight we eat in a fine restaurant called Andante in Petoskey, whose chef, John Sheets, not only serves excellent fish but catches what he cooks. He agrees to take me out tomorrow for a fishing lesson on Horton Creek.

  Before going back to our hotel I take a walk up to the corner of State and Woodland to look at the rooming house where Hemingway stayed in the winter of 1919 and from there I retrace his steps down to the same public library on Mitchell Street where he went most days to read the newspapers. The moon is full and the air is cold, and I feel myself in danger of entering a young Hemingway time warp. Turn in to the Park Garden Cafe for a night-cap and a dose of present-day reality. Order a beer and settle myself down at the bar. The barman nods approvingly. ‘Second seat from the end. That was Hemingway’s favourite.’

  A scintillating late autumn morning. I’m in a canoe moored up amongst auburn reed beds on the marshy banks of Horton Creek. The wind ruffles stands of aspen sending the sunlight scattering. A dragon-fly settles momentarily on the end of my paddle, ripples spread from an almost imperceptible movement in the water. A soft and seductive sense of timelessness prevails.

  Twenty minutes earlier our camera boat overturned, plunging our director, cameraman and his assistant into eighteen inches of water. We’re not talking Titanic here, but they were in well above their knees and all the footage we’ve shot so far today has gone soggy.

  So, whilst they’re off drying out the equipment I’m left, with John Sheets, chef and fishing mentor, thinking about life and why, despite the undoubted beauty of this place, I’m feeling oddly regretful. For what? Well, not catching a fish for one thing. Although fish are shy in the bright sunlight we have seen a couple of fair-sized steelheads emerge from the shadows but they swam past the bait with almost contemptuous disdain.

  The twenty-year-old Hemingway caught sixty-four trout in one day here. Mindful of this I think I tried too hard. I rushed the line into the water, I tugged too sharply, I forgot the loose, controlled sweep of arm and rod and at one point my line stuck somewhere behind John’s ear, hooked into the back of his shirt. I find myself guiltily hoping that the film will have been damaged beyond repair by the muddy waters of Horton Creek.

  There’s also a larger, deeper regret and I think it’s to do with that old cliche, lost childhood. Horton Creek remains as it was when Hemingway learnt to fish here, an unspoiled backwater. Its peacefulness and my present enforced inertia remind me, suddenly and quite poignantly, of being very young again, of spending seemingly endless days crouched by the side of a pond in Sheffield collecting stickleback and frog-spawn in a jam jar.

  It’s ironic that this rush round the world to recapture the spirit of Hemingway should have stirred such an acute memory of days when there was no rush at all.

  There’s a shout from the bank. The crew return with camera intact, film saved and ready for work. The reverie’s over.

  Actually, I have a feeling that what brought it on was not so much to do with
Horton Creek as waking up this morning and realising that, back in England, my eldest son had turned thirty.

  Later. Expedition over. All the fish in Horton Creek are still there.

  *

  Best Western Motor Inn, Petoskey. Woken by the sound of someone pacing about above me. This is a motel and you expect a certain amount of ambient noise but this goes on for almost three hours, broken only by the occasional sharp ping of bedsprings, and a momentary lull before the pacing starts again.

  I find myself unwillingly drawn into all sorts of speculation about the nature of the pacer, ranging from serial somnambulist, to man wondering how to tell wife about girlfriend, man wondering how to tell girlfriend about wife, man wondering how to tell wife and girlfriend about garage mechanic, to man preparing to kill us all at breakfast.

  The only way that I can curb my hyperactive imagination is to exchange it for someone else’s, so I reach for my copy of the Nick Adams stories. I’m struck by the number of times the local Indians feature in them. It’s as if Hemingway found something in their way of life that was lacking in his own, something raw and elemental, a direct confrontation with sex and death and pain. Whatever it was, he kept coming back to it.

  He was a very tall Indian and had made Nick an ash canoe paddle. He had lived alone in the shack and drank pain killer and walked through the woods alone at night. Many Indians were that way.

  ‘The Indians Moved Away’

  People in Petoskey tell me that it was once the largest Indian village in Michigan, but now all that’s changed. For a start Indians are not called Indians any more. They’re called Native Americans and if I want to see what they do now I should drive north to the Kewadin Casino. It is owned and run by descendants of the tribes Hemingway wrote about.

  A ninety-minute drive due north takes us almost to the Canadian border, crossing ‘Mighty Mac’ - the Mackinac Bridge - an epically graceful suspension bridge which soars above five miles of open water where Lake Michigan meets Lake Huron. It carries Route 75 into what they call the Upper Peninsula and us into a torrential downpour.

  Partly because of this we have difficulty finding the place, but when we do I can’t imagine how we missed it. Kewadin is much more than a casino, it’s a conference centre, hotel and entertainment complex. It moves Basil, our stills photographer, to poetry.

  ‘That is the biggest goddam tepee I ever saw.’

  The tall atrium which leads to the gambling rooms is hung with Native American pictures, totem pole carvings, embroidered skins and little devices with holes in the middle called dream-catchers.

  ‘Only good dreams go through the centre,’ explains Lisa Dietz, a Native American much concerned with the old traditions. She still tracks moose with her husband, but today is doing duty at the approach to the gambling tables, burning a mixture of sage, sweetgrass and tobacco, which she wafts around with a feather to enhance the spiritual atmosphere. It should be an eagle feather, she confides, but eagle feathers are sacred to the Chippewa Indians and cannot be used in a building where there is alcohol.

  And alcohol there is. Beneath an appearance of orthodoxy the Native American culture is happily pragmatic about customers’ needs. As well they might be. My guide, Carol, a Chippewa in a pin-stripe suit, says the casino alone turns over 50 million dollars a year to the tribe.

  Despite the lousy weather the tills are turning over nicely. And despite a couple of early successes at the roulette wheel, a substantial part of that turn-over seems to be mine.

  As we head south on the sodden highway that leads back to the Mackinac Bridge I feel the long ride has been worth it. If only to correct the impression I’ve been getting that nothing much has changed up here since Hemingway took his vacations in Michigan eighty years ago. Let’s face it, there’s nothing in the Nick Adams stories that might remotely prepare you for Chippewa croupiers.

  My last morning in Michigan. I’m out running early along the shore of Little Traverse Bay which Hemingway reckoned was ‘more beautiful than the Bay of Naples’.

  Today it’s hard to tell as a long white tongue of cloud seems trapped in the inlet, lying low over the water. The gentle slopes surrounding the lake rise clear of the mist and in the soft sunlight the turning leaves of oak and maple and aspen blaze like the last flames of a dying fire.

  As we pack our bags I get talking to a couple in the car park.

  ‘We’re on the Colour Tour,’ they tell me. ‘We’ve waited all year for this.’

  Indeed as we drive a meandering but photogenic course toward the airport at Traverse City, the scenic back-roads of north Michigan are full of people looking at trees, swerving with delight at a brazenly scarlet maple, braking ecstatically before a golden grove of birch. It’s pretty dangerous, this tree worship.

  Stop at a town called Indian River. It has one long main street and looks like most other small towns on the way to somewhere. My eye is caught by a low single-storey building in between Top Shoppe Resort Wear and Hair Creations Inc. It’s a hunting store with a large ad for Winchester rifles on the door and puts me in mind of a passage I’ve just been reading in ‘Fathers and Sons’.

  Someone has to give you your first gun … and you have to live where there is game or fish if you are to learn about them, and now, at thirty eight, he loved to fish and to shoot exactly as much as when he first had gone with his father. It was a passion that had never slackened.

  Beside the ad for rifles, there is a friendly warning on the door. ‘This property is protected by an armed American citizen. (Nothing in here is worth dying for.)’

  Inside is a select but comprehensive armoury of rifles, handguns, long-bows with telescopic sights, shells, shot, powder and other life-ending accessories. There’s also a fascinating and graphic range of hunting products with names like Gland-U-Lure and Natural Doe in Heat Urine, as well as frankly surreal items such as A Guide to Successful Turkey Calling and The Polar Heat Seat complete with provocative instructions, ‘Hold Your Hand On Seat - Feel It Start Heating!’

  Presiding over this small arsenal is a helpful, soft-spoken man called John who wouldn’t have been out of place as a parish priest. He’s proud of his business. He sees those who hunt and shoot as protectors of a public environment threatened by private development. The forests of north Michigan, he claims, are being systematically destroyed to provide land for leisure. There are now nineteen golf courses in the immediate area. He and his wife came to north Michigan to get away from urban life only to find it followed them.

  He shakes his head. ‘We’ve lost a lot of things we moved up here for.’

  I ask what he might recommend for a first-timer and he lovingly selects a double-barrelled Wheatherby with a burr-walnut stock engraved in silver to his own design and by his own hand. It’s a handsome well-crafted piece of work which would set me back two thousand dollars. But I’m a foreigner without a licence so he can’t sell it to me anyway.

  He suggests that if I want some action without the capital investment I should try a gun club if I have time. I tell him I’m on my way back to Chicago and he grins broadly.

  ‘Well, no problem.’

  At the end of the summer of 1920, things went sour in north Michigan. Ernest fell out with his mother and never went back to live at Oak Park. He spent a winter in Petoskey and then moved into a tiny apartment he shared with his friend Bill Horne at 1230 North State Street, Chicago.

  ‘It was the kind with a washstand in the corner and a bath down the hall,’ Horne recalled. And it’s where I’m standing today. Except that the handsome, if slightly run-down row of crumbly sandstone facades where he lived has been sliced in half and the number 1230 now adorns the marquee of a soaring modern apartment block.

  Somehow this seems to symbolise the transitory nature of Hemingway’s relationship with the city of Chicago. Oak Park was the comfortable, settled, family home, north Michigan the great outdoors where he learnt all sorts of ropes, but Chicago was a way station between home and freedom, youth and adulthood, Ameri
ca and Europe.

  In a typical stream of consciousness letter to his fourth wife, Mary, in 1945, Hemingway came as close as he ever did to paying a compliment to the city.

  I remember always how exciting it was when I was a kid and the Art Institute where I first saw pictures and made feel truly what they tried to make you feel falsely with religion and the old South State Street whorehouse district … and Hinky Dink’s the longest bar in the world … and further back going with my grandfather to the theater in the afternoons … and hot nights along the lake when I was poor in the summer after the war and the boarding houses and tenements we used to live in and when had money able to send out to the chinamens for lovely food.

  Chicago today amply fulfils my criterion of a great city, that is one which becomes more exciting the nearer you get to the centre.

  Here the rolling waves of prosperity on which the city was rebuilt after the great fire of 1871 are all acknowledged. The pioneer tower blocks of the 1890s, full of Gothic detail and chunky stone-work, stand alongside the sheer glass walls of the 1990s. It’s the oldest modern city I know. Things we take for granted, like steel frame construction, curtain walling and high-speed elevators, were pioneered in the city, and the buildings which pioneered them are still working.

  And once in the downtown area I begin to feel the buzz of the street life which Hemingway celebrated. Just odd things. A sign above a North State Street diner which reads ‘Bad Booze, Bum Food, Rotten Service, Great Seating’. The constant, precarious presence of the El - The Union Loop Elevated Railway - whose trains rumble raucously over wooden sleepers on a steel gantry that was first erected over a hundred years ago. And a woman’s voice outside the Chicago Tribune building asking loudly, ‘So, can your husband achieve partial erection, or no erection at all?’