It seems it was not just a nine-and-a-half pound boy that was born at 339 Oak Park Avenue, but an industry and, quite possibly, a religion.
Clutching my Hemingway-signed mug I step out into the leafy neighbourhood which he is said to have described as one of wide lawns and narrow minds. The wide lawns may still be there but Oak Park nowadays guards a zealously liberal reputation.
An elderly man offers to show me around.
‘I’m a socialist,’ he declares proudly. ‘My wife has twice shaken hands with Paul Robeson.’
The light is fading as we walk down to the end of Oak Park Avenue. A war memorial which bears Hemingway’s name stands in a postage stamp of greenery they call Scoville Street Park.
‘That’s so crazy,’ mutters my grey-haired guide. ‘They should rename it Hemingway Park.’
*
Chicago O’Hare. The busiest airport in the world. It doesn’t have a lot to do with Hemingway but it’s the quickest way to get to north Michigan, which has a lot to do with Hemingway.
He never wrote much about Chicago but he wrote an awful lot about the life and adventures he had during eighteen years of summer vacations at Walloon Lake.
By midday, I’ve negotiated the long slow check-in lines that are the price we pay for high-speed travel and am twenty-five thousand feet above the grey-green surface of Lake Michigan. The Hemingway family would have taken one of the lake steamers that ran out of Chicago and reached Harbor Springs in thirty-two hours. Today, by jet and rented car, I’m there in four.
Harbor Springs, on the north shore of Little Traverse Bay, is a well-heeled and exclusive small town and the jetty at which lake steamers like Manitou or City of Charlevoix would have tied up is now occupied by dazzling white private yachts. The old station building from which the Hemingways and all their baggage would have been loaded aboard the train is still there. Except that there is no railway attached to it. And it sells women’s clothing.
Looking inside, I have a momentary panic that I’ve stumbled upon a coven of transvestite train-drivers and that someone looking frighteningly like John Cleese might emerge from the back office, wiping greasy hands on a matching Donna Karan two-piece. This disturbing fantasy is not helped by the fact that the Depot boutique has, alongside the racks of dresses, a perfectly preserved ticket-office, complete with ironwork grille, wooden floor and wood-burning stove.
The railway and the Lake Michigan steamer service enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. In their pre-war heyday they advertised together: ‘Upper Michigan - the Charmed Land Of Hiawatha’, ‘The Northland’s Blue Lakes - Far From Heat And Hay Fever’. But they couldn’t fight aeroplanes and automobiles. Once one died, so did the other and the only way to Walloon Lake now is to take the highway through Petoskey, like everyone else.
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.