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.’