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, America 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?’
I swivel round but there’s no one there. It’s a moment or two before I realise the voice is coming from a loudspeaker, broadcasting a radio talk-show from somewhere inside the building.
Following the advice of my friend in Indian River I check the Chicago Yellow Pages for a gun range. This being the city of Al Capone, there’s quite a choice.
With the help of a latter-day James Bond by the name of Peter Thomas (futures trader, weapon trainer to the stars, deep-sea diver, etc.) we select a place up by the airport.
It’s a gun shop and shooting range combined. The shop appears to be run by two Labrador dogs, one cream, one chocolate, who tumble over each other in vaguely amorous fashion beside a display of holsters and magazine extensions.
There are two people ahead of us, waiting to be served. He is big, and sports Ray-Bans, a pony-tail and a sweat-stained bandanna. She is very big and dressed in black.
Attached to the wall behind the counter are newspaper clippings, with gung-ho headlines like ‘Gun Control Wrecked’, ‘Gun Control Dealt A Blow’, ‘More Women Packing Pistols’. Some of them look very old.
The wall suddenly reveals itself to be a door from which another very large person waddles out. I feel like Gandhi in here. He appears to be the owner, and approaches the waiting couple.
‘Yep?’
‘We need ammo and targets. We need four number 9 and four number 2.’
I try to sound equally nonchalant when it’s our turn to order but when it comes to targets I’m a bit nonplussed. The owner shows me three black silhouette shapes to choose from. One is that of a hooded gunman, another a thick-set bad guy with oddly creased trousers and the third, unbelievably, is a fat lady.
He lays them out and folds his arms.
‘Pick your offender,’ he says, without a smile.
I choose the hooded gunman, and he takes me through into a small space at the back of the shop with a stained plasterboard ceiling, a big Coke machine and piles of reading matter ranging from Shooting Times to Handguns Magazine (‘Modernised Hi-Power from Bulgaria’), and the more academic Firearms Journal. This last has an advert for a Hemingway bush jacket, and a picture of bearded Ernest clutching a rifle and smiling contentedly. This seems too good to be true. My reason for being here summed up in one advert.