Hemingway Adventure (1999) (3 page)

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.

*

B
est 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.

M
y 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.’

A
t 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.

F
ollowing 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.