Hemingway Adventure (1999) Read Free

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.’
    W e’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