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.
*
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
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.
*
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