Hemingway's Boat (43 page)

Toward the end of the second day, when the landscape looked a little wilder, they decided to put the boat into the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which parallels the Des Plaines—but this meant they had to lug the canoe, with all the gear inside it, around a series of locks. Soldiers of the Illinois National Guard, protecting the canal, now that America was at war, came up and pawed through their things. That night it rained, and the water ran into their tent. In the morning they swirled their coffee in a skillet, having forgotten to bring a coffeepot. They hunched over their cups by the fire. The collars on their coats were turned up, their woolen caps pulled down over their ears. In the pictures, they look stiff and cold, their paddles against a tree, their boat upside down on the bank.

“Dear Dad,” the stern paddler wrote in a postcard dated “5 April 1917” (it was actually Wednesday, April 4, their third day out). “Am writing from Chanahon [he misspelled it], a little village on the sleepy old canal about 10:30. This morning the river was absolutely black with ducks, bluebills, pintails, mallards. Weather is warm and are getting some good pictures. Fine eats.” Despite their troubles, the canal and the river were quite scenic, he wrote. “We go into the Illinois River this aft. Have made about 50 miles, many portages. Ernie.” In town, they saw a large sign the town fathers had just put up:
AMERICA FIRST, THEN CHANNAHON
. Hemingway stopped in a hardware store and bought a piece of railroad chalk. Cohen wondered what Stein was up to. Hemingway walked up to the sign, looked over his shoulder, scrawled on it: “And then God Almighty.” Roaring, they tore for the canoe.

A day later, at the town of Ottawa, in La Salle County, they went to a freight office to send the boat back to Oak Park by rail. They hiked the fairly brief distance to Starved Rock. There, they climbed around on the monument, mildly terrorizing some local Boy Scouts on a camp-out. They skipped stones in the river, slept one more night on the ground, saw great blue herons and egrets and a kingfisher, watched a couple of smallmouth bass leap to bugs, hiked to a train depot, and then rode home to their families.

End of trip, end of story. Except it's not. There's a postscript.

Forty-three years afterward, on January, 11, 1961, a time-punching employee at Caterpillar, Inc., in Peoria, Illinois, heard on the radio that the most famous writer in America, if not the world, had been a patient for the last six weeks at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The announcer said something about hypertension, about Ernest Hemingway having entered the hospital in late November under an assumed name, about his condition now being judged “satisfactory” by his doctors, with a release expected in the next two weeks. There was no mention of the twice-a-week electric shock treatments the patient had been undergoing since mid-December for his depression, for his paranoid delusions about the FBI combing through his bank accounts late at night with their flashlights.

Cohen hadn't talked to Stein in four decades. He knew almost nothing of Hemingway's life except its fame. The boy who'd paddled from the bow on that spring vacation trip down the Des Plaines drove to a drugstore and bought a get-well card. He wrote a few sentences and mailed it off. Would Stein even remember him? Several days later came a small envelope to the modest house with the 120 rosebushes in the yard at 1013 North Frink Street in Peoria. The note, dated January 15, 1961, dictated to a Mayo medical secretary, was signed and slightly amended by the patient. It said: “Dear Cohen. It was worth going to Rochester to hear from you, kid. Will be out of here soon. Let me know how you are and any news of the old gang when you get time.” It closed, as if not quite wanting to close: “It certainly was wonderful to hear from you, and remember that trip we made in the canoe down past Starved Rock. Best always, Ernie.”

Six months later, Ray Ohlsen again turned on the radio in his living room to hear the news of a suicide, which wasn't being reported as a suicide, not then.

Actually, there's a second postscript—you can find it in the endnotes.

When he was two and a half, Hemingway picked up some sheets of his father's medical stationery and began to draw. It was a Saturday morning in Oak Park. One of the first things he drew, along with a giraffe, was a sailboat. It was just a couple of abstractionist scribbles on the page, in pencil, but, yes, you could make out a big sail and a horizontal platform below it. His mother wrote on the first page of this, his first “book”: “Ernest Miller made this book all himself. Illustrated it and named all his
drawings at 2 years 7 months. March 8, 1902.” Beside the sailboat “chapter,” Grace Hemingway wrote: “Sailing in the sea.”

Antecedents. The first boat Hemingway was ever on was most likely a mini–ocean liner named the SS
Manitou
. In the first week of September 1899, when he wasn't quite seven weeks old, the vessel carried him and his parents and nurse (the nurse's name was Katherine Love Norris, and not much is known about her) across a blue expanse that could almost have been the Atlantic itself, Lake Michigan, fifth-largest lake in the world. Is it possible a rocking sway indelibly imprinted itself? Did the deep love of ocean travel on big liners in adulthood have its conception in this overnight voyage?

It was a transit of approximately twenty hours, from a pier in downtown Chicago late on September 5 to a resort town in northern Michigan the next day called Harbor Springs, near the tip of the Lower Peninsula, close to the Straits of Mackinac, on Little Traverse Bay. The year before, Ed and Grace Hemingway had purchased an acre of land fronting a Caribbean-colored inland lake, close to another resort town called Petoskey, and they were going over now to check on the construction of their backwoods home. What was being built for them, in Windemere's first incarnation, on the shore of what would soon be renamed Walloon Lake—it was still known as Bear Lake at this moment—was little more than a twenty-by-forty-foot box, made from locally cut white pine, with an outhouse in the rear and a screened porch off the front. A $400 house. Later would come additions and improvements, although never indoor plumbing.

When the travelers landed at Harbor Springs, they had to transfer their luggage to a commuter local of the Grand Rapids & Indiana Railway, ride it around the curving horn of the bay for eleven miles to Petoskey (with passengers being let off at various resorts and whistle-stops along the way), switch at Petoskey to an even smaller commuter spur rail line (known in local parlance as the Dummy Train because it didn't really go anywhere—just back and forth), take it down to the depot at the foot of the lake that would soon be renamed Walloon, and load their belongings onto a small steamer that finally delivered them to their destination, which was an inn called the Echo Beach Hotel, about a mile from the property they had purchased. For the next two decades, this was the normal pattern of travel and intricacy of schedule for the ever-increasing Hemingway family in its summer relocations to Michigan. In late August, they'd reverse the process.

Sometimes, depending on which steamer they rode, the family was
able to land directly at Petoskey, at the bottom of Little Traverse Bay, thus saving a link in the connecting chain. And there were several years when the Hemingways, or some of them, came to the woods via train from Union Station in Chicago, and in those instances there wasn't quite so much getting on and getting off. And in 1917, four Hemingways, including a restless and just-graduated high school senior, who'd recently been on a canoe trip to Starved Rock, rode to the family cottage in Ed Hemingway's Model T touring car. (The four girls in the family had gone ahead by boat.) That was a five-day adventure, with flat tires and sinkholes and nights under the stars and panfried trout in the morning out of the stream that they'd camped beside. Grace sat in the back with baby Leicester, wearing an ankle-length duster and a rail engineer's cap.

But what of the
Manitou
, Hemingway's maiden boat? If she was hardly the
Paris
or the
Île de France
, she was awfully grand in her own Great Lakes way. Her lines were long and sleek. Her name was an Indian word for God. She could carry four hundred passengers. She was made almost entirely of steel. She was 275 feet in length, with a forty-two-foot beam. She could cruise at nineteen and a half knots. Her dining room was trimmed in Mexican mahogany. On her upper deck was a promenade for late-night strolling. She was built during the Chicago world's fair in 1893, and her shipwrights had given her a rakish shear from bow to stern, with tall spars and a sharply slanting black stack. That stack, which you could apparently see from half a mile off, had a big white
M
painted on it. For three decades into the twentieth century, until the
Manitou
burned in a fire and was reduced to a barge and ultimately got scrapped for junk in World War II, she slashed up the lake several times a week in the summer months, bound for Mackinac Island with only two or three ports of call beforehand, one of which was Harbor Springs. You can study photographs of this proud old ship gliding from her stall in early-evening summer light at the foot of Rush Street and North Water Street in downtown Chicago, looking so tubular and graceful, ready for the race to the other side, and say to yourself: Damn, that could almost be
Pilar
, writ large.

In the summer season of 1907—Hemingway would have turned eight—the
Manitou
was offering three round-trip sailings weekly from Chicago. A one-way fare between Chicago and Harbor Springs was six dollars, not including meals or berths. There were six Hemingways in 1907—four kids and the two parents—so this would have amounted to something. If the
boat departed Chicago at 6:30 on a Friday evening, her passengers could expect to be in Harbor Springs at 2:30 the next afternoon.
^*

Antecedents. There are something like eleven thousand interior lakes in the water-surrounded state of Michigan, but none is more distinctively colored, arguably, than Walloon Lake, which is located nine miles south of Petoskey, framed by wooded hillsides and ringed by coves and bays and points and beautiful beaches. If so many other Michigan lakes are a cast of rich blue, Walloon has the greens and jades and turquoises of the Caribbean. The tropical hue may have to do with sunlight reflecting off the calcite particles in the deeper portions of the lake. (At its deepest, the lake, which has about twenty-seven miles of shoreline and a surface area of about seven square miles, is one hundred feet deep; it is said to be the twenty-second-largest lake in the state.) It may have to do with the unusual number of springs and runoffs that feed Walloon. It may have to do with its gray clay bottom, once you are away from the shore. (The gray clay is really something known as marl, which again has to do with the calcite particles. The calcite particles themselves are said to arise from the groundwater that supplies the lake.) Whatever the cause or reason, the extraordinary color is just there. When Hemingway first saw the bonefish flats of Key West, did he think he was back home in some way? Home? By 1928, when he first saw those flats, he'd left northern Michigan far behind him, at least physically, even if a different northern Michigan was much alive in his invented memory. “Of the place where he had been a boy he had written well enough. As well as he could then,” thinks the dying writer, eaten up by his poisons, in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” That's from an
early draft of the story, probably late 1935, when Hemingway was back from that first summer on Bimini.

The wedge of Walloon that belonged to the Hemingway family was on the north shore, with a wide beach, on a small bay. The acre of sloping field and sandy beach was protected from the stiff wind that sometimes came in from Lake Michigan by a point of land half a mile away known as Murphy's Point. Before a split-plank fence went up around Windemere, Holsteins from a neighbor's farm used to wander down onto the Hemingway beach, cooling their ankles in the shallow water.

In the story “Fathers and Sons,” written in 1933, which is a psychologically layered tale about the inability of fathers and sons to understand each other, Hemingway has his Michigan alter ego, Nick Adams, remembering:

Antecedents. In his childhood, Walloon's waters throbbed and pulsed and lapped and feathered and oared and wind-puffed with almost every kind of floating craft imaginable—including a small armada of Hemingway family boats. There were gaff-rigged racing sailboats out on the lake. There were smart little runabouts tricked out in gleaming chrome. There were rowboats. There were canoes. There were primitive launches driven by one-cylinder, two-cycle gasoline engines, known as one-lungers, whose spark came from a battery or from a magneto activated by a breaker switch connected to a flywheel. There were noisy tubs, powered by multicylinder four-cycle engines. There were sloops flying the flag of the Walloon Yacht Club. All of them, no less than the water itself, were framing a child's earliest field of vision, fueling the incipient literary imagination. Is it any wonder that
Pilar
seems inevitable?

There were also Walloon service boats operating as a public transportation
system, making circuits of the lake four and five times a day, dropping off goods and mail and passengers at the docks of hotels and individual cottages. These boats were crucial to the life of the community. There were few roads then. The lake was the road.