Hemingway's Northern Michigan: The Streams Before the Books

Ernest Hemingway spent the summers of his childhood and young adulthood at his family's cottage on Walloon Lake in Emmet County, coming up from Oak Park, Illinois every year from infancy through his early twenties. He fished the Pigeon River and the Sturgeon River. He hunted in the jack pine forests above Petoskey. He encountered the Ojibwe communities of the northern Lower Peninsula in ways that shaped his understanding of landscape and silence even as his fiction handled those encounters in the conventions of his era.

The terrain that became the Nick Adams stories is this terrain. The "Big Two-Hearted River" that Nick Adams fishes in Hemingway's famous story is named for a real river in the Upper Peninsula, but the landscape Hemingway was drawing on was northern Michigan: the jack pine plains, the cutover land where the logging industry had passed through and moved on, the sensation of being alone in a country that went on further than you could walk.

Hemingway left Michigan, went to Europe, and wrote books that made him famous. Northern Michigan gave him the sensory vocabulary he worked from for the rest of his career: cold water, morning light on a lake, the smell of woodsmoke, the sound of nothing. He never quite wrote about this place directly; it kept surfacing in the fiction as Nick Adams kept returning to rivers.

The Walloon Lake cottage remains in private hands. The streams are still here. The country is quieter than it was when the logging camps were running and louder than Nick Adams would have liked.