Pigeon River Country: A Michigan Forest

9. Hemingway

9 Hemingway The most famous person of letters known to have spent time in the Pigeon River Country is Ernest Hemingway. His experiences there occurred just as the area was being set aside as a state forest. He was a young man just back from the war, but as his writing developed he used what he knew of the area to serious purpose. In his “Up in Michigan” short story, Hemingway described three young men coming back from hunting with ri›es on “the pine plains beyond Vanderbilt” carrying “three deer in the back of the wagon, their thin legs sticking stiff over the edge of the wagon box.” In “Now I Lay Me,” his central character mostly gave up thinking about the girls he had known and concentrated instead on trout ‹shing “because I found that I could remember all the streams and there was always something new about them, while the girls” after awhile “blurred and all became rather the same.” In a July 26, 1919, letter to a friend, Howell Jenkins, Hemingway talked fondly about the Pigeon River Country. He called it the Pine Barrens and said they could “nearly drive across” it “without any road just by compass. It is so free from under brush.” He told Jenkins “that Barrens Country is the greatest I’ve ever been in,” and that “there are some great camping places on the Black” where he guaranteed they would catch all the trout they wanted. In a September 15 letter, he told Jenkins that Ernest’s group of ‹ve people caught 23 ‹sh the day before on the Black even though “it rained like hell.” Hemingway, who had defective vision in his left eye, was carrying cigarettes , chocolates, and postcards for Italian troops as a member of the Red 137 Cross in Italy when an Austrian fragmentation bomb exploded along the ground July 8, 1918. The injured Hemingway carried a more severely wounded Italian soldier 50 yards when a machine gun round tore into his right knee; he staggered but got his man another 50 yards to safety. Hemingway was 18. A year later, after convalescing in Milan, he was at his parents ’ summer home on Walloon Lake some 25 miles west of what is now Pigeon River Country. His ‹shing trip in early July was his ‹rst in nearly two years, according to his biographer Carlos Baker. He said Hemingway and his friends drove southeast to Vanderbilt, then east past the Sturgeon and Pigeon to the Black, where they spent seven days and “took more trout than they could eat.” The road Hemingway traveled from Vanderbilt still exists as a narrow dirt road, closely lined by woods. It is now called Old Vanderbilt Road and runs roughly parallel to the newer, paved Sturgeon Valley Road. In an unpublished letter July 15, 1919, Hemingway said they had seen the bear on “the Pidgeon river” and that the trip was “a peach.” Hemingway took the Vanderbilt road again in August 1920 and camped at the Black River. He and four friends were gone for six days in a rented car with a trailer. “We had a marvelous time this trip,” he said in a letter. “Brummy [Ted Brumback] . . . can play the mandolin wonderfully and in the evening he would play after supper in the dusk and ’side the camp ‹re. “And before we went to sleep we’d all be curled up around the ‹re. Often a wonderful moon . . . “Brummy and Dick [Smale] were wading down the stream and Brummy was tired and wet and about two miles below camp. Brum’s beard was blond and curly and Dick sez, ‘Gosh, Baugh, you do look like Jesus Christ!’ “‘Well,’ the Baugh comes back at him, ‘If I was I wouldn’t wade. I’d get right up on the water and walk back to camp!’ “. . . It was great in camp lying all rolled up in the blankets after the ‹re had died down to coals and the men were asleep and looking at the moon and thinking long long thoughts.” In October, Hemingway met Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, and by spring 1921 they planned to marry. On April 28 that year he wrote to Bill Smith that he would “sometimes get thinking about the Sturgeon and Black during the nocturnal [night] and damn near go cuckoo. . . . May have to give it up for something I want more—but that doesn’t keep me from loving it with everything I have. Dats de...