Hemingway's Boat by Paul Hendrickson

Author:Paul Hendrickson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307700537
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-20T10:00:00+00:00

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.

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