Just Before Dark by Jim Harrison

Author:Jim Harrison
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

The Last Good Country

It all began quite accidentally. I wanted to go farther north than my northern Michigan home for a few days of rest from nothing, a condition of torpor that is the most exhausting of all human activities. So I loaded my old yellow Chevy pickup with gear and headed out for the Straits of Mackinac, deciding at the last moment to avoid the freeway by passing through Charlevoix and Petoskey. Just beyond Charlevoix I swerved by impulse onto a side road to drive over to Horton's Bay and Walloon Lake.

These place names are particularly resonant to anyone who cares about Ernest Hemingway because they are the locus for most of the Nick Adams stories, the author having spent the summers of his youth vacationing in the area. Despite the closeness I have only been in the locale once before in my adult life.

The area is still beautiful, green and hilly with a vernal juiciness that reminds one of the Lake Country in England. But it's hard to identify the landscape with the woods, swamps and rivers where Nick Adams played Injun, and endured the rites it passage that Hemingway wrote so cleanly about. Not, anyway, when you see a million-dollar condominium peeking through the woods like some sort of fey Rotarian Xanadu. This is not to quibble about progress, merely to say that the place no longer resonates of the literature that put it on the map, in the same way that if you are looking for the golden Colorado of the fifties you'll only find it in Montana. How quickly mass tourism subsumes the indigenous culture, converting it to its own pursuits. For three months of the year northern Michigan is a vast summer suburb of Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis, in the same manner that Aspen, a former mining town, is a winter haven where businessmen, movie people, the disaffected children of orthodontists may rub souls to the porcine, blissed-out strains of John Denver.

Farther north I crossed the Mackinac Bridge and my thoroughly predictable snit dissipated. Several times a year I use the Upper Peninsula as a tonic, its vast, not particularly distinguished forests and rivers as a retreat from the summer eyesore of a Rolls Royce pulling into a local filling station. You can even find a wee trace of Hemingway along the Fox River where he fished brook trout after World War I. But then the brook trout, which are the pimps of the trout world, are mostly gone now. Instead of turning left into the Upper Peninsula I continued on straight north into Canada, up the Ontario coast of Lake Superior until I stopped at an unlikely little town called Wawa.

Late that first night after eating fried steak and onions I lay on my motel bed looking at two girlie magazines which had the collective sexual impact of a dozen sleeping pills. I spread out a large map of Ontario wondering at the rivers I had crossed that day and how they bisected groups of hills that formed a humble but somehow impressive coastal range.

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