Hemingway Adventure

Series: Hemingway Adventure
Chapter: Walloon Lake, Michigan
Country/sea: USA
Place: Walloon Lake, Michigan
Book page no: 24

Walloon Lake, Michigan

Walloon Lake, Michigan. The view from the house.

We’ve finally reached the shores of Walloon Lake. A raw and strengthening wind is funnelling down its eight-mile length straight into our faces. This would have been the last lap of the Hemingways’ summer odyssey.

Here at Walloon Village they would have un-loaded everything from the train that ran from Petoskey onto the steamer that plied the lake.

I unload myself into a tiny aluminium dinghy captained by Strat Peaslee, in his eighties, short, with neatly trimmed silver hair just visible between a jauntily angled nautical cap and the upturned collar of a thick plaid jacket.

Strat’s family were summer vacationers here - ‘fudgies, they called us’ - and he remembers the Hemingways. Dr Hemingway was ‘a big man, a hunter’. He once took a bee out of Strat’s ear.

Strat laughs at the memory. ‘He never charged.’

His father was with him, suddenly, in deserted orchards and in new-plowed fields, in thickets, on small hills, or when going through dead grass, whenever splitting wood or hauling water, by grist mills, cider mills and dams and always with open fires.

‘Fathers and Sons’