Hemingway Adventure

Series: Hemingway Adventure
Chapter: Horton Bay, Michigan
Country/sea: USA
Place: Horton Bay, Michigan
Book page no: 27

Horton Bay, Michigan

Horton Bay, Michigan, inspiration for Hemingway's earliest published stories and very little changed.

'Hortons Bay, the town, was only five houses on the main road between Boyne City and Charlevoix,’ wrote Hemingway, recalling it from a cold and draughty apartment in Paris, in 1922.

Seventy-six years on it pretty much matches his description. The two-lane blacktop from Charlevoix bridges Horton Creek and curves right, past the ‘general store and post office with a high false front’ and the 117-year-old Red Fox Inn, close by a grove of basswood and maple trees, old enough for Ernest to have walked beneath them.

We push open the door of the inn to find ourselves in a big front room on whose tables is arranged a dusty selection of Hemingwayana. There is no one there except a boy of maybe nine or ten, who, on seeing us, snaps into a terrific sales spiel covering all the Hemingway connections with Horton Bay and the relevant books in which we might find them - including ‘Up in Michigan’. It doesn’t come as a complete surprise to find out the boy’s name is Ernest. Or that his father, Jim Hartwell, is the son of Vol Hartwell, who taught Hemingway to fish.