Hemingway’s Paradise Lost

  • Students do 'the Hemingway thing' (Photo by Jennifer Guerra)

A good book has the ability to transport
you to different times and places. You can travel
to far off exotic countries or cities nearby. You
can also visit places that aren’t so easy to get
to – mostly because they don’t really exist anymore.
Places like Hemingway’s wild north woods. Jennifer
Guerra reports:

Transcript

A good book has the ability to transport
you to different times and places. You can travel
to far off exotic countries or cities nearby. You
can also visit places that aren’t so easy to get
to – mostly because they don’t really exist anymore.
Places like Hemingway’s wild north woods. Jennifer
Guerra reports:

Say what you want about Ernest Hemingway’s writing, the man loved his North Woods.
Up until his early twenties, he spent almost every summer up north at his family’s cottage
in Michigan.

And it’s there where most of The Nick Adams Stories take place.

“They were walking on the brown forest floor now and it was springy and cool under
their feet. There was no underbrush and the trunks of the trees rose sixty feet high
before there were any branches. It was cool in the shade of the trees and high up in
them Nick could hear the breeze that was rising.”

This is Nick Adams country in the early 1900s. The Last Good Country, Hemingway
called it. Filled with cathedral-like forests and streams swimming with big fat trout.

Now, it’s said that some of The Nick Adams Stories are based on Hemingway’s own
experiences in the north woods. Especially the parts in the book about hunting and
fishing.

“That was one of his favorite things to do.”

Valerie Hemingway was with the author when he wrote The Nick Adams Stories. Before
she married into the family, she was Hemingway’s secretary and occasional fishing
buddy. She says Hemingway used to go on and on about the good old days back in
northern Michigan.

“He taught me how to shoot a gun, told me about the river fishing – and these were
things that were initially associated with Michigan. And I think Michigan
represented the freedom in his life.”

But if Hemingway went up north today, he probably wouldn’t recognize the place.

“I think we’ve done our share of damaging it. And I’m sure there are areas where we
can still find something that he found, but it would be few and far between.”

Mary Crockett just finished The Nick Adams Stories. She read it as part of a state-wide
reading project put on by the local chapter of the National Endowment for the
Humanities. The reason The Nick Adams Stories was chosen for the great state read was
because of its obvious ties to Michigan and the north woods.

But Adam and Eva Colas
just read the book in a high school writing class. They’ve lived in Michigan their entire
lives, and they can’t relate to Hemingway’s North Woods at all.

“It doesn’t feel really representative of Michigan to me, cause it’s not the Michigan I know.”

“Cause even if you go to
Lake Michigan now for camping, there are specific pits for bonfires and specific cabins and all
these designated areas that make sure you don’t get lost or hurt, and you don’t have
to do anything for yourself.”

Their teachers thought that might happen, so they came up with the next best thing. An
outdoor classroom where the students can talk about the stories while doing what Adam
and Eva Colas call ‘the Hemingway thing’.

“The nature, hiking, canoeing. We can’t do the hunting/fishing thing, but just sort
of experiencing nature as nature.”

“Michigan as it was back in the day when this takes
place.”

See, that’s the beauty of a good book. Virginia Murphy teaches a class on Environmental
Literature at the University of Michigan. She says just because the students can’t
experience Hemingway’s world as it was back in the day, doesn’t mean they can’t learn
from his words.

“It allows them to see an environment that they’re not necessarily exposed to on a
daily basis. Most of us live in cities, drive our cars, work in buildings. And so it offers us a
perspective that we don’t have.”

So even if you never got to experience the north woods with all the big open spaces and
virgin forests and clear blue streams, well, there’s always the public library.

For The Environment Report, I’m Jennifer Guerra.

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Roots of the Great Lakes Fishery

  • Planting fish in the Elk Creek in the late 1800's. Photo courtesy of the State of Michigan Archives.

Head to almost any body of water and chances are you’ll find someone there fishing. We take it for granted that lakes and streams have fish in them. But most waterways can’t produce enough fish to keep up with demand. For more than 100 years states around the nation have been stocking the water with fish. Tamar Charney reports:

Transcript

Head to almost any body of water and chances are you’ll find someone there fishing. We take it for granted that lakes and streams have fish in them. But most waterways can’t produce enough fish to keep up with demand. For over 100 years states around the nation have been stocking the water with fish. Tamar Charney reports:


(Sounds of water in a stream)


When you stand at the side of the Boyne River in northern Michigan, you can smell the balsam fir that line the banks.


“There go a couple of salmon, right at our feet you can see.”


Tim Tebeau is standing under some branches casting his line into the river.


“We’re fishing for steelhead trout today. They are most likely just lying there waiting for something to come their way.”


The lakes and streams in this part of the state have drawn fishermen for years. Tim Tebeau says that includes writer Ernest Hemingway who set many of his short stories in Northern Michigan.


“As a writer I kind of revere Hemingway, and I spend a lot of time fishing the very same streams he did when he was spending his summers here.”


But if it weren’t for human intervention there wouldn’t have been fish for Hemingway, or for Tim Tebeau to fish for. In the mid to late 1800’s people started noticing that pollution, habitat destruction from dams and logging, and over-fishing were killing off almost all the fish in New England, and in the Great Lakes region.


Gary Whelen is the fish production manager for the state of Michigan. He says people began to squeeze out the eggs from fish, hatch them, and put the small fish back into lakes and streams.


“In 1870 many state agencies were looking at building hatchery systems.”


The hatchery systems rebuilt the populations of many native fish, including the brook trout that Hemingway liked to fish for. But they didn’t just breed local fish. For instance they brought in brown trout from Germany in 1883, and Whelan says the steelhead that Tim Tebeau fishes for came from California in 1877.


“Some of us depict that era as the ‘Johnny Fishseed’ period, where we were moving fish all over the continent, and internationally for that matter, bringing fish in that were considered commercially or economically important.”


Now this was long before there were highways, so if you wanted to move stuff long distances you basically had one choice.


(sound of train whistle)


That’s right, trains.


“This is a re-creation of the last of the 3 fish cars that transported fish around the state of Michigan. So this is a re-creation of the Wolverine.”


Maureen Jacobs is with the Michigan Fishery’s Visitors Center. The train car she’s standing in shows people, complete with train sound effects, how the fish were moved in the late 1800s and early 1900s. What you see is that the fish rode in the lap of luxury.


“They had chandeliers on the old fish cars!”


See, the fish cars were Pullman cars, used ones, but they still had all the trappings, including the mahogany bunks that the guys who cared for the fish slept on. Underneath the bunks were row after row of milk cans full of water and tiny little fish.


“Public citizens called ‘applicants’ would apply for permits to meet the train at different depots around the state of Michigan. From there, they would remove the old fish cans and plant the fingerlings in different lakes, rivers, and streams, so the public would basically stock the fish.”


Things are different today. People no longer pick up cans at the train station. Hatcheries are big modern facilities, the fish are moved by truck, and fisheries’ staff take care of releasing them. But they are still needed to make sure there are enough for people to fish for, because over-fishing and environmental damage are problems that haven’t gone away.


(Sounds of birds and water.)


“I’m going to adjust the depth a little bit here, get it closer to the bottom.”


Unfortunately the dark shapes you can just make out swimming around in the Boyne River aren’t biting Tim Tebeau’s line. But he’s says they’re there.


“If it weren’t for stocking programs like the ones we have, we wouldn’t be fishing for anything today; we’d simply be standing here enjoying the river.”


And perhaps tomorrow he’ll catch one, take a good look at it, and release it back to it’s watery world; an experience that will show up in unexpected ways in his writing, the same way fishing these streams inspired Ernest Hemingway many years ago. Good thing there were fish to fish for, huh?


“Whoa, that might have been a fish.”


For the Environment Report I’m Tamar Charney.

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