BIGGER THAN LIFE

Ernest Hemingway at Walloon Lake

Ernest, let's suppose we have the ability to sit together and talk for awhile about how you see the world. It's 1915/1916 and you're 17 years old. There is war brewing a world away that you have no knowledge of how you're going to be involved and how it will change your life. But let's set that aside. Lets sit by the shore of Walloon Lake for a spell, and watch the water bugs scuttle across the surface and talk about you, who you are, what you love and are passionate about, and how you see your future. I know, as a young, active, somewhat self absorbed adolescent, who sees adults as affected and boring, and who'd rather be fishing and mucking about with his friends, sitting and talking like this is probably the last thing you would want to do.

Tell you what, let's drop a line in the water and see what we catch.

From your letter written in the spring of 1916 I gleaned that you and a group of friends were planning a "Hudson Bay Trip." What fun! Your plan is to take two canoes and start at the Soo Locks, near Sault St. Marie, and take the Moose River to Hudson Bay. Ernest, I love your adventurous nature. You are a romantic at heart. I can read it in your letters and in the pictures that you paint around the events in your life. You have a way of making each vignette larger than life. I know the trip never came to fruition, but the thought of it, the planning of it, the fun of it!

Yes, life for you at this age is like an adventure and the young men you run with make up a sort of "secret society": you invent words and languages, and playfully assign monikers. You tease and provoke and playfully prod. I'm not surprised that in your letter to Emily Goetzman, dated March, 1916, you write of you father "frowning on boxing" due to a boxing match you helped stage/participated in at your house which resulted in a bloody nose on your part. All in fun, as you point out, but not to be repeated according to your father. I enjoyed the way you framed his resulting diatribe on boxing: "Did dad break up that little social tea? Wow. Talk about the IV Phillipic. Dad certainly rose to the occasion in oratory line." Love it! I must say, succinctly put.

What I read in your letters to your family and friends is that there's lore to be created and passed on in the telling of your life stories. There's giant rainbow trout to catch after battling for hours; there's fields of hay to be mowed and bailed and commiserated over; there's orchards to be harvested and potatoes to be dug and it's all a great adventure. You wrote in a letter to your sister, Marcelline (who you fondly call Ivory), dated June 20, 1916, "Ivory, dearest, you should have seen the old brute doing a war dance in the costume of Adam enveloped by a cloud of mosquitoes on top of a bluff about 300 feet high at night while my clothes were drying on a rack of cedar poles in the driving rain. One hand waved a shoe aloft the other helped me swear. The calm and quiet of the abysmal wilderness of the Boardman River were violated by the old Brute."

At the young age of 17, Ernest, you were already bigger than life.