Hemingway's Ghost Appears Incarnate at Secret Walloon Lake Cottage
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MyBayCity.com Columnist Dave Rogers snapped a Polaroid of the Hemingway cottage at Walloon Lake and this ghostly image appeared.
A.E. Hotchner's book apparently has fallen from literary favor, selling on-line for .39 cents.
We parked in a public access, removed our shoes and socks and waded into the water.
My wife Dolores and I were exploring the Walloon Lake/Horton Bay area about 15 years ago, hoping to find vestiges of the Ernest Hemingway legend.
"Waall, ya turn on Indian Garden Road and go about a mile and a half," drawled the oldtimer at the marina in town. "It's the second cottage from the end and there's no sign. They even took the name off the mailbox, so many people were coming by and curious." The local had given us the inside information we needed: the location of the Sunny Miller cottage at Walloon Lake. She was Hemingway's sister and he sometimes visited there.
We pointed the Polaroid (remember them?), shot a quick picture and escaped. Right in front of the cottage we stumbled across a beautiful fluted glass buried in the sand that was salvaged as a momento of the day at Walloon and remains a treasure in our china cabinet. We call it our "Hemingway glass."
Today we would have had a digital camera and there would not have been a ghost on the photo. But there it was on Polaroid, a ghostly image that vaguely could be Hemingway's bearded visage.
That conclusion is a stretch, butwhatever image it is is unexplained and mysterious. Maybe it's just a sunspot. The cottage of Hemingway's sister, Sunny Miller, is so far away that it doesn't even show up in the picture.
Maybe Hemingway's ghost was returning to relive thehalcyon summers in Michigan when his talent was abud and life was simpler. It would make eminent good sense.
All this nostalgia is triggered by the recollection that the man called "Papa," born 105 years ago in Oak Park, Illinois, is the subject of an exhibit in the Petoskey Museum. The exhibit focuses on the first 18 summers of his life, spent at the family cottage at Walloon Lake.
And the accidental discovery of a book entitled "Papa Hemingway" by A.E. Hotchner that I purchased the other day for $7.50 at a local antique store. To illustrate one of the ironic dichotomies of the modern age, a friend of mine, a retired public school teacher whose family knew some of the Hemingways in northern Michigan years ago, purchased thesame book on-line for .39 cents. Yup, that's right, thirty-nine cents. The wonders of the Internet never cease.
"My mother was a big Hemingway fan and had a lot of his books," my friend enthused. "I have the book "Ernie" by Madeline Hemingway Miller (that's Sunny) and it is autographed and has more than 130 family pictures in it. Also my college friend from dance class has his picture in this book. I doubt anyone in college knew he was Hemingway's nephew."
Hotchner's book reveals some of the details of Hemingway's tragic death by suicide in 1961. These are details I always wondered about but never knew. Now I do. He killed himself because he could no longer write; writer's block made him so despondent he couldn't continue living. His problem was obsessions and delusions and memory loss made worse by electric shock treatments.
The famed writer abhorred taxes and feared government agents, especially immigration officials he delusionally believed were after him for corrupting the morals of a minor, his young secretary strangely named Honor.
Hotchner's personal account of his interaction with Papa during the last 14 years of the writer's life is worth more than 39 cents. They were friends in deep sea fishing, daquiri drinking and bullfights and also were literary collaborators. Hotchner reveals intimate insights into the mind of a remarkable writer who won both the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes.
So, if you're interested in Ernest Hemingway and you have a spare 39 cents ...you know what to do. Jump on Amazon.com.
As for me, I'm going on line to try to find out how to avoid writer's block.###
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