Every summer up at the lake, Hemingway started out with a full set of arrows in his quiver. He would pitch a canvas tent near the cottage and make that his address until the heartsick end of summer came and all the arrows were gone and it was one last hike, one last dive in the lake, before heading south again. It was a bit different when Hemingway portrayed the lake through the Nick Adams stories. In the early stories, we never see Nick in any location besides Walloon Lake, even though he was depicted as a summer resident. Still, an awareness of impending departure was ever present, an eddy in the famous Hemingway undercurrent of things not said, of things endured but not remarked on, of forebodings that were either very accurate or self-fulfilling.
When it came to woodcraft, Ernest Hemingway possessed the pride and certitude of one who has learned it well, and from masters. As for writing, Hemingway sometimes displayed the fervor of a schoolboy. In the story “On Writing,” Nick Adams professed that, “He, Nick, wanted to write about country so it would be there like Cezanne had done it in painting….Nobody had ever written about country like that. He felt almost holy about it.” Hemingway seemed to feel as though he were on a quest to master a secret craft, a wholly original method of painting the natural scene with words. It is probably in the Nick Adams stories that Hemingway had his breakthrough.
In those stories, Hemingway limned in the details of the land clearly, but with his customary restraint. He added details and movement and woodcraft. The reader did not stand back watching a flat tableau but approached to the edge of the clearing, the bank of the stream, the hollows behind Nick’s eyes, and experienced a living scene. For instance, in “Big Two-Hearted River,” Nick returns to Michigan, a war survivor with war baggage, to go fishing in the Upper Peninsula. He takes a train to get there, and then hikes in to the river. By the time he finds a level piece of ground, uproots some sweet ferns and makes a camping spot, cuts some tent pegs with an ax and sets up his tent, the reader of the story is very much along for the experience, smelling the pleasant canvas odor of the tent and how it exudes “something mysterious and homelike.”
