Big Two-Hearted River was first published 100 years ago in 1925,
but another river also had Hemingway’s heart.
The orange rain fly of my tent stretched taut and staked, I could finally turn my attention to the river after a four-hour drive. It was tempting to walk to the bank first and check for hatches and rises, but with an overnight storm on the forecast, I didn’t dare uncase my rod before my shelter was secured and my gear ferried the short walk from where boulders blocked further vehicle access to my riverside campsite.
The author on the Black River with his restored Tonka Prince Bamboo fly rod.
A paperback lay atop my sleeping bag and cot, its cover curled at the corners and the lamination peeling off the birchbark print framing a painting of two anglers in a canoe. The cot and the family-sized tent are newer additions to my camping kit. The red and black sleeping bag is old enough to vote, but The Nick Adams Stories has accompanied me on every camp on this river for a quarter century since college.
I didn’t start camping on the river because of the book, though. Ernest Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River, first published a century ago in 1925, has inspired several generations of fly anglers to fish the Two Hearted River in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that lent its name to the story, and the Fox River where Hemingway fished in 1919 and which Robert Traver deduced was the real river the story described, as he wrote in Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted Secret.
I was camped on the Black River, though, in the northern part of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula in what is now the Pigeon River Country State Forest, but known in Hemingway’s day as the Pine Barrens. It is the setting for another short story in The Nick Adams Stories titled “The Last Good Country.”
A history of the 109,000-acre forest is the conservation history of the Midwest Northwoods encapsulated in one contiguous tract and stretched out over centuries. Three rivers flow north through the Pigeon River Country State Forest: the Sturgeon, the Pigeon, and the Black. The Pigeon River derives its name from the passenger pigeons that once blackened the skies before unregulated market hunting led to their extinction by the early 1900s. The forest was cutover during the logging boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s, creating the “barrens” that Hemingway found; rusted remnants of the narrow-gauge railroad used to haul logs can still be found in parts of the forest. In 1918, elk were introduced near the forest, and it has become the heart of the range of Michigan’s elk herd, one of the largest east of the Mississippi.
Pioneering conservationist P.S. Lovejoy – a contemporary of Aldo Leopold – assembled the bulk of the state’s ownership of the forest through a combination of tax reversions from the cutover timberlands and purchasing adjacent lands with funds generated by hunting license revenues. And when gas and oil development threatened the wild character of the forest in the 1970s, the conflict, lawsuits, settlements, and compromise led to the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund, created in 1976 to invest royalties from gas and oil development on state land into a fund to acquire new public land.
The Pigeon River Country is where I first read The Last Good Country in camp, and where I realized that Hemingway was writing about the same place, having camped there often when he was about the same age as I was then. In the posthumously published unfinished short story, young Nick Adams and his sister trek from Walloon Lake, where Hemingway spent his boyhood summers, to the “Pine Barrens east of Vanderbilt.” On the run from game wardens, they hike under cathedral hemlocks and catch trout for dinner.
Reading this by flashlight in my first tent during a college summer break, I realized that his “Last Good Country” was the country I was camped in and that his eastward journey mirrored mine, after my parents had moved to nearby Gaylord from my hometown of Central Lake, west of Walloon Lake. Like Nick Adams, I found my escape in the woods when I started backpacking in the forest on weekends.
I bought a cheap dome tent, tied a full-sized sleeping bag to a school backpack, and took off for every summer weekend that I didn’t drive downstate to visit my girlfriend (now wife) or go fishing with my grandpa, trolling for pike on Antrim County’s Chain-of-Lakes. I traversed the forest by making my own loops, combining trails and forest roads, and usually made my camps somewhere along either the Black or Pigeon River. Reading his description of the landscape, I had a clear picture in my mind of the country I’d just hiked. I didn’t know if it was the effectiveness of his writing or the setting in which I experienced it, but the distinction didn’t matter to me.
Hemingway camped on the river often, and in letters of his, collected by biographer Carlos Baker, he described the Black River to friends he invited to fish.
“Where we will go will be the Pine Barrens and camp on the Black River. It is wild as the devil and the most wonderful trout fishing you can imagine,” Hemingway wrote to Howell Jenkins in 1919. “There are some great camping spots on the Black.”
It was Hemingway’s descriptions of fly fishing in The Nick Adams Stories beside the river that inspired me to fish it, though. My only real fishing experience then was trolling for northern pike with my grandpa on his boat, but being a broke college student, I couldn’t afford a boat to fish like that on my own. I asked my parents for a fly rod for Christmas to get me started; I could afford a cheap pair of hip waders and a handful of flies.
“A fly rod and a fly line. That will be all we’ll need,” as Hemingway wrote to Jenkins.
My dad took me to The Alphorn Sport Shop in downtown Gaylord to get a fly outfit. The shop recommended a 2-piece, 8-foot Cortland graphite rod, reel, and line combo. He bought it for me along with a few flies and a fly box. A quick casting lesson in the parking lot was the sole instruction I received, in person, for years. The river and Nick Adams would be my teachers.
The Black River has tight vegetation and requires a lot of roll casting; I caught more branches than fish. It was a couple years, at least, before I even caught and landed a trout. One August, though, I was fishing the Black and thought about how Nick Adams used live grasshoppers on a fly rod in Big Two- Hearted River. I tied on a foam hopper and caught a brookie in a riffle, my first.
Over the years, my fly fishing improved. I started tying flies, improved my cast, took a couple casting lessons from friends who happen to be casting instructors and fished with friends who happen to be guides. I bought more rods and sold rods and broke the tip of my trusty Cortland. I started fishing and restoring old blue-collar bamboo fly rods – returning closer still to the image I’ve long carried of Nick Adams – and had just put the final coat of varnish on the guide windings on a vintage 2-piece, 7-foot Horrocks-Ibbotson Tonka Prince the day before I drove up to the river.
Driving through the forest, the damage from a recent ice storm was shocking. It was like a tornado came through, knocking over treetops, but instead of a tornado’s relatively narrow path, it affected the whole forest. Only the youngest aspens and the oldest pines appeared unscathed. Unlike the stump-dotted pine barrens of young Hemingway’s day, the treetops, like fresh slash, lay everywhere, broken off high from the trunks. This could attract pine beetles, which would then kill many of the living trees that escaped the ice storm, and all this wood on the ground could fuel a major wildfire risk as it dries out; the forest could become pine barrens again in a few years.
My immediate, more selfish worry was that my planned dispersed campsite would be blocked, but the roads had been cleared of debris and there was enough open space close to the river that I didn’t worry about broken branches falling on my tent. It’s not a designated campsite in any way, but dispersed camping is allowed in the forest and the spot is known among local trout anglers. I first learned of this spot several years ago when I served on the forest’s citizen advisory council for the Department of Natural Resources, and a few years ago, I joined a group of friends there for a trout opener campout.
“Picture us on the Barrens, beside the river with a campfire and the tent and the full moon and a good meal in our bellies, smoking a pill and with a good bottle of grog. There will be some good singing,” Hemingway had written to Jenkins. It was pretty much just like that, just a hundred years later.
I pitched camp with a couple hours left of daylight, pulled on my neoprene socks and wading boots to wet wade, assembled my fly rod and approached the river. Downstream from where it leaves the Black River Swamp, marsh marigolds lined the banks under towering hemlock and gnarled cedars.
The Tonka Prince in hand, I stepped into the current. I was eager to see how the rod cast and my Adams dry fly caught a tree branch on the first cast. Just like old times. There wasn’t much of a hatch, but some of the down branches on the river’s edge created dynamic runs, riffles, and pools. I drifted my fly along the seams, over the holes, under the branches, in front of and behind the rocks; nothing rising.
The rod dropped the fly accurately and softly, though, strung up with 4wt line on a vintage Pflueger Medalist 1492 reel. I tied on a Ginger Quill and drifted it along a seam at the edge of a hole behind a submerged log. Ploomp. I set the hook and the rod throbbed. I stripped in line, guiding the brookie into my net. Keeping the trout wet in the net, I admired its dark green back vermiculated in yellow, its tiny red spots haloed in blue, its bright orange fins tipped in black and white. Then I wet my hand and released it, as Nick Adams first taught me in Big Two-Hearted River.
It was the only trout I caught, but it was enough. The thermos I’d filled before I left home still held hot coffee, so I poured a cup, laid my rod against a camp chair under the rainfly vestibule, hung my wet wading pants and neoprene socks from tabs hanging from the ceiling of my tent, pulled on sweatpants, crawled into my sleeping bag, and turned on the lantern. I read The Nick Adams Stories in the last good country.
