The remote pine forested northeastern corner of
Michigan’s
Upper Peninsula has provided settings for at least a couple of well known stories.
The most famous is Hemingway’s
The Big Two Hearted River, detailing young Nick Adams back from World War I on a solo camping and trout fishing trip.
In the story
Adams takes the train to Seney, originally a rough and tumble logging town in the middle of the UP.
He hops off the train to find the town completely burned.
Seney had been burned, the country was burned over and changed. This never happened, but fictionally provides a metaphor for
Adams, back from heavy battle, mental breakdown and a severe leg injury—
burned over and changed.
He hikes into the sand hills, past the burn line, and strikes camp near the stream. He has a lovely time reacquainting himself to fishing and life without war. I hadn’t read this story before, picked up The Nick Adams Stories in a camp store at the end of a long sand road near the mouth of the Two Hearted River, just before it flows into Lake Superior. The river that Adams fishes out of Seney is actually the Fox River. The Fox is longer and runs south into Lake Michigan, but as Hemingway said, because Big Two Hearted River is poetry. It is named thus because of the similarly sized two branches by which it is formed. It’s undoubtedly a fantastic name, though there are some other good ones in the area: Tahquamenon, Yellow Dog, Manistique, Laughing Whitefish Falls, and oh yeah, Dead Sucker.
Hemingway maybe only visited the UP once, but another author who writes about the area and lived there for some time is Jim Harrison, who wrote Legends of the Fall and Revenge. I’m not a big Harrison fan, and Legends of the Fall is the only movie I can think of that is better than the book. Harrison’s characters are people with whom I rarely sympathize and have problems like having had an affair with their good friend’s, a Mexican Cartel boss’, wife (Revenge—in which the woman is tortured and killed by the cartel leader, but then two men become friends again) or being sheltered and having to get rid of too much money (The Man Who Gave up His Name). They are like bad Hemingway stories with self-serving fatalism that is not really fatalism but just the protagonist justifying himself. They are like Danielle Steel stories for men. But I still like parts of them. Harrison writes fantastically at times and his settings are awesome: By first light the wind blew hard against the yellowed aspens, the leaves skittering across the high pasture and burying themselves in a draw. When they forded their first river the leaves of the cottonwoods stripped by the wind caught in the eddies, pasting themselves against the rocks (Legends of the Fall). I’m going to read more of him. He’s still at it, over 70, just having published Returning to the Earth in 2007 (about man dying in middle age and his loved ones dealing with it, and sort of a map of the UP).
He’s settled some in old age—he doesn’t kill off any women in this book and the prevailing horniness has lessened a little. Plus it’s almost exclusively set in the UP. So when I pulled into Grand Marais, Michigan with a day to kill before four days hiking the Pictured Rocks and saw the Dunes Saloon (…with a new and peculiar itch in my brain that I figured could be dispelled only by the sight of the harbor of Lake Superior or, more likely, a cheeseburger and beer at the Dunes Saloon) of course I went in for a beer that they brew on the premises and wound up staying a few hours talking with a man getting a beer while his kids slept and a 70 year old who was hiking the North Country Trail through the UP. It is a very fine place, so fine that when I finished hiking a few days later in Munising I went looking for a similar pub at which to refuel, but found no such thing. The bartender at the Dunes said his mom used to clean house for Harrison. Shortly before reaching town while driving a maze of sand roads I passed a Harrison Trail. Although his jacket back biography says now he lives in Arizona and Montana. I guess those northern winters are probably pretty tough on an old timer from the Lower Peninsula.
The remote pine forested northeastern corner of 
