Camping Out With Ernest Hemingway By: Chris Carlson Spring 2009 Semester HNR 312: Hemingway in Michigan Professor: Dr. Swartzlander

Introduction

When most people think of Ernest Hemingway and the outdoors they often think about his fishing and hunting experiences as he travelled all over the world.  However, if it had not been for his education about natural history and outdoor survival at a very young age many of these later experiences would have never happened.   From his teachings in his hometown of Oak Park, Illinois to his summer vacations to Northern Michigan, Hemingway spent much of his childhood learning about nature, how to interact with it, and how to survive.  When looking at Hemingway as a naturalist we must study his childhood because this is when he learned the most important lessons about living in the wilderness.  It is important that we know about Hemingway’s knowledge of nature and wilderness survival because he used his knowledge and real life experiences to accurately detail his characters actions in his short stories such as, “Big Two-Hearted River.”  Michigan continued to inspire Hemingway throughout his writing career because nature continued to be a major theme in many of his works such as, “Green Hills of Africa”.  However, the most information we have about Hemingway’s personal camping knowledge and experiences are best summarized in the 1920 essay, “Camping Out”, which Ernest Hemingway wrote while working for the Toronto Star.  This essay was basically a miniature survival guide for those with little camping experience and details the most important parts to surviving in the wilderness.  My goal here is to study what Hemingway learned about the outdoors and where he learned it and combine it with research about available camping equipment available during the first 20 years of the twentieth century to expand on Hemingway’s original survival guide.  Learning about Hemingway’s camping knowledge that he gained early in his life is the key to understanding his descriptions and use of nature in his writings.

Young Hemingway and the Outdoors

As a young boy Ernest Hemingway learned a lot about nature from his time spent up in Michigan during the summers.  However there were also many other influences on Hemingway the most important of which were people he knew or books written by famous naturalists.  His earliest encounters with learning about nature began at a vey young age when he was taught by his father about birds and fish.  In, My Brother, Ernest Hemingway, Leicester writes about when Ernest was only two years old his father took him fishing with him and taught him to catch small fish and identify catches.  Leicester also talks about how their father used books to teach Ernest to teach him about bird species saying, “He had learned more than two hundred and fifty of the Latin names” (24).  Even at an early age Ernest Hemingway had knowledge and abilities far beyond his years.  It seems like that, even as a child, he was always destined to be successful which enthralled his mother who was known to brag about her son’s accomplishments as a young scientist.  “When Ernest was nearly four years old, she would write, ‘He is a natural scientist loving everything in the way of bugs, stones, shells, birds, animals, insects, and blossoms’ (Eye and Heart 61).   From his mother’s description we conclude that even at an early age Ernest was heavily infatuated with the outdoors, long before he began his attempts at serious writing.

Hemingway and the Agassiz Association

The importance of learning about nature was obviously very important to the Hemingway family.  According to Reynolds, it all began with Hemingway’s grandmother, Adelaide, who taught Ernest’s father Clarence about flowers and their Latin names and even the stars (Reynolds 30).  This was quite similar to how Hemingway’s parents taught Ernest as a young child.   Clarence sought to pass on the knowledge he learned, not just to his son, but to as many people as possible and while attending Oberlin College started up a new chapter of the Agassiz Association, a group dedicated to the teachings about naturalism (Reynolds 30). Even as Ernest entered school and began to pursue knowledge in new subjects, he continued to study nature as a member of the local chapter for the Agassiz Association his father had created.  For Hemingway and his father, the whole idea of the Agassiz Association was to go out and find nature and learn about it through the experience rather than sticking to learning about books.  Ernest and his father must have believed that the pursuit of knowledge served no purpose if it could not be used to become a more resourceful camper.  According to Beegel, “Photos of the Agassiz Club in the field show children with their hands full of leaves and wildflowers, abandoned bird nests, collecting baskets, jars of insects and pond scum, and notebooks.  Ernest glows with enjoyment” (69).  Once again it is clear that Ernest found great pride and enjoyment being outdoors becoming a man capable of surviving and interacting outdoors later in life.  According to Reynolds, Hemingway was a successful member of the association and while serving as assistant curator learned another valuable lesson from his father.  According to the account, Hemingway asked his father if it was wise to spend money on an albatross foot for the club, which his father replied by saying that it was only worthwhile if he bought something he had no doubt was authentic.  Hemingway instead chose to buy a swordfish bill because it was a better way to spend money (Reynolds 30-31).  Hemingway learned from these club experiences that the key to a happy and successful life is going out and living life to the fullest and finding pleasure in the experiences themselves and making sure that the experiences he does have are authentic so that he could achieve as much as possible in life.

Hemingway and Theodore Roosevelt

While Hemingway learned much from his father about nature as well as morals, there is little doubt that it was Theodore Roosevelt who held responsibility for inspiring Ernest to seek a strenuous life filled with adventure.  During this time period people chose to follow the example of Theodore Roosevelt who embraced natural history, physical fitness, the importance of hard work and pushed for exploration of new frontiers and the pursuit of knowledge.  According to Michael Reynolds, Hemingway was immediately influenced by Roosevelt after seeing his movie about his African Safari and reading about his exploits.  “In National Geographic, he devoured Roosevelt’s account of the hunt, complete with pictures of dead animals and half-naked women” (Reynolds 28).  These exotic tales filled Ernest Hemingway with excitement and it soon became his dream to travel to these new frontiers.  To explore these new frontiers and areas of wilderness Hemingway knew that physical strength and endurance would be key if he wished to explore these frontiers.  Hemingway and Roosevelt were very similar in regards that they were both very out of shape as children.  However, this did not stop Ernest from competing in a wide array of high school sports including cross county, football, swimming, track, and even boxing for a time (Reynolds 26-27).  The reason Ernest insisted on participating in athletics, despite his lack of size, was because he wished to become a man capable of surviving and overcoming any challenge by oneself.  However Ernest did manage to continue to find success in academics as he had in his early childhood.  This was something that the very competitive and hard-working Ernest Hemingway was all too willing to reach for and even pledged:

I desire to do pioneering or exploring work in the 3 last great frontiers Africa, central South America or the country around and north of Hudson Bay.  I believe that science, English, and to a certain