Literary Pilgrims Still Trek for Papa Hemingway : Roots: They come to northern Michigan to search for early influences on a soon-to-be famous author.

HORTON BAY, Mich. — The Hemingway cottage on Walloon Lake is unmarked. Locals say Ernest Hemingway’s younger sister, Sunny, took down the historical plaque that pointed out Windemere, the summer home where Ernest played, fished and took his bride.

Sunny still summers here.

Sunny--Mrs. Madelaine Miller, 85--also asked the Petoskey Chamber of Commerce to stop giving directions to the low, white house among the cedars.

No matter. Hemingway fanatics on their summer pilgrimages find it anyway.

It is Hemingway’s Michigan that is elusive.

“They don’t know what they’re looking for,” says Melissa Creasey. With her mother she manages the 114-year-old Horton Bay General Store 4 miles from Windemere.

Creasey sells pizzas and T-shirts to the pilgrims and answers their questions. “They ask: ‘Is this the place?’ ”

It is. Hemingway described the false-front store with its wide porch in “Up in Michigan,” a scandalous story about the rape of a Horton Bay woman. It was one of his earliest published stories.

But that isn’t what the fans want to know.

They want whatever it was here that flamed the son of an Oak Park, Ill., doctor into the burning bright writer who crystallized the ripple of a trout stream or the seduction of an Indian girl.

“They want to know why it influenced Hemingway,” says Bill Ohle, 79, a retired ad man from Chicago whose grandfather constructed many of the buildings around Horton Bay.

Ohle lives down the lane from the store, in his father’s hilltop cabin overlooking Lake Charlevoix. There is a landscape painted by Hemingway’s mother hanging over the fireplace.

The pilgrims want something larger than life, some sign of the emerging greatness, Ohle says. What they find are stories about a boy nobody much noticed.

Ohle was a scrawny-legged kid while a teen-aged Ernest Hemingway freeloaded chicken dinners at Liz Dilworth’s boardinghouse across the street and cast for trout on the bay at the bottom of the hill.

He remembers Ernest fishing, Ernest courting cousin Marjorie Bump, 22-year-old Ernest bringing his St. Louis fiancee Hadley Richardson to Horton Bay to get married in 1921 in a church since torn down. He remembers Ernest and his bride leaving a few weeks later and never coming back.

“Half a dozen of his better short stories are about this here,” Ohle said, gesturing about him. “It made a deep impression on the guy. He had a ball out here.”

It was wild then. It was a kid’s dream. Those were days when a boy could steal away from his mother’s cottage and catch trout and sleep under the stars. The roads were dusty logging trails. Indians lived in the woods.

Ohle points out the window toward a dark strip of land jutting across the sparkling water. That’s where Ernest loved to fish. That’s the point where Hemingway’s young Nick Adams rowed to that last night with his girl in “The End of Something.”

How’s the fishing now? No one knows. The point is privately owned and trespassing isn’t allowed.

Hemingway spent every summer of his youth at Walloon Lake. In 1918, just 19, he went to Italy as an ambulance driver. He returned from World War I with wounds from 227 pieces of shrapnel in his legs and took up residence in a boardinghouse in Petoskey, a hilly port town 6 miles to the north next to Lake Michigan. He also earned the reputation of a ruffian.

While Hemingway’s mother, four sisters and baby brother still summered at Windemere, Ernest crossed Walloon Lake and walked over 4 miles of rolling hills, potato fields and apple orchards to Horton Bay. He slept up the hill in the back shed at the Dilworths’ boardinghouse.

Lives changed. Hemingway’s father killed himself, just as Hadley’s father had done. Ernest killed himself. His sister Ursula and his brother, Leicester, killed themselves.

Michigan changed. Wealthy resorters built 22-room log cabins with three-car garages amid the tiny cottages on Walloon Lake. Petoskey exploded into a commercialized tourist town. The beanery where Hemingway once ate now sells resorter clothes. It is open only in the summer.

Today, developers on Lake Charlevoix advertise $325,000 waterfront condominiums on “Hemingway Pointe” with a slip “which will accommodate your 55-foot yacht.”

Biographer Constance Cappel, in her 1977 book “Hemingway in Michigan,” quotes an old chum asking Hemingway if he would ever come back.

“No,” he replied. “It’s too civilized now.”

Only Horton Bay, a logging town on the skids when Hemingway saw it, looks the same. Its population has shrunk to 47.

Hemingway returned in his writing, casting northern Michigan places and people in one novel and a dozen short stories about birth and death and sex and trout.

Fact and fiction flew together like particles in an atom smasher. Hemingway exchanged the Fox River for the Two-Hearted River some 45 miles away. He turned girlfriends into lovers.

Very real people got hurt. Marjorie Bump for one. The red-headed girl with the easy smile who waited tables at Dilworth’s became Marge, jilted by Ernest’s autobiographical Nick Adams in “The End of Something” and later fantasized about in “The Three-Day Blow.”

“She lived in terror of Hemingway,” Ohle says of his cousin. “They were obviously childhood sweethearts. . . . Then he goes and writes her real name in a couple of stories. All through life people discovered she was the Marjorie in the stories.

“She never got away from it. It plagued her. I think this was her first love, really. But half the time it turned to hate.”

Marjorie Bump died a few years ago.

“I hate to say it, but I haven’t read too much of Hemingway,” says Kris Woodruff, the Petoskey librarian.

Yet Hemingway stood in the library with his cane and rakish Italian officers’ cape the winter of 1919 and told the Ladies’ Aid Society about the horrors and glories of war.

Rex Miller, the head librarian, says Hemingway’s writing is “interesting . . . but my tastes run in other directions. I can take him or leave him and mostly I leave him.”

Mostly, Horton Bay has left Ernest Hemingway, just as completely as he left Horton Bay. The general store has faded pictures of him on the walls, a few Hemingway T-shirts, a Hemingway book on the coffee table by the front window.

But few around remember the rough-hewn youth with a vivid imagination.

Hemingway’s Michigan Hemingway spent every summer of his youth except one at Walloon Lake or Petoskey on Lake Michigan. After WW1, he returned for his wedding and honeymoon never to come back, except in literature.