The northern peninsula of Michigan is the setting for many of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories: “Indian Camp,” “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” “The End of Something,” “The Three-Day Blow,” and Parts I and II of “Big Two-Hearted River.” This country was intensely familiar to Hemingway; he grew up fishing, hunting, hiking, and camping along the rivers and in the woods and hills of this region.
Horton Bay, in “The End of Something,” is referred to as Hortons Bay; today, the once-burned-out town of Seney has been rebuilt. In “The Three-Day Blow,” Bill tells Nick Adams that had Nick continued dating Marjorie, he would not be drinking scotch with Bill in the cabin; he’d be living a boring, middle-class life with Marjorie in Charlevoix; Nick reluctantly agrees.
After Nick is wounded, physically and psychologically, during his stint as a soldier in Italy during World War I, he returns to the woods of northern Michigan and camps along the Two-Hearted River, fishing for trout and slowly restoring serenity and peace to his broken mind and emotions.
Hemingway’s father had a summer cabin, Windemere, here in the northern peninsula; it was along the streams and rivers, where they fished and camped, that Dr. Hemingway taught his son the skills and codes of life—especially living outdoors, independently, on one’s own.
