Day 33 - Ishpeming, MI to Batavia, NY

Having a computer and internet access had been a boon last year on our trip to the UK; it has proved so again this time around. Also, finding the right book makes a huge difference in the last days, as we tell ourselves we're still on the trip, but we're actually focused on zooming home. As we hurdled across the UP today, we kept an eye out for Seney, the town where Ernest Hemingway isolated himself in order to recuperate from his war wounds. (I hadn't realized that he ended up with about 200 pieces of shrapnel in his leg.) Two Hearted River runs north to Lake Superior, but Fox River runs through Seney. This is probably the area that inspired some of the Nick Adams stories, such as, "Big Two Hearted River" and "Indian Camp." Later, we charged down the interstate that cleaves the top of the main section of Michigan, driving past the Walloon Lake area where Hemingway's family had their summer home. I'm tempted to think that Summit, the town depicted in "The Killers," found its inspiration here. There just aren't real towns on the UP, at least now.

Also, we'd acquired a terrific book at the visitors center for the Voyageurs National Park in upper Minnesota. A reprint of a 1941 publication by the Minnesota Historical Society Press, The Voyageur's Highway is as interesting for its auther as for its content: both are fascinating. Author Grace Lee Nute of North Conway, NH, graduated from Smith in 1917, then achieved an MA from Radcliffe, and, finally, earned her PhD from Harvard in 1921. She studied under Frederick Jackson Turner at Harvard who recommended her for the job of manuscripts curator at the Minnesota Historical Society. Nute was clearly an avid outdoorswoman, an early, outspoken conservationist, an obsessed researcher, an inspired writer, and someone who could recognize and communicate the complex image of the mix of lakes and portages defined through the fur traders' canoe route between Lake Superior and Rainy Lake. Reading the book aloud and talking about it made the time on the highway interesting.