“Literally breath taking.”
Autumn is on the retreat. The warm weather is overstayed and the heavy winds of winter are nearly here. I drove into the Petoskey State Park to watch the sunset. Small drifts of sand were blown onto the road that winds its way to the vacant beach, pock marked with drops of rain.
I was reminded of Langston Hughes’s short story “Early Autumn” and his depiction of the “chains of misty brilliance in the blue air.” This flash-fiction story is one of my favorites, the story of two former lovers crossing paths in Manhattan’s Washington Square. Years had passed, their conversation was stilted and then a sudden blue brightness shone down the length of Fifth Avenue: it was the realization of time’s irrefutable passage.
Ernest Hemingway just a few months before he killed himself wrote “The best sky was in Italy or Spain and in Northern Michigan in the fall.” Hemingway’s first adventures were in the woods and lakes of Northern Michigan. This is where he found his writer’s voice: economical, clear and clipped—the cadence found in this area. While living in Paris he wrote—as writers often do—about where he wasn’t, about the small towns of Northern Michigan. Unlike so many places associated with Hemingway which have commodified his fame, the place that perhaps meant the most to him has exploited him the least. To his residents in Horton Bay, Walloon Lake and Petoskey, he isn’t known as a Pulitzer or Nobel Prize winning author, but as a former neighbor.