The signs couldn’t have been clearer. PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO
TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. I had been looking for the
dead-end street in Ketchum, Idaho where Ernest Hemingway took his life
on July 2, 1961, and reckoned I had found it. Thanks to fierce
opposition from affluent neighbors in the Canyon Run neighborhood that
has sprung up around what was once a very isolated 22-acre property on
the Big Wood River, the home has never been open to the public and the
address isn’t advertised.
Hemingway and his (fourth) wife Mary bought the Idaho house in 1959,
and it has sat empty since his death, save for spells when caretakers
resided in the basement. Although I have a deep respect for Hemingway’s
work, I’ve long been even more fascinated with his peripatetic life. As
someone who has traveled to 70-odd countries and has moved more than a
dozen times in the last twenty years, peripatetic Hemingway is something
of a kindred spirit. He never sat still, never seemed satisfied, and
frequently sought to cure what ailed him with a change of scenery—I’m
the same way.
For years, I lived a short walk away from his birth home in Oak Park,
Illinois, and when I learned that Hemingway’s Ketchum home had been
preserved as a kind of time capsule, I resolved to try to see the place.
I wanted to know why it was still closed when so many of the other
places Hemingway once called home are open to the public. And, perhaps
more important, I wanted to understand what had brought the restless
author to a remote valley in the Idaho wildnerness to live out his final
chapter.
Many writers have grappled with this question, but none more
perceptively than Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote three years after the
Hemingway’s death, “Anybody who considers themselves a writer or even a
serious reader cannot help but wonder just what it was about this
outback little Idaho village that struck such a responsive cord in
America’s most famous writer.”
The Ketchum that the pioneer of gonzo journalism discovered in 1964
had just one paved street and was “no longer a glittering,
celebrity-filled winter retreat for the rich and famous, but just
another good ski resort in a tough league.” Thompson thought that
Hemingway had returned to the Gem State because he had lost his way and
was pining for the good old days he’d spent there during and after WWII.
Hemingway, he surmised, wanted a place that hadn’t changed where he
could “get away from the pressures of a world gone mad,” and live among
apolitical people who loved the outdoors as he did.
Eager to understand it myself, I left my home in Bend, Oregon, along
with my wife, Jen, and two sons, Leo, 10, and James, 8, on a bright
Tuesday afternoon in late October (2017) to see what we could find. The
eight-hour drive took us through desolate Malheur County, site of the
2016 armed Oregon Standoff, sprawling, ever-expanding Boise, now
America’s fastest growing city, and forlorn cowboy hamlets like
Fairfield, Idaho, home of the Wrangler Drive-in, where gluttons can
feast on two-pound jackalope burgers, which come with six slices of
bacon, three onion rings, six slices of pepper jack cheese, and secret
sauce among other things. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/trespassing-at-ernest-hemingways-house/
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