The thing you should know about going up country highway 31 northwest from I-75's rushing traffic is that you should breathe. Seriously, stop by the side of the road in Gaylord and buy some weed if you must, or a pasty from a roadside stand. A country gas station and convenience store makes amazing sub sandwiches if you're hungry, but I always find I'm not hungry for food -- I'm hungry for this place. As soon as you pull off the main interstate, the pine trees loom over you like a sentry of telephone poles waiting to be felled. I can't help it. Every time I drive through here I think like a capitalist: what resources could be put to use to make it possible for people to live up here like I want to? No one goes to Hemingway country in northern lower Michigan near resort town Petoskey and says yuck, I hate it here. It simply isn't done. You wouldn't even think of it unless maybe it was winter and the snow was hemming you in admid the hushed pine and maple forests surrounding you on every side until you hit the beaches to the west. In summer, this land glistens with sudden sun on the fields, the trees bloom in all colors, turning scarlet and gold first hint of frost in early fall, which comes far too soon around here. It's paradise.

My family knew this, or else they wouldn't have helped to name the paradisical Jordan River Valley where my mother's father's family homestead still sits. They have donated their 80+ acres as the Rogers Family Nature Preserve, and for this I am grateful. If you pass that vista over the family farm that rises with the dunes past Boyne Mountain's abandoned ski resorts in hot July cicada-buzzing summer, you will want to stop and never leave just like they did in 1855 when the Michigan territories opened. Lots of people do that here: they come, and they stay. Or Hemingway country stays with them. That's how much Hemingway loved it here, and how much we all do.

Horton Bay General Store

Hemingway loved this place his whole life even after he moved to Paris and Spain and Argentina. In fact, it's no credit to me to appreciate a location this beautiful, this gets-in-your-bones wonderful coccoon of trout streams and shaded valleys full of old cherry and apple orchards. Sure, a lot of old stores are abandoned along the inland roads, the economy still struggles up here outside of tourism. When I told a local in Muskegon further south on Lake Michigan that we had purchased a rental house in town, he grimaced (Muskegon was anti-tourism until like last year) saying that out of town investors are coming in and swooping up the real estate from under locals. Nevermind that my great-grandmother lived just up the road in Shelby and the family cabin is buried under the shifting sand dunes of Silver Lake a few miles north of the Shoreline City on this same Lake Michigan coast. You would think a lake 200 miles long would have enough room for everyone, but it simply can't. I don't mind the jab. Locals in Michigan go back as far as my family: the 1850s, when my great- great-grandfather delivered the mail by horse and buggy on skis before Petoskey and East Jordan had a post office.

That isn't to say that if you fall in love with the hushed wind through the trees by the lapping lakeshores near Petoskey that you don't belong. Everyone belongs. It's that kind of place pretty much anyone can love and go rockhounding for days. At least if echoing silence doesn't drive you mad.

Hemingway used to travel up here by train from Chicago when a rail line was the only way all the way up to Walloon, and inland lake between Charlevoix and Petoskey on Lake Michigan's northeastern shore. Earnest would take his family's canoo across Lake Walloon to visit a nearby general store called Horton Bay general store, sometimes hang out there all day writing and talking to locals. The store remained little changed for years after he was long gone, but writers and tourists still visit for an experience of local lore. This is one of the places he wrote about when describing fishing for trout like a holy pilgrimage of devotion to simplicity and freedom.

People were angry when the place recently sold a wooden desk or bar he had carved his name into, but the place is now a renovated luxury inn and gift shop, which makes elegant French style boating picnic lunch boxes to order ahead for the area's many boating tourists. Things change. If you get the chance, you might still want to visit if you are driving north of Boyne City on the east side of Lake Charlevoix, before you get to Walloon just northeast. There is so much water here that the land serves as bridges between boating paradises, each lake its own flavor of mist and sunsets and swimming all day in rhythmic waves slowly polishing the Petoskey stones for treasure hunters.

Boat people, they call us. Fudgies. People who come up north just to buy the Mackinac Island fudge and saltwater taffy. Hemingway also went to the foot of Lake Walloon, where even in his time the imposing Victorian Walloon hotel sits at the southeast end of the long finger lake with a beautiful view of the lake all the way to the west end. You can even rent one of the original train station gatekeeper booths as an Airbnb house a couple doors down from the hotel. It's like Michigan's own little Narnia portal to slower times nostalia.

Can you imagine how lucky everyone has been in this long line of people from my family being gifted land to farm (with apologies to the Native Americans whose land was taken in unjust coerced treaties, a story for another day) all the way through Hemingway canoing the Jordan River looking for fish on a lazy afternoon 100 years ago, still 70 years on from when my people first settled here? And now I get to visit, sucking up the views from dune roads named things like "Dead Man's Hill" for good reason, harkening back to the hardworking lumberjacks who scraped out their living here alongside other family members of mine: the miners that brought the Cornish pasty meatpie over from west England's similarly rugged shores. I am so damned lucky to love a place like this, I get lost here sometimes, remembering like the land does the slow plodding of religious pilgrims' feet here like all the Methodists and Presbyterians attending Bible camps (and sacreligiously funny Finns I'm also descended from up here: that's something like a Swedish person but with blandly elegant food and a devilishly joyful sense of humor).

Image courtesy the Red Fox Inn

Red Fox Inn Bookstore

Near the Horton Bay General Store is an old saltbox farm house with white siding whose sign advertises Hemingway memorabilia and books, as well as a few antiques to purchase. The place was in business for many years as a restaurant and inn, and the owner's children revived the location for old time's sake just this June in 2025 to carry on the area residents' love of all things Hemingway and flyfishing country. You can stop here and pick up an antique or some Hemingway stories.

For me, it's not just the golden touch of a magically honest writer that draws me in. It's the pace of this place he loved. The air holds its breath in mid-afternoon while midges swarm in cliques, waiting for you to make last-minute plans, or maybe sit out all evening in a lawnchair reading poetry or a mystery book while burying your toes in sand that stretches across this whole farming-poor land of black spruce and birch trees waving for miles over rolling hills.

Hemingway Statues (which one holds the saint's true relics?)

Walloon has a seated statue of Hemingway with a fish on his pole, brass jeans rolled up to his knees. It sits in the center of tiny downtown that is really just one street passing by the beach facing west. I like this statue the best, because he's smiling. I don't like to remember the alcoholic Hemingway, the misogynist, the impossibly stubborn old boy. I like how much he refused to write about anything but what he loved: fishing, adventure, and freedom to choose his path through life. Walloon is so quiet and so tightly knit as a community even now that multiple generations have had permission to walk the old Indian trail around the shore that passes in front of all the cottages (and some of the new mansions). It's not hard to slow down here, to imagine that you are not the only human on earth that loves simple beauty of grass waving in the wind over a cloud-studded hillside view of sailboats fading off into the far distance. Sometimes the whole lake seems alive with speedboats and sails here; other days, it's cozy and misty and calm. A place you can forget if you left the windows open because there is fresh air but no noise outside.

If you get a chance to visit Petoskey several miles to the northeast on a lovely bay looking out into Lake Michigan, you can also visit Hemingway as he stands with briefcase in the park downtown in Petoskey's old gaslamp district, where Grandpa Shorter's gifts and Symon's general store take you right back into the deep past when goods were sold on wooden shelves and the floor creaked as you inched through picking out your purchases to put in a hand-held basket. All of this with a whiff of Kilwin's chocolates down the street (founded here), and with a breezy view of the bay.

I think you get the idea that I love this place like family, as much as I love anyone who can write as simply as Hemingway about liking what you like and spending your life on it. If you get a chance to visit Hemingway country sometime soon, I hope you give some of these hidden gems a visit. I have heard for years about all the places Hemingway loved near Lake Walloon, but only recently after over half a dozen visits in recent years have I tracked down all these locales adored by so many people. You can even boat past Hemingway's old family cabin on Lake Walloon in the northern side of the deep V that splits the lake in two arms. The cabin is still owned by the family. Maybe a little of that love of place will rub off on you, too, though I suspect anyone who is lucky enough to make it to northern Michigan in summer is touched with enough luck and magic to make it just fine on their own freely chosen path.