A True Story

Hemingway

This is a true story. In the Summer of that year, we were coming home from a camping trip. It was late at night, and the sky was awash with the constellations. As we drove on through the mountains, we smelled smoke, and a little further on we saw light on the horizon. Then a fireman in a yellow coat running along the shoulder motioned us to the side of the road. “We’ll have to hold you here for a while until we know that it’s safe to pass,” he said. We pulled over to a point at the edge of a huge drop off. In the distance, we could see the raging red and orange flames silhouetted against the blackness, as the smoke got thicker, acrid and stinging to the nose. My parents turned on the radio to kill time. They were playing a Glenn Miller tune when the announcer suddenly broke in, saying “it was reported today that the American novelist and short story writer Ernest Hemingway was found dead in his home in Ketcham, Idaho.” In my memory, this happened when I was about five years old, but I was 13 on July 2^nd, 1961, when Hemingway committed suicide with a shotgun in the mouth. Also, my brother has not yet been born, but this can’t be because he was born on October 16, 1960. The forest fire was real. After an hour or so, the fireman told us to go ahead, the danger had passed because the wind had shifted away from the road. In my mind these events will always be connected, despite the random, meaningless conjunctions between my childhood and the death of a great American writer. I remember my parents, speaking with reverence about it. A small piece of their history had broken off and passed into eternity. I was too young to understand, then, but eventually I would.