Hemingway's Ketchum

The writer’s legacy in the town that he helped transform

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When Hemingway first came to Idaho—on September 19, 1939, to be exact­­—home was Suite 206 at the Sun Valley Lodge. “Glamour House,” he nicknamed it. The corner suite’s beds were covered with Hudson Bay blankets and chenille bedspreads. The furniture was upholstered in apricot, cinnamon and sunshine yellow. Today, photos of Hemingway The Hunter hang from salmon-colored wallpaper. Duck decoys sit on the white fireplace. A bronze statue of a younger, mustachioed Hemingway types away on the dresser.

When Hemingway aimed his shotgun off the balcony here at unsuspecting geese, he would have looked out on the spreading meadows of the Brass family’s ranch. Since then, landscaped aspens and condominiums have encroached on the resort grounds.

“The idea of the lodge when they built it was ‘roughing it chic,’” said Sandy Hofferber, regional history librarian at The Community Library in Ketchum, as she led a group of Hemingway fans on a tour of his former haunts. “Now they’ve gone a lot more on the chic side.”

One of the men on the tour is Charlie Knapp, from Carson City, Nevada. “I’m a retired prison guard interested in Ernest Hemingway,”

Knapp introduced himself with a succinctness worthy of Papa. Tall and fit, with a weathered face and clear blue eyes, Knapp has spent a good part of his retirement chasing Hemingway around the world: running with the bulls in Pamplona, tracking down little-known Hemingway bars in Spain. Paris is still on his list. He hasn’t made it to Cuba, either: “I’m waiting for Castro to die.”

Wearing a felt hunting hat, red-and-black plaid shirt and blue jeans, Knapp looked like a character from a hunting tale. Having grown up in Michigan, Knapp said he feels a connection with the author who spent boyhood days rollicking in the Upper Peninsula. It’s an affinity he doesn’t share with Hemingway’s peers.

“James Joyce was worthless,” he said. “William Faulkner was worthless. I’m absolutely convinced this stuff only survives because of college professors.”

Knapp and his wife, Joyce, know this tour well enough to lead it themselves—the cabins he lived in, the homes he played in. When we come to the cemetery above town where Hemingway is buried, Knapp scoffed at the pens, pencils, booze and bottle caps fans had left on the flat stone that marks his grave. “Someone should just come by and sweep all this stuff away.”

“For some people it’s a shrine,” Hofferber said. “For some people it’s a place to give respect to a person who had a profound influence on their lives. For some people it’s a hole in the ground. It just depends what Hemingway meant to you.”

A more touching memorial was built just east of Sun Valley alongside Trail Creek. The site was chosen for its natural state, “as when the Indians roamed this part of Idaho.” That’s how it was described in 1966 when the memorial was created. If the Indians roamed today, they’d be roaming the seventh hole of the Trail Creek Golf Course, where a golf cart wheels down to the creek’s edge. A man steps out with a pole and a net. He’s fishing–for his little white golf ball lost in the creek.

The statue bears an inscription Hemingway wrote for Gene Van Guilder, a Sun Valley publicity man killed in a hunting accident. “Best of all he loved the fall,” it said.

Hemingway’s skeptics, less impressed by his ability to take down a duck than to put down a bottle, put it another way. “Best of all, he loved to fall,” Hofferber told me conspiratorially.

For her, knowing Hemingway lore is as much a part of the job description as knowing old mining wagons. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of them both; she’s not a fanatic of either.

“There’s a funny thing about Ketchum and Sun Valley,” Hofferber said. “Almost any place I’ve ever been, celebrities are still treated like celebrities. Except here. Somehow or other, we’re just not impressed.”

Hofferber runs down the list of Sun Valley celebs: Jamie Lee Curtis, Clint Eastwood, Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Hemingway led the way for these celestial bodies. His estate was worth a hefty $1.4 million when he died. In his time here, Hemingway hung out with his local hunting buddies, but he also partied with Gary Cooper and the Spiegels, heirs to the family catalog fortune.

Hofferber and I shared beers at Papa Hemi’s Hideaway, a bar that came as close as possible to using the author’s name without having to pay a fee to Fashion Licensing, the New York firm that owns the rights to the Hemingway name and strictly manages them on behalf of the family. “The Hemingways,” a condo complex down the road, has to pay. Even the library pays when it holds its annual Hemingway Symposium.

The bar at Papa Hemi’s Hideaway sits amid a klatch of log cabins that until recent years was a low-budget motel. Hemingway, no longer getting a free place to stay at Sun Valley Resort, first came here to Room 38 with Mary in 1946 as she recuperated from a near-fatal tubal pregnancy. It was called the MacDonald Cabins then.

The Ketchum Korral, as they’re called today, are cheap month-to-month rentals shared by the Anglos, Mexicans and Peruvians who make up Sun Valley’s workforce.

I walked amid the cabins and tall dark pines until I found No. 38. No signs mention Hemingway. Nothing distinguishes it from the other cabins.

THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE REALTY
Whatever changes Ketchum has seen, Hemingway can take some of the credit or, perhaps, the blame. When Hemingway settled here for the final chapter of his life, his house in the hills was among Ketchum’s first stylish second homes. Its $50,000 price tag was a 1958 fortune.
“It’s ironic, isn’t it?” said David Earle. A professor at the University of West Florida, Earle came to Hemingway through his genes. His father was a doctor, and his mother was a nurse, and they had cared for Hemingway when they lived in Sun Valley. Earle was born in Sun Valley, delivered by the author’s friend, Dr. George Saviers, seven years after Hemingway died and was raised on tales of Hemingway and Sun Valley’s golden age.
His book, All Man!, plumbs Hemingway’s image in the 1950’s media world: a boozing macho man drawn to war and bullfights. Hemingway helped create that image, Earle said, but it spun out of his control. The image didn’t square with the stories Earle heard growing up. Where was the soft-spoken man Idahoans remembered?
And what happened to the low-key Ketchum that Hemingway would remember?
“You can still find it,” Earle said, “but you have to look through an awful lot of shellac of condos and resortishness.” Hemingway’s reputation, and Sun Valley’s, followed similar arcs into unanticipated consequences of star power, Earle said. In its heyday, Sun Valley had a reputation for letting celebrities be. It still does, but it’s changed. When Earle worked for the resort in more recent years, his job was to shoo autograph-seekers from Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“A runaway reputation,” he said. “I’m sure an analogy could be made with runaway real estate sales and runaway development. I think it’s an absolute parallel.”
What would Hemingway make of Sun Valley today?
“Oh, he would hate it,” Earle said. The little town of 200 is long gone. Most of the old-timers are gone. Even the pheasants left.
“It really isn’t the Sun Valley that he knew,” he said. “But that’s the same Sun Valley that my folks knew, and they still come here. They hate the traffic. They hate how built up it is. But my dad still loves hiking and still can tell you every mountain range.”

I knocked, and the door swung aside to reveal a short Hispanic man. Hugo Pedro Vargas Vargas had never heard of this Ernest Hemingway fellow, but when I explained my interest in his cabin’s former inhabitant, he graciously invited me in.

“Where I’m from there’s no snow, no ice,” Vargas said. He arrived from the lowlands of Peru eleven years ago in January, and the winter chill was a shock to his bones.

“Now I live like this,” he cackled, showing off sockless feet.

If this cabin’s most famous occupant was a symbol of the glorious Sun Valley of old, its most recent occupant is a symbol of the new Sun Valley, dependent on foreign labor. Vargas left behind his job as a taxi driver to come here to work in a posh Ketchum restaurant. More than that, he left behind his wife, children and grandchildren in Peru.

He drew an imaginary line down the middle of his face. “I’m divided between the two,” he said.

Vargas is quick to laugh, and to philosophize. For the past two years, he’s been a permanent resident, and he’s hoping to become a citizen. Before that, he was here illegally, he said, “hidden, frightened of living.” For ten years, he wouldn’t get behind the wheel of a car out of fear that he’d be pulled over and deported.

I wonder if Hemingway would recognize his old cabin, cluttered with tired furniture and computer equipment that Vargas’s son fixes in his spare time. The window offers pretty much the same view to the mountains Hemingway saw, and Vargas seems to appreciate Ketchum. “It has a spiritual peace,” he said. “A tranquility. It calms your soul.”

I can’t help but think that he and Hemingway would have hit it off. Otro pisco sour, por favor.

At 91, Bud Purdy is among the last living members of Hemingway’s circle of Idaho friends. “Living” is an understatement. Purdy pilots his own plane south to Mexico twice a year to go dove hunting. He skied at Sun Valley from the day it opened until about a decade ago. He has turned over most of his ranching operation to his son, the fourth generation of Purdys to run cattle on the plains south of Ketchum, but he’s fit, sharp-minded and quick-witted.

Purdy was nineteen years Hemingway’s junior, just out of college, when Sun Valley first brought Hemingway to the Purdy ranch to hunt. “I was impressed, let’s put it that way,” Purdy confessed. Hemingway was already required reading when Purdy was in school. Over time, Purdy came to know him less as Hemingway the author than as Ernie the hunter.

“He wasn’t a macho guy,” Purdy said. “He was shy, kind of. He wouldn’t do anything that he felt offended anyone.”

As we talk, Purdy looks out his picture window to the meadows of his ranch where Hemingway used to hunt. Silver Creek rolls past the rushes, bubbling with trout nosing for the surface. It’s the same creek Hemingway used to hunt by canoe. Off in a distant meadow, a coyote caught Purdy’s eye.

Silver Creek is a reminder of how little some parts of Hemingway’s Idaho have changed. Much of the southern part of Blaine County is still farmland. A mile and a half down the road, Hemingway’s family preserved his old hunting grounds under the protection of The Nature Conservancy and people still hunt and fish at the Silver Creek Preserve.

At a secluded memorial to Hemingway amid the preserve’s 2,882 acres, a rock bears a quote from The Sun Also Rises: “One generation passes away, and another generation comes, but the earth abides forever. The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to its place where it arose.”

Purdy disagrees with the Casino bartender. “Hemingway wouldn’t like it if he came back now and saw these big houses and big stores and big buildings,” he said with a trace of Western drawl. “He’d just shake his head and say, ‘It was better way back when.’”

To understand Hemingway’s life in Idaho, I sought out the house where he ended it. Except for annual dinner parties, it’s closed to the public. But Paslay, the caretaker who lives in an apartment beneath Hemingway’s living space, agrees to open it to occasional journalists and scholars.

When he pushed open the front door, a musty whiff blew out, as from a sealed-away time capsule. I feel like we’re opening a tomb. We walk through the morbid vestibule into the long living room, all cold angles and low, modern furniture.

“The first time I came up here,” Paslay said, “I expected a big log cabin, game mounts everywhere, something very Hemingway. Idaho. Big West. But it’s not.”

Mostly, it’s like a yellowing snapshot from the 1960s, a decade Hemingway barely saw. Like his Sun Valley Lodge suite, the house has become an ersatz shrine. The typewriter by the bedroom window is a donated prop. The old magazines weren’t his either.

Over the gray stone hearth, beside the mounted antelope heads, hangs Hemingway’s most famous portrait, captured by renowned photographer Yousuf Karsh in Cuba in 1957. Hemingway looks the way most Hemingway impersonators remember him: silver hair and full beard, in a rollneck cable-knit sweater that looks awfully hot for Havana.

That portrait gazes out the wall-sized window, down to the Big Wood River and across to the massive homes that have taken root among the cottonwoods. Hemingway looks like a sea captain from another age staring over the ship’s wheel, wandering into what strange port he has arrived and wondering if there’s any place for him there.

If he stepped out of that portrait today and walked through the vestibule into the streets of Ketchum, what would he think? The roughness has been sanded and polished. The wilderness tamed, packaged and sold.

Tamed, but not lost. A glance north to the Boulders, or to the shining stars, or to the tumbling Big Wood River, would still point the way home.

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