Darla Worden - Cockeyed Happy - Ernest Hemingways Wyoming Summers with Pauline

Keen editorial eye

Her family became his family: Jinny, Mother Pfeiffer

Uncle Guss support

Strong again

Someone to feel swell with after a days work

The feeling of us against the others

Willing to join him on adventures

Believed in the promotion of masculine society

Vowed to always let him have his way

She could give him little Pilar in three years

Her throat never got sore like his

Spontaneous lovemaking

HED NEVER BEEN OUT WEST BEFORE, but hed heard it had some of the best fly-fishing in the world. As Ernest steered the yellow Model A toward the Bighorn Mountains, they reminded him of the Sierra de Guadarrama in Spainthe same color and shape but bigger. He missed Spain already. Because of Patricks birth, hed had to skip the San Fermin Festival in Pamplona this summer, and he swore hed return next year. But for now, he and Bill Horne had driven three days from Kansas City to reach a dude ranch in Wyoming, where Ernest hoped to go fishing and finish his book.

Ernest recorded mileage each day340, 380, 320. He liked to keep lists and record things, like how many fish he caught and game he shot. into Wyominga changing landscape with hills like sand dunes, rocky outcroppings, buttes topped with scrubby ponderosa pine, and miles of sagebrush-speckled plains.

The entire country was baking in a heat wave, and forget about finding a cool drink to quench your thirst because of Prohibitionsomething that Ernest was having a hard time adjusting to after the Roaring Twenties in Paris, where liquor flowed freely. Finding liquor in America was like tracking game: you had to be stealthy. In Kansas City, though, he had connections, and he had brought four quarts of bootleg scotch for the trip.

Ernest had been planning to go out to Idaho, He also needed a respite from the awful heat and a quiet place to work.

It was July 30 when they turned onto a steep shale road that snaked up the mountainside, the coupe leaving a trail of red dust as it climbed. Ernest maneuvered the roadster around potholes, bumping over rocks and ruts, trying to stay away from the edge as Bill peered over the sheer drop-off where boulders the size of cars had tumbled thousands of feet to the valley floor.

Look out, Ernie! Bill yelled when Ernest came too near. The view was seductivethey could see the little towns of Sheridan and Big Horn in the valley below.

Ernie, look out! Bill shouted again.

Do me a favor, Horney, Ernest said. When you get out, just close the door. Bill didnt make a peep after that.

Ernest met Bill when they were in the autoambulanzia and theyd traveled from New York to Paris, then to Milan and eventually Schio, Italy, where they were assigned to their posts. Bill had been there for him when Ernest was injured227 shrapnel wounds in his legand they had been friends ever since.

The air became cooler as they gained altitude, and the breeze felt good. Kansas City had been too bloody hot, over ninety degrees each day. He hadnt been able to work in that heat, especially while worrying about Pauline, dangerously ill in the hospital. After the caesarean, she had to stay in the hospital for ten days due to gas distention, and at times Ernest had worried that it was the end for her. When she was finally out of the woods, he had taken her and their new son, Patrick Miller Hemingway, to stay with her family in Piggott, Arkansas, to recover while Ernest went fishing with Bill.

At a plateau, Ernest spotted a spring and pulled off the side of the road to fill up the car with water. was a sure way to get to know a person.

And now driving with Horney, someone he had not seen in seven years, was an opportunity to catch upso much had happened. After Ernest married Hadley Richardson in 1921, they had moved to Paris. He had lived there until this spring, when he and Pauline had returned to the United States so their baby could be born here. Hed seen Bill just a few times on brief visits from Paris to the Hemingway family home in Oak Park, outside Chicago, where Bill lived. Now that Ernest was back, maybe he would see Bill more often. This trip gave them a chance to reminisce about their time in the war together; perhaps some of those stories would make their way into his new novel.

His first novel, The Sun Also Rises, had been published two years earlier while he was in Paris. Hed written about men who returned to Paris after the Great WarGertrude Stein had called them The Lost Generationdrifters without purpose after what they had seen in the war. His new book took place in Italy, where Ernest had spent months recuperating in a Milan hospital after his injuries and had fallen in love with his nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky. His leg eventually healed, but his heart had been broken on receiving a letter from Agnes after he returned home, saying she was dumping him to marry a duke.

That was ten years ago, but he could still conjure those feelingsfeelings he was putting into the story of a soldier falling in love with his nurse in Italy. He was on page 486, with a third still left to write, and he hoped to finish the bloody book in the solitude of Wyoming before Pauline joined him in a few weeks.

At the spring, the men stretched their legs. Ernest was six feet tall, Ernest welcomed the chance to discover this new place with the Horned article or Article for shortErnest affectionately gave friends, family, even himself nicknames. Wyoming was the blank page just waiting for him to put his mark on it. To write, he needed something new: new lands, new experiences, and new people.

Thats how The Sun Also Rises had come to him. After attending the bullfights in Pamplona with his friends, hed been on fire. He had sat down at his typewriter, and ten weeks later had written a bestselling novel that was based on his experience. Critics called it a new style that combined journalistic reporting and real people with fiction techniques. It was thrilling to have written a book like that at age twenty-six, a book that rocked the literary world, even if many of those friends no longer spoke to him.

Back in the car, the road was so narrow in places that any cars headed downhill needed to yield to cars going uphill by allowing them to pass. Luckily, there werent many cars coming downmostly just cattle grazing in the mountain meadows and crossing the road when they felt like it.