Pat Hemingway, 76, a son of Ernest Hemingway, spent much of his life in Africa, but now lives in Montana

April 3, 2005
OUTDOORS
Old Man and the River: A Hemingway at Home
By PETE BODO

Craig, Mont.

It is the new generation of guides that gets Pat Hemingway's goat - the articulate, hip, Starbucks cowboys and aspiring screenwriters whose voices sometimes carry across the Missouri River and the railroad tracks that go right by Hemingway's house in this enclave of matchbox-sized homes and trailers. This is a place that nobody would ever mistake for that more glitzy Hemingway family haunt, Ketchum, Idaho.

"Sound travels ," said Hemingway, whose dark eyes glitter merrily despite his 76 years. "And especially when there's a pretty girl to impress in the boat, how often have I heard a guide say, 'Oh, this isn't really me, I'm just doing this for now.' My God, can't these guys even stand up for their profession?"

Hemingway spent the better part of his life as a hunting guide and wildlife manager, in Tanzania and Kenya. It is impossible to wade through any hunting-related article on Africa without bumping into a reference to Hemingway's famous father, Ernest, as if he were a misplaced coffee table in a dark room. But the great writer made only two trips to Africa in his entire life.

For the record, the Hemingway who knew Africa intimately is Pat, the one who most diligently avoided the public eye. He now lives in Montana and said of his career, "I take pride in being the Hemingway son who got a job at 21, worked all his life and retired with a pension."

"Big Two-Hearted River," the unforgettable Ernest Hemingway fishing story, opens with Nick Adams, the protagonist, walking the tracks. Growing up, Pat Hemingway and his older half-brother, Jack, armed with .22-caliber rifles given to them by their father, hunted rabbits on the railway spur near their Sun Valley home. Among other adventures, Pat remembers accompanying Papa Hemingway and a driver to North Dakota for a pheasant hunt, father and son sitting on either warm fender of an ordinary sedan as it jounced along abandoned grain fields, flushing the colorful birds, left and right.

Papa's passion for the blood sports proved more heritable than his literary achievements, and that probably was a good thing. Pat never experienced his father's genius as a millstone; he had a greater interest in mathematics and painting than in literature. In fact, father and son commiserated about the truth behind the brutally frank phrase Lord Chesterfield reputedly uttered to his son: "You have no possibility of becoming anybody except through me."

Oddly enough, though, it was Pauline Hemingway, Pat's glamorous, social mother, who strove to impress upon Pat the more concrete pitfalls of growing up in the privileged set. "I'd studied art history, but I didn't want to work in a museum," Pat said. "My mother had warned me about turning out like some of the other kids - a perfect, effete, young gentleman."

Instead, shortly after Pauline died in 1951, Pat took his inheritance and lit out for Africa. Hemingway intended to be a rancher in Kenya, but the unrest caused by the Mau-Mau rebellion ruled that out. He made his way to Tanzania (then, Tanganyika) and rode the tracks to Arusha Station, where he wound up working for two years for Tanganyika Tourist Safaris before putting out his own shingle as a professional hunter (he named the company Hemfar).

After nearly a decade - and one, memorable hunting trip with his father - he accepted a position as a teacher and trainer at the United Nations-sponsored College of African Wildlife Management at Mweka, near Dar es Salaam, and worked there until he retired - with a pension. He returned to the United States in 1975.

Shorter than his father but just as stout, Pat Hemingway enjoys telling stories of Africa, punctuating them with bursts of wicked laughter. His urbanity - this is a man who is fascinated by Byzantine civilization, and who says things like, "There are two awful words, 'consumer' and 'fan;' God help me if I'm either" - seems a maternal legacy.

But it is all Papa Hemingway when he says, "The truth about African hunting is that the local guides and trackers are the ones with the real knowledge. Some professional hunters covertly had the trackers tap them on the left or right side to cue them on which tracks to follow."

Pat Hemingway is a founding member of the Society of Range Management. He also made a contribution to game management, employing his gift for mathematics to develop the line-transect system, a reliable, statistically based method for estimating animal populations in the wild. He also spends a fair amount of time handling Hemingway family affairs, which include overseeing a forthcoming Cambridge University Press volume of his father's complete correspondence. It is a daunting job, as Ernest was a prolific letter writer.

The father Pat knew was not the glamorous figure who epitomized a mid-20th century ideal of masculinity. It was the man whose best qualities, in his son's eyes, included an aversion to corporal punishment; the quiet, solid presence who, by Pat's estimate, spent 65 percent of his life piloting nothing more romantic than a desk. It was the man whose own eyes momentarily betrayed a bit of hurt when Pat returned from college one year and blithely declared, "English is a lousy language compared to French or Italian."

Pat took up fly-fishing in 1991, when he and his wife, Carol, built their second home here. It is a tasteful house that fits nicely in this unprepossessing haven for anglers and hunters. Although he finds something "finicky" and "overcommercialized" about fly-fishing these days, there is something about this home near Lewis and Clark's gates to the west.

Perhaps it is the tracks, running right by the door.



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- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 12:52 PM