A Quaker Tunity: A hike, and a Hemingway story

While I was reading up on Indian Camp earlier in the week, I read that Hemingway considered it a good story; another story that won his approval was "Big, Two-Hearted River". So today I took a copy of that short story on the hike.

We so rarely have a trail to follow. Today was great that way.

Fittingly, it was about someone on a hike. It's a haunting story with so little background information given, and so much sensory detail of the character's experience described, and such a deliberate delivery of play-by-play actions done by the man who is hiking, camping and fishing in the story, that I expected, at any minute, something truly terrible to happen. The sentences are brief. The explanations of sensory experience are evocative. The paradoxes of emotional responses to situations are simply and gratifyingly stated.

The main character, Nick, whose age and situation we never learn, has just disembarked from a train at the beginning of the story, with "a bundle of canvas and bedding".

"There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country. The thirteen saloons that had lined the one street of Seney had not left a trace. The foundations of the Mansion House hotel stuck up above the ground. The stone was chipped and split by the fire. It was all that was left of the town of Seney. Even the surface had been burned off the ground."

A Bedouin camp we passed at the start of the hike.

This bleak beginning gets no exposition - we never learn about the fire, or about the history of Seney, or why Nick has come to it with a bundle of canvas and bedding. Indeed, his own history seems to have been burnt and charred away, and even he seems not to think of his past or his situation beyond the immediate present. The word happy is used to describe Nick at least half a dozen times in the story. The only dialogue we get is when he eats dinner on his first night at a camp he's set up.

"Chrise," Nick said, "Geezus Chrise," he said happily.

The combination of his slurred speech and his repeated happiness, and lack of references to any life beyond or other people, makes me think that he's like John Steinbeck's Lenny, from Of Mice and Men, which the English B classes are reading right now: a guy with a mental handicap who is very keen on sensuous experience and lives mainly through his physical, not his mental, world. Both men experience life on a visceral, immediate, unselfconscious level that inspires, in me at least, a longing for a culture in which childlike responses to the world are not quite so stifled.

Coffee/cigarette break number one, about 30 minutes in...

It was a satisfying story to read as we went along.

Today we had a guide, well, more of an accompanier. One of the Shat7a group members has a connection to this man, Abu Saliah, who knows the area we were hiking (Ein Samia) very well. He accompanied us the whole way, as did his two grandsons, Hamoudeh and Usslieh.

Abu Saliah wore a kuffiyeh on his head and hiked in a knitted vest and loafers. He smoked a cigarette about every fifteen minutes and spoke at very high volume about the route, and probably other things, which I did not understand. When we stopped at 10 to make tea, he took out a flute and started playing it.

When we reached the Ein, the spring, at the end of the trail, there was a load of garbage around the water where families were laying out picnics and playing in the water. I was impressed to see the members of Shat7a jump into action collecting the garbage in bags which they then carried more than an hour to our end point. The other Palestinians looked on at them, bemused. I watched Hammoudeh throw his disposable cup into the water.