The Last Good Place: Ketchum and the Ghost of Papa.

Ernest Hemingway at Sun Valley Lodge, Idaho. Image taken by Lloyd Arnold

There has always been something slightly perverse about pilgrimage. We hunt down the places where our heroes died, as though the very geography could reveal some secret that they couldn’t articulate in life. Maybe the mountains they stared at, the rivers they fished in or the bars they drank in could whisper something they couldn’t say out loud.

So I am here in Ketchum, Idaho. A town that has become something of a strange shrine to the last act of Ernest Hemingway. Not his last creative act, something that was gone long before he setup camp here permanently, but his final and definitive last act. The one involving a shotgun in the foyer of a house looking out over the Big Wood River on that Sunday morning in July 1961.

This isn’t exactly something that is advertised by the town. You won’t find a “Hemingway Shot Himself Here!” sign anywhere, or shotgun-shaped bottle openers in the gift shops. Ketchum has class, or at the very least it has enough restraint to package its most famous residents suicide with a certain level of discretion. There’s a memorial, of course. There always is. We’ll get to that in due course.

Ketchum is nestled in the Wood River Valley of central Idaho, huddled against the Saw tooth Range like it’s seeking shelter. Come winter, it’s a satellite to Sun Valley, the Depression-era invention of the chairman of Union Pacific Railroad, who had the clever idea that Americans might like skiing if it was glamorous enough. And in this, he was right. The wealthy came, saw, conquered the slopes and Ketchum became the unpretentious little brother. It was the place where the hired help lived, where you could get a proper burger, a place that felt real.

Hemingway bought his house here in 1959 and by that time, Ketchum had already played host to a number of celebrities looking escape from the coasts. Hemingway wasn’t seeking refuge, though. He was looking for something else entirely. An ending, perhaps. A place where his own mythology could, finally, rest.

The irony of course is that he had been coming here since 1939, when he was still Papa Hemingway, the capital-H Hero of American Letters. He came to hunt. Pheasant, duck, elks in the mountains. He came after being told about it by Gary Cooper. Because it wasn’t Cuba, or Key West or Europe, and hidden in its remote mountain isolation he could be just another guy with a dog and a rifle. Pretend to be, at least.

Walking down Main Street and it’s not hard to see what drew him here. It’s America at its most honest. The sort of Western town that never completely decided if it wanted to be functional or quaint. And so decided to be both. The Pioneer Saloon, opened in the 1940's is all dark wood and hunting trophies and is where Hemingway held court at the bar. Then there’s the Casino Club, where he frequented the slots and drank with the locals who treated him like a neighbour instead of a monument. There are sporting goods stores, old motels, architecture of transience that became permanent here.

The mountains rise, surrounding us, magnificent and indifferent. The Big Wood River runs cold and clear through the town, still filled with the trout that would have interested Papa in his better days. The air is clean and thin, and in the autumn, when the aspens change, the hillsides ignite in that gold colour that makes you understand why people believe in God.

Then of course, there is the house. I don’t go to it. It’s private property and even my streak of morbid curiosity has its limits. Besides that, what could I possibly learn staring at a facade?Depression lives in nice homes, too? Madness and genius can coexist at the same address? That the man who wrote some of the most important prose in American literature could still find himself in that foyer at dawn with a Boss shotgun in his hands?

The house sits on a hill above town, a low-slung modern structure designed by Mary Hemingway. A contemporary design for 1959, with big windows. Views of the river and the mountains. All a man could want, that is all except what he really needed. To be young again, to have his talent fresh again, to pick up the phone and not hear the FBI in every call. Paranoia that was partially justified, we would later learn.

By the time Hemingway arrived here permanently, he was a wreck. Plane crashes in Africa had done their work. Drinking had done its work. Electroshock, two full courses at the Mayo Clinic, had done massive damage to his memory and creativity, to the machinery that made him Hemingway. He could no longer write. Not really. Not in the way he wanted.

I think about how it must have been for him. Once, the man who could distil language down to its purest elements, the man who could describe a heartbreak or a sunrise or a killing in five perfect words, suddenly finding those words gone. They weren’t hiding, they were gone. Stripped away by well-meaning men in white coats who thought electricity and trauma were cures for melancholia.

The Hemingway Memorial is located alongside Trail Creek, around a mile north-east of town, along a path he used to walk. It’s a bust of Papa looking weathered, bearded, and more like a sea captain than a writer, and mounted on a stone pedestal. Behind it, there is a monument inscribed with a eulogy he wrote for a friend killed in a hunting accident in 1939; “Best of all he loved the fall/ the leaves yellow on cottonwoods/ leaves floating on trout streams/ and above the hills/ the high blue windless skies/ ...now he will be apart of them forever.”

It’s beautiful, with classic Hemingway economy. Short and declarative sentences building to something akin to poetry without ever admitting they’re trying. But there is something almost cruel in using words he wrote for someone else’s death to commemorate his own. As though his suicide was a natural merging with the landscape, a romantic dissolving into the Idaho wilderness he loved so much.

The truth, of course, is messier. The truth is that a man was in such psychic agony that death seemed preferable to another day on this earth. The truth is that paranoia, mental illness and the theft of your identity comes with losing the ability to do the only thing you know how to do. The memorial doesn’t mention that part. Memorials rarely do.

I sit at a bench near the creek and watch the water flow. Tourists walk around, taking pictures, reading the inscription aloud. Some seem honestly moved. Others, as though they are ticking a box. Saw the Hemingway thing, off to the next stop. To my surprise, I don’t judge either response. What exactly are you supposed to feel at a shrine to a stranger's despair?

What I find in Ketchum is a town that has managed to honour Hemingway, but without being consumed by him. There is a collection of his photographs and correspondence at the local library. His grave is in a cemetery at the north end of town. A simple stone marker, “Ernest Miller Hemingway” and his dates. No special fanfare. His wife Mary is buried beside him. His granddaughter Margaux is buried nearby, her own suicide echoing through the family plot like a curse.

Scholarly symposiums are hosted at the Community Library. There are lectures, readings, the intellectual activities that would have bored Hemingway to tears when he was alive and now preserve his legacy. The town is able to keep him present but without turning him into a theme park.

At the Pioneer Saloon, I order a gin and tonic. Not his drink, but what the hell, I’m not trying to channel him, and ask the bartender about Papa. He gives me a shrug. “Lots of people come through asking about him,” he tells me. “He was just a guy who drank here a long time ago. We try not to make a big deal of it.”

But in their way, they do. There are pictures on the walls, along with the stories that are told. The stool he preferred, although it must have been replaced a dozen times since 1961. The mythology endures because mythology always does. And Hemingway understood, maybe better than anyone, how to carve a public persona that would outlive the private man.

My last morning, I drive up to Sun Valley. It’s everything Ketchum isn’t, polished, expensive and precious in that way ski resorts are when they cater to the one percent. Hemingway was here too, stayed at the lodge and fished the Silver Creek. But while Sun Valley feels like a movie set, Ketchum feels like the sort of place real people have real problems, even if they can stare at the mountains while having them.

I think of Hemingway’s Idaho years. The golden ones, when he was here for seasons of hunting, fishing and relative peace. And the terrible final ones, when he came here to die. What was it he was looking for? Simplicity? A place that existed outside the literary madness, outside the fame machine he had helped to build and that would ultimately crush him?

Or was he looking for permission? Permission to be ordinary, to fail and disappear? The mountains don’t care that you wrote The Sun Also Rises. The trout in the river don’t care about your Nobel Prize. In Ketchum, surrounded by the landscape that preceded and outlasted him, maybe he hoped to find some relief from being Hemingway.

But of course, he didn’t. You can’t outrun yourself, even in Idaho. The one you want to escape from is the one driving the car.

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s memoir of his Paris years, there is a moment when he writes about the “clean, well-lighted places” that protect us against the darkness. For all its beauty, Ketchum couldn’t provide enough light. It tried, though. It welcomed and protected him, gave him space to be human. When the end came, it honestly mourned him. Walking down Main Street as the sun lowers, turning the mountain tops purple and gold, I realise why he chose here. Not for the dying. You can do that anywhere. But for all the living that preceded it. For all the hunting and fishing, the conversations in bars, the seasons passing in their ancient rhythm. For a place that, if not home, then somewhere he could find peace.

He was wrong about that. The mountains remain though, eternal and indifferent. The river is still running, cold and clear. Ketchum endures as a testament, not to how a writer died, but that stubborn human hope that somehow and somewhere we might find the place that saves us. Even when we know that there is no such place at all.