On the streets of Havana, a 1955 Chrysler New Yorker carried Ernest Hemingway to the long bar at the Floridita for daiquiris mixed strong and sour. It took him to the hilltop farmhouse where he lived most of the last twenty-two years of his life. Then it disappeared. (more…)
The boys were raised in little wooden houses with palm frond roofs, some of them, and floors of dirt or concrete, lit by oil lanterns. The electric lights that glittered on the sequins of nightclub dancers in Havana didn’t reach the poor here, eight miles to the southeast, in the village of San Francisco de Paula.
Old men now, in their eighties, they look back on a time 75 years ago when a legend even while he lived enchanted their childhood (more…)
Just past Johnny Depp’s private island in the Caribbean sits Lee Stocking Island, a little piece of paradise that’s going to hell.
The coral reefs that surround it are some of the healthiest in the Atlantic. And they’re dying. They’re dying in so many different ways, from so many different causes, it’s hard to imagine how they could survive, and without them, what the oceans might look like. (more…)
The Brasserie Lipp is famous for three things: Its choucroute; its cevelas, cold, squishy sausages smothered in mustard; and the man who made those sausages famous, a young writer named Ernest Hemingway, who came here when he had enough francs in his pocket for a cheap lunch. It’s not so cheap anymore.
I had come to Paris’s Left Bank on a quest for all things Hemingway, and I dragged my fiancée Cristina along. Cristina, who is from Mexico, has not read much Hemingway, but she has a great sense of adventure, which she exhibited by ordering the house special without having any idea what the house special actually was.
“What am I eating?” she asked, taking a stab into what looked like pink flesh wrapped in octopus tendon over gristly bone. (more…)
BY DAVID FREY
PHOTOGRAPHY MARK OLIVER
ILLUSTRATION GINA SCANLON
On the morning of Ernest Hemingway’s death, long shadows tugged at a typewriter perched at the window where clear Idaho skies hovered over the Wood River Valley. Throughout his writing life, Hemingway had always visited Ketchum in the fall, when the impending winter carried a sharpness, and fallen aspen and cottonwood leaves perfumed the air with the bouquet of changing seasons. After much of a lifetime in Italy, Paris, Cuba, Spain and Africa, Ketchum had become home. Hemingway and his wife, Mary, left behind Caribbean fecundity for the arid West, a place where he had friends–actors, socialites and cowboys–from many years and many visits. This was his first summer.
Hemingway boasted never missing a sunrise, and the morning of July 2, 1961, was a glorious one. Sunlight spilled into the bedroom where he slept alone. Down the hall, in her separate room, Mary slept.
Ketchum still had the feel of an outpost on the edge of the wild. It reminded the Midwesterner with no college degree of rugged places he’d known in his six decades of rough living. The meadows near Silver Creek recalled the green hills of Africa. The dry, rugged hills teemed with Basque shepherds and, with their flocks, he was reminded of Spain.
Born in the waning days of the nineteenth century, an age of exploration succumbing to machine modernity, Hemingway was ill fit for a world turned Technicolor. His expatriate days were behind him, and he settled in this remote corner of America, still drawn to wild places even as the world’s wildness waned.
What would he tell us, I wonder, about the world he never lived to see? (more…)
Cristina and I step off the Metro at Chateau Rouge and step into the sunlight and into another world. It’s a Saturday, and Saturday is market day. The streets are filled with vendors in bright African clothes selling mangos and papayas, fish and lamb, African prints and pirate DVDs.
“It’s hard to say this is France,” Cristina says.
We’re meeting Sophie Nellis, our tour guide into the African side of Paris. Nellis is completed a master’s in Paris studies. Like many Americans and British lured to Paris, Nellis, who is British, was drawn to the Paris of Hemingway and his expat chums. It was the later wave of immigrants, though, that fascinate her now. (more…)
I’m a freelance journalist based near Washington, D.C., where I specialize in writing about food, the environment and travel writing from a shrinking globe. I hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to contact me at david@davidmfrey.com.