Whiskey and a Grave

It was early October, and in the northern American backcountry where I live, that means the air was cool and crisp and the trees were a symphony of yellow, orange, and brown. The grasslands were a sea of copper.

I was going on a quick two-day road trip with my best friend Craig, a fellow poet and writer, to the Wood River Valley of Idaho’s Smoky Mountains. Our journey was a pilgrimage of sorts with but one goal: to pay our respects at the grave of the almighty Ernest Hemingway, my own personal deity in the realms of literature.

Craig and I live in separate little hamlets in eastern Wyoming so the drive, including a side trip to pick up Craig, was about 12 hours to reach Ketchum, ID, a place Hemingway lived and loved and ultimately took his own life with his favorite shotgun on a July morning in 1961.

A drive across the vast rugged landscape of my home state of Wyoming, with its high snowcapped ranges, shimmering plains and deserts, and mighty pine forests, was a breathtaking adventure in itself, but that’s not what this story is about.

We eventually made our way around the majestic Tetons and crossed over into Idaho. Racing across that state, at dusk we finally turned north up into the Smoky Mountains. The sky was a swell of pink, lavender, and buttery yellow, all fading to the violets and blues of nightfall, when we finally rolled into the small mountain town of Ketchum, racing to the local cemetery to visit Hemingway’s grave while there was still some light. We didn’t want to wait until morning. In our wrinkled flannels, sweaters, and jeans, grimy with an entire day of driving, smoking, and eating gas station food, we had a singular focus — to visit Hemingway.

Ketchum’s cemetery was small and it didn’t take us long to spot Hemingway’s grave between two old pines, a long flat stone adorned with coins, notebooks, and various bottles of wine and liquor left of fellow literary pilgrims.

We stood for a moment before it, looking down at that powerful name that had meant so much to me. I’d been in Hemingway’s house in Key West, Florida, but he didn’t feel as present there. He’d felt like a ghost or a shadow, long since departed. But there, standing at his heavy grave in the last of the autumn light, his bones beneath my feet with the roots and dark earth, Hemingway felt more real than anything else in the world.

I knelt down and ran my hands over the name that was carved into the stone. “Thank you, Papa,” I whispered. “Thank you for everything.”

I stood then, pulled a metal flask of honey whiskey from my back pocket, took a drink, and passed it to Craig. My friend took a swallow, passed it back to me, and I took another long pull of the whiskey. The flask had an inscription of a very fitting Hemingway quote to be emblazoned on a flask: “Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”

After taking a final drink, I poured a long stream of the honey whiskey into the pine needle-shrouded earth next to the heavy stone slab. A final drink for Hemingway.

Then I placed the flask, half-full, on the grave with the other bottles. It was a gift or an offering, a symbol of respect and gratitude for the man that wrote the words that would completely change the course of my life.

At that, Craig and I shared a hug, ambled back to my car, and made our way to our hotel for the night. We were hungry and weary, and a belly full of cooked trout and white wine sounded like the perfect way to end the day.