Hemingway Fished Here
Chuck Snearly
Mopey Jack
Call me Jack.
I am an English professor at an engineering school. It is an imperfect fit, but I make the best of it. The would-be engineers I teach are practical sorts, they often ask how learning about literature will help them in life. I don’t have a good answer, but I’m working on it.
Since you don’t know Jack, let me catch you up.
I’ve been made a widower twice and died once myself. I’ve read lots of books and written a few. One time I broke up a drug ring that was run by some of my students; two of the people involved were murdered.
It happens.
My latest late wife had a Ph.D. in Physics and a passion for science.
I helped her conduct an experiment that should have revolutionized quantum physics, but was mostly ignored. She believed that the implications of quantum physics were clear but impossible: the universe is made not of matter, but of perceptions.
Matter doesn’t matter.
What you see is what you get.
She was also passionate about word games: palindromes, anagrams, ananyms, acronyms. Her epitaph is a tribute to both her passions and a nod to Schrodinger’s cat: “Never odd or even.”
All stories for some other time. This is the story of how I headed to the dark side of the moon, thinking failure was my only option, and almost died a second time. It starts like this:
Some time ago, having little money in the bank and even less to occupy my time I decided to go see the literary part of the world. My second wife had just died after a long battle with cancer, and I had finished writing another book the world would ignore. In the depths of my despair I came to believe the only way out of my misery was to dive deeper into the darkness.
I decided to go on a book tour.
Why a book tour?
Because a book tour is the answer to the question, “How can things get any worse?”
I’m not talking about a successful author tour, where crowds of admirers hang on your every word, overpay for a hard-cover copy of your book with a smile, then stand in line for hours waiting for you to scribble something illegible and holler, “Next!”
That’s a dream cruise, not a journey into the heart of darkness.
To have your soul crushed properly, you need to go on a wannabe–successful-author tour, where you sit at a card table behind a mountain of unsold books, direct the occasional misguided pilgrim to the restrooms, and watch so many people avert their eyes and turn away that you begin to imagine you are selling time shares.
Embarrassment. Discomfort. Humiliation.
That’s what I wanted.
It was a long-shot chance at the lesser of two evils, a desperate hope that a miserable time would distract me from my unrelenting grief. I should point out that I am no stranger to mourning. It took me decades to come to terms with the loss of my first wife, and that sadness will always be with me.
But this was different.
This time the sadness was pulling me toward places I had never been, thoughts I had never had. What-ifs flew around in my brain like pigeons from hell. A dark path was calling me. I didn’t want to go down it, so instead I took the road less traveled by.
I was hoping to have a difficult time.
My hopes were greatly exceeded.
~ ~ ~
The Tour – First Day In Seney
“What do you see?”
Baha was excited.
“It looks like about a hundred people,” I said.
“One hundred and seven,” Baha said. “Not bad for the first day of your tour, eh?”
Baha is my agent. He’s a Yooper: a person who lives in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Upper Peninsula, U.P., Yooper—you get it. Being a Yooper, Baha adds the region’s idiosyncratic “eh?” to the end of every other sentence. Don’t worry, over time it becomes much less annoying. Some say it even approaches being charming, eh?
I met Baha at Michigan Technological University, the engineering school I work at in Houghton, a town in the Keweenaw Peninsula, which on a map looks like a shark’s fin sticking out into Lake Superior. MTU was founded in 1885 as the Michigan Mining School to train engineers to harvest the immense wealth of copper in the ground beneath them. In time the copper disappeared, but the university remained, and eventually I showed up.
In addition to mandatory Great Books courses, I teach a course that focuses on the impact Michigan had on Ernest Hemingway’s writing. That course inspired me to write a book, and that book led to my book tour.
It’s a good book with a terrible title my publisher insisted on using: Michigan In Ernest. I told him it sounded vaguely homoerotic and that I preferred Up In Michigan. He said my title sounded stupid and offered this compromise: use his title or go perform a sexual act on myself that was as unappealing as it was impossible.
Compromises were made, the book was published, the tour began.
The first stop was Seney, the small Upper Peninsula town where Nick Adams goes fishing in the Hemingway short story “Big Two-Hearted River.” We kicked off the tour by visiting a marker on the nearby Fox River celebrating the trip that inspired the story. It read:
Hemingway Fished Here
Baha took a picture of me by the marker and posted it on social media as part of his worldwide marketing campaign. In the caption he explained Hemingway thought Two Hearted, the name of a river farther north, worked better as a title than Fox.
Several people gave his post a thumbs up.
The town of Seney is near the Seney National Wildlife Refuge, a 95,000-acre bird watcher’s paradise where hundreds of migrating species stop to rest before they head across Lake Superior. As fate would have it, the Michigan Audubon Society was hosting a bird-watching weekend in Seney that attracted Birders from all over the state. Thanks to Baha’s surprisingly effective efforts, I was the guest speaker at their Sunday night dinner.
Bitter experience has taught me that giving a speech to a large group while they’re eating is a terrible idea. When it comes to capturing a crowd’s attention, a speaker on a podium doesn’t stand a chance against a pork chop on a plate. But since I was desperately hoping the tour would be a disaster, I was eager to speak to the feeding birders. Making my way to the lectern, I was certain they would be distracted to the point of rudeness during my remarks.
I was wrong.
They ate quietly and listened attentively as I outlined the places Hemingway had visited in Michigan and explained the impact they had on his writing. They nodded at my insights and laughed at my jokes. With growing alarm, I realized my talk was on the verge of being a success. I decided to put down my note cards and ad-lib my way to failure.
“Of course, Hemingway is well known for his love of hunting and fishing,” I said. “But did you know he also was an enthusiastic wingshooter?”
The birders chirruped what I hoped was disapproval, so I doubled down on my plan.
“For those who don’t know, a wingshooter is someone who enjoys shooting birds out of the sky,” I said. “They wait until these beautiful creatures have taken flight, then they kill them.”
The crowd began murmuring.
I pressed on.
“Hemingway shot sand grouse in Africa, jacksnipe in Idaho, quail in Arkansas,” I continued. “And ruff grouse right here in Michigan.”
The murmuring escalated into groans.
It was time for the kill shot.
“How about a round of applause for the great sportsman Ernest Hemingway, who, with great determination and expert marksmanship, killed thousands of birds all over the world?”
I smiled as the boos rained down on me.
~ ~ ~
The Tour – Second Day
Mojito Monday
“Do you see him?”
Baha was excited.
Sitting at the other end of the bar was the local librarian, who also served on the selection committee for the State of Michigan’s Notable Book awards. Baha had invited him to my book signing, hoping to schmooze him into making Michigan In Ernest a notable book.
“I see him,” I said.
“The publicity from being a Notable Book is money in the bank,” he said. “Don’t screw it up by rambling on about wingshooting.”
“I won’t,” I promised.
“You were talking to bird lovers, for chrissake,” Baha said. “More than a hundred people and not one book sold.”
I had neglected to tell Baha I wanted the tour to be a disaster, figuring the nature of wannabe book tours would take care of things for me. I was also counting on the fact that, as my agent, Baha had been more lucky than good.
I assumed his luck would change soon.
It happens.
After a lifetime of odd jobs and side hustles, Baha had jumped into the agenting game after sitting in on one of my lectures. I knew he wasn’t one of my students because he was older, dressed in overalls spattered with paint that matched the new color of the building we were in, and paying attention to what I was saying.
He also smelled strongly of marijuana, though that didn’t differentiate him from my students, and it didn’t bother me. His attentiveness was so flattering that I waited until the class was over to confront him. When I stopped him on his way out the door, he had a ready explanation for crashing my lecture.
“I’m a handyman who likes a good book, eh?” he said. “Whenever I have a job near the school here, I try to sit in on an English class so I can learn more about them books. Most of the professors know me and don’t mind, eh?”
When I asked his name he told me his friends called him Baha.
“B-A-H-A, Baha,” he said.
“That’s an ananym for a famous literary character,” I said. “My wife will love it.”
She did.
Then she died.
In the days that followed Baha kept painting the building, coming back to my class, and smelling strongly of marijuana. We struck up an odd friendship of sorts, with me exploring the great books and him explaining his get-rich-quick schemes. The ultimate goal of these schemes was for Baha to retire to the city of Zihuatanejo in Mexico, which is where the hero of his favorite novel, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, had escaped to with his ill-gotten gains.
“That’s how I got the nickname Baha, eh?” he explained.
When I explained that Zihuatanejo is in the state of Guerrero, and not in Baja, he laughed.
“You stick to literature, Professor, leave geography to me, eh?” he said.
I decided there was no point in telling him he was misspelling his name.
When Baha learned I had written a book he deemed it a promising scam and offered his services as my agent. It was his level of confidence, not his grasp of facts, that sold me on him.
“How hard can it be, eh?” he said.
I knew all too well how hard it could be, but I figured he couldn’t do any worse than the other agents I’d had. I was right about that, but not by much.
What Baha lacked in knowledge, contacts, and ability, he had made up for with his unorthodox methods and unbridled obsession with chasing literary success, which he defined as making lots of money. Foreshadow alert: most literary agents don’t throw rocks through publishers’ windows, pitch manuscripts like used car salesmen, or ply book prize judges with free drinks to win coveted awards.
Baha did.
He said it beat unplugging toilets.
Baha ignored the typical Soup-Nazi–like submission requirements publishers insisted on. He sent out queries that used the wrong font, had unacceptable line spacing, or were printed on stationery that wasn’t the correct shade of white. All unforgivable sins that will get your manuscript a life sentence on the slush pile.
Books like that— turned down after submission to publishers —are said to have “Died on Sub.” Unlike my previous agents, Baha figured out a way to escape that terrible fate.
He had only been on the job for a few weeks when he pitched my manuscript to Frank Lee, the person in charge of Michigan Tech’s university press. Up until that point Frank had refused to even have a meeting with me or my agents. Baha solved that problem by throwing a rock through Frank’s window and showing up to fix it.
“Weren’t you worried about the real repairman showing up?” I asked.
“I know the maintenance guy who handles that building,” Baha said. “I had him call me when Frank asked him to send somebody to repair his window.”
“I’m going to be Frank with you,” Frank told me later. “The only reason I agreed to publish your book was because your agent was so persuasive.”
Frank liked to make that self-referential joke whenever he could. And yes, he was the person who told me what I could do to myself if I didn’t like the title he chose.
After becoming the first agent to ever push one of my books past self-publishing, Baha’s obsession with success became all-consuming. He had great expectations that Michigan In Ernest would become a bestseller. To use the oldest of tropes, he had the highest of hopes.
Or maybe he was just high and had hopes.
“Our ship’s coming in, eh?” he said. “We are going to make a boatload of money.”
Baha’s fame and fortune fixation was why I found myself in the City Park Grill in Petoskey, Michigan, craning my neck to see the Notable Books man. I was sitting in the second seat from the end of the bar, where a young Hemingway once sat writing his earliest stories. Instead of a speech I would read excerpts and answer questions in a back room before returning to my special seat, where a pile of books sat on the bar waiting to be signed.
To his credit, Baha had made no left turn unstoned in arranging the evening. Before we went inside he took my picture standing by a statue of Hemingway in a nearby park; the young prodigy leaving Petoskey to become a reporter in Toronto, the old tragedy using his legacy to sell books.
When we got to the bar Baha posted the picture. While we waited for thumbs to turn up he urged the faithful who were gathering to enjoy the low-price libations of Mojito Monday. They took up his suggestion with great enthusiasm.
So did I.
The third time I turned and stared at the Notable Books man he walked over to introduce himself. I didn’t quite catch his name in the noisy bar, but I shook his hand.
“I’m looking forward to reading your book,” he said. “We’re quite proud of Hemingway’s connections to this area, especially right here at the City Park Grill.”
He seemed like a pleasant, friendly, well-meaning man. In other circumstances I’m sure we would have gotten along quite well. But the boos and bad vibes in Seney had intensified my desire for a disaster to drown my sorrows in. Like Edgar Allen Poe in “The Raven,” I was desperately seeking “respite and nepenthe” from my memories.
Author’s Note: in Greek mythology nepenthe is a potion that erases sorrow from your mind, Homer refers to it in The Odyssey. That evening I was experimenting with a modern version of nepenthe – multiple mojitos. They didn’t help with my sorrow, but they may have contributed to what I did next.
“Hemingway never visited the City Park Grill,” I said.
“I beg your pardon,” the man said.
“When Hemingway was here this place was called the Annex,” I said. “It wasn’t named City Park Grill until years later.”
“Of course,” the man said. “I only meant …”
“You need to get your facts straight if you plan to keep using Hemingway as a cheap tourist attraction,” I said.
The man stood, staring at me in frozen disbelief until Baha stepped between us.
“Thanks again for coming out tonight,” he said. “We really appreciate it. It’s Mojito Monday! Why don’t you drink up, the mojitos are on me, eh?”
“That would be great,” the man said. “You know, the reason they have Mojito Mondays here is because mojitos were Hemingway’s favorite drink.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said.
“I beg your pardon?” the man said.
“Jack, what the hell are you doing?” Baha said.
“In Key West and Havana his favorite drink was a daquiri,” I said. “In Paris, sitting at the end of the bar writing The Sun Also Rises at Closerie des Lilas, it was a dry martini.”
“I’d heard that mojitos …”
“The whole mojito story is a hoax,” I said.
“Well I …”
“In the late 1950s the owners of a bar in Havana called La Bodeguita del Medio were trying to drum up business,” I said. “They forged a note in Hemingway’s handwriting that said he liked to drink mojitos there and hung it up behind the bar.”
“That’s interesting …”
“That’s bullshit,” I said.
“I’m not sure …”
“It was a cheap trick that was used to attract tourists to a bar in Cuba,” I said. “Now it’s a cheap trick being used to attract tourists to a bar in Michigan.”
At this point Baha hurriedly brought us all mojitos, hoping to calm the man down and shut me up. It didn’t work, for him or for me. After several more mojitos from Baha and several more insults from me, the man threw a punch that knocked me back over the bar and into the pile of books. The books and I crashed to the floor and a moment later all hell broke loose above us. It was soon apparent the Hemingway fans who had come to see me shared his enthusiasm for barroom brawling.
I lay on the floor smiling as the dogs of war were unleashed above me.
~ ~ ~
The Tour – Third Day
Green Light
“Do you see it?”
Baha was excited.
We were sitting on the back patio of the Walloon Lake Hotel, looking across the water.
“It’s a green light,” Baha said. “Just like in his book.”
“I can’t see anything,” I said. “And he didn’t write that book.”
After much finger pointing, head positioning, and eye squinting, I agreed that I saw a green light at end of a distant dock just to get Baha to stop pestering me.
“That’s the Hemingway family cottage, eh?” he said.
“Windemere," I said.
“It’s not too windy here, but it’s sure getting cold fast now that the sun’s down,” he said. “Good thing your book signing is inside, eh?”
Windemere is the name of the Hemingway family cottage on Walloon Lake, but this was not the right time to enlighten Baha, who was still pissed off about last night. No books had been sold at the City Park Grill, to make things even worse many had been stolen during the ugly brawl.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to sabotage this book tour,” Baha said. “Promise me you won’t do anything stupid like that again, eh?”
“Nevermore,” I said.
Once again, Baha had done an unexpectedly outstanding job of preparation. We arrived at the hotel and went immediately to a Hemingway statue in front of the marina next door. It was a bit more whimsical than yesterday’s statue. This was an older Ernest sitting on a bench holding a fishing pole, a cat on his shoulder reaching for the fish on his line.
Baha encouraged me to also act whimsically, so I stood next to the statue and pretended to reach for the fish. He took my picture and posted it, a dozen people gave it a thumbs up.
After the photo op we went inside and checked out the conference room where I was supposed to do what I wasn’t able to the night before—read passages from my book and answer questions from the audience. Despite the assurances I had given Baha that I would behave myself, after last night’s debacle I was even more drawn to the sweet release of self-destruction. Assuaging my grief called for a stupid and futile gesture, and I was just the guy to do it.
The conference room looked fine, with books stacked high, lectern in place, microphone tested and ready. We went to the back patio of the hotel to watch the sun go down. As a glorious sunset lit up the lake in red, yellow, and orange, Baha gave me lessons in book tour etiquette.
“This time don’t be an asshole, eh?” he said.
When the sun disappeared Baha pointed out Windemere to me, issued a final warning to behave myself, and led me back to the conference room. We arrived to find the door locked and my books stacked in boxes in the hallway. A handwritten sign taped to the wall read, “Tonight’s Event Cancelled.” Baha let loose a string of expletives and headed to the front desk to talk to the manager. I stayed behind to make sure I didn’t have books stolen from me two nights in a row.
Baha returned and explained that the Walloon Lake Hotel staff had gotten wind of what happened ten miles down the road at the City Park Grill and were worried about a repeat performance. We were welcome to stay the night as guests, but anything involving a crowd of people was strictly prohibited. After stashing the books in Baha’s room we went back to the patio.
It was a lot colder and darker.
“No worries, I got a Plan B, eh?” Baha said. “The Hemingway cottage is still owned by the family. His nephew’s son owns it.”
“Did you even read my book?” I asked. “I interviewed Hemingway’s great-nephew over the phone when I wrote the chapter about the family cottage. He’s a nice guy.”
“I don’t know how great Hemingway’s nephew is, all I know is this guy is his son,” Baha said. “I invited him to come to your reading, but he said he was having people over, eh?”
“That’s too bad,” I said. “I would have liked talking to him in person.”
“That’s exactly what you’re going to do,” Baha said. “He invited us to come over after the reading was finished.”
“I’m definitely finished reading for the night,” I said.
“No shit you’re finished, eh?” Baha said. “So let’s go to the party.”
Baha took a moment to remind me once again of book tour etiquette. When he finished, I turned to walk back through the hotel.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“You said we were going to the party.”
“We are but we’re not driving,” he said. “We’re taking a boat, eh?”
Once again, the constantly stoned but consistently strategic Baha had made plans in advance. Now he was ready to execute.
We walked along the shoreline boardwalk to the marina and down to the end of a long dock. Waiting there for us was a pontoon boat Baha had rented for the occasion.
“I wanted to surprise you after your reading, eh?” he said. “I stashed some books on this boat, we’ll take them over to Hemingway’s party, and you can sign them for him and his guests.”
“That’s a great idea, Baha,” I said.
“You sound surprised,” he said.
“I am surprised,” I said. “I never would have thought of taking a boat.”
“I meant was you sounded surprised I had a great idea,” he said.
I laughed at what he said but didn’t deny it. We walked onto the boat, untied the ropes, and pushed off the dock. Baha started up the motor and we whined off into the darkness.
“It’s going to take a while to get there, eh?” he said. “Walloon Lake is nine miles long and a mile wide. You a good swimmer?”
“Not really,” I said.
For a while we bounced through the darkness without talking. Then Baha shouted out a confession over the howling motor.
“You know why I didn’t tell you we were coming here ahead of time?” he asked. “I wanted to see if you could do the reading without causing trouble, eh?”
“Makes sense,” I said.
“So you’re not going to cause any more trouble, right?” he said.
I shook my head in the dark.
I can’t remember if I shook my head up and down or sideways. Either way, I’m not sure that Baha could see it, or that it mattered. A short time later he began asking me a series of out-of-context questions about dead authors.
“That John Kennedy Toole guy, eh?” he said. “He wrote A Confederacy of Dunces. Didn’t get published until after he died, then it’s a big hit, eh?”
“Toole was a struggling writer who committed suicide when his book didn’t get published,” I said. “His mother took his unpublished manuscript to Walker Percy, a famous author, and he got it published. It became a tremendous critical and commercial success.”
“Big success, eh?”
Baha went on to talk about Philip K. Dick, Franz Kafka, Herman Melville, and other writers who weren’t successful until they were dead.
“Actually, Melville’s early novels were financially successful,” I said. “But he tried to write a more serious novel, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale.”
“I never read The Whale, but I’m a big fan of Moby Dick,” Baha said. “I’m a sailor myself, just like in the book, only I’ve done all my sailing on the Great Lakes, eh?”
“Unfortunately, Moby Dick became Melville’s first major failure as a writer,” I said. “He had to get a job as a customs official to support his family.”
“But after he died that book was more in demand than ice water in Hell, eh?” Baha said.
He paused for a moment, then began asking a series of questions about agents’ fees, posthumous publishing rights, copyright law, and more. I answered them to the best of my knowledge until he finally fell silent, appearing to be lost in thought. The high-pitched howl of the motor speeding us across the lake made the only sound until Baha spoke again.
“I got beers in a cooler back by the motor,” he said. “Go grab us a couple, eh?”
Rising and falling as we chopped through the waves, I carefully boat-walked my way to the back of the pontoon, opened the back gate, and stepped out onto the rear platform. Holding onto the bimini top with one hand to steady myself, I reached down and flipped open the lid of the cooler. As I bent down farther to grab a beer I had a life-changing experience.
I was shoved from behind.
A heartbeat later I tumbled into the icy black water.
~ ~ ~
Epilogue
Eh Minus
I’m not sure how long I remained underwater. Stunned after hitting the surface at high speed and in shock from the icy cold water, I felt as though my brain was frozen. At first I wasn’t even sure which way was up. The only thing I was certain of was that I was going to die.
I finally saw a light and began swimming toward it. The light turned out to be the bright side of the moon, which guided me back up to the surface. As I gulped in lungfuls of air, I couldn’t help noticing how glad I was to be alive.
Unfortunately, clawing my way back to the surface was just the start of my ordeal. I flailed around in the freezing water for what felt like a lifetime. Then, as fortune would have it, the cooler popped up next to me, snapping me out of the panic that would have drowned me and offering a floatation device that helped me make it to the shore.
Getting to the rocky beach took a lot longer than I hoped it would. At times I thought about giving up, but then I remembered how glad I felt to be alive. The moonlight helped me see where I was going as I walked back to the hotel.
Storytelling 101: First person narrators cannot be dead, unless he/she/they are a ghost, which I am not. Obviously I survived or I wouldn’t be writing this story.
When I saw Baha the next morning he said the whole thing was a practical joke.
“You gotta have a sense of humor, eh?” he said. “You worship Hemingway, I thought you’d like being baptized in his lake.”
He couldn’t or wouldn’t explain why he didn’t turn back to get me. I learned later that he didn’t tell anyone at Windemere I had fallen off the boat on the way over. He definitely didn’t tell them I had been pushed off.
I told him I didn’t think his joke was funny.
My take on what happened that night is this: I think he was on to my self-sabotaging ways and didn’t want me messing up the meet-and-greet with the descendants of Ernest Hemingway. An endorsement from the Hemingway family would help my book sales whether I was alive or dead. He probably figured I would make it to shore, but if I did drown it would be icing on the cake. The news of my untimely and ironic death—Hemingway author dies in Hemingway lake—would boost sales even more.
In the end I couldn’t prove it was attempted murder, so I had to let it go.
It was not easy.
Word about the City Park incident spread quickly, the rest of the tour was cancelled. In its absence I tried distracting myself by rereading some of Hemingway’s writing. I found a quote from The Old Man and the Sea that gave me some comfort: “I may not be as strong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.”
Resolution is a fancy word for what the Finnish call “sisu.”
Sisu means an unwillingness to give up even under the most adverse conditions. It is something the Finns who came to the U.P. to work in dark and dangerous copper mines had in great abundance. My grandparents were from Finland, growing up I spent every summer at their home near the Quincy Mine in Hancock.
Some of their sisu may have trickled down to me.
It happens.
I decided the creative process might be more helpful than the destructive process, so I’m writing another book, a fictional account of love, loss and redemption, a real hoot, eh? I hope it becomes a best-seller, but I also know that the best-selling fiction book of all time is Don Quixote, which I find hilariously ironic. A delusional man on an impossible quest seems like an appropriate metaphor for what I’m doing.
So it goes.
Hemingway ended up killing himself, which doesn’t invalidate his Old Man quote. It just means he was speaking from experience when he wrote about pain and perseverance. I’ll end this story with a Hemingway quote I find comforting in a different way: “All stories, if continued far enough, end in death.”
I was truly sorry when I heard that Baha was dead.
That night at the Hemingway cottage Baha met a documentary filmmaker who was launching an expedition to find lost gold in Lake Superior. Using his jack-of-all-trades credentials and knowledge of the local waters, he signed on as a member of the crew. A submersible vessel he was piloting went down in Lake Superior twenty miles north of the shark’s fin.
Normally bacteria create decay that causes a sunken body to float to the surface after a few days. Lake Superior is so cold year round that bacterial growth is inhibited, so bodies sink and never resurface.
Baha is never coming back.
I take comfort in the fact that he is where he would want to be, sleeping with the fishes and keeping watch for the gold.
One must imagine Baha happy.
~ ~ ~
May 2026
Chuck Snearly
Mopey Jack
Call me Jack.
I am an English professor at an engineering school. It is an imperfect fit, but I make the best of it. The would-be engineers I teach are practical sorts, they often ask how learning about literature will help them in life. I don’t have a good answer, but I’m working on it.
Since you don’t know Jack, let me catch you up.
I’ve been made a widower twice and died once myself. I’ve read lots of books and written a few. One time I broke up a drug ring that was run by some of my students; two of the people involved were murdered.
It happens.
My latest late wife had a Ph.D. in Physics and a passion for science.
I helped her conduct an experiment that should have revolutionized quantum physics, but was mostly ignored. She believed that the implications of quantum physics were clear but impossible: the universe is made not of matter, but of perceptions.
Matter doesn’t matter.
What you see is what you get.
She was also passionate about word games: palindromes, anagrams, ananyms, acronyms. Her epitaph is a tribute to both her passions and a nod to Schrodinger’s cat: “Never odd or even.”
All stories for some other time. This is the story of how I headed to the dark side of the moon, thinking failure was my only option, and almost died a second time. It starts like this:
Some time ago, having little money in the bank and even less to occupy my time I decided to go see the literary part of the world. My second wife had just died after a long battle with cancer, and I had finished writing another book the world would ignore. In the depths of my despair I came to believe the only way out of my misery was to dive deeper into the darkness.
I decided to go on a book tour.
Why a book tour?
Because a book tour is the answer to the question, “How can things get any worse?”
I’m not talking about a successful author tour, where crowds of admirers hang on your every word, overpay for a hard-cover copy of your book with a smile, then stand in line for hours waiting for you to scribble something illegible and holler, “Next!”
That’s a dream cruise, not a journey into the heart of darkness.
To have your soul crushed properly, you need to go on a wannabe–successful-author tour, where you sit at a card table behind a mountain of unsold books, direct the occasional misguided pilgrim to the restrooms, and watch so many people avert their eyes and turn away that you begin to imagine you are selling time shares.
Embarrassment. Discomfort. Humiliation.
That’s what I wanted.
It was a long-shot chance at the lesser of two evils, a desperate hope that a miserable time would distract me from my unrelenting grief. I should point out that I am no stranger to mourning. It took me decades to come to terms with the loss of my first wife, and that sadness will always be with me.
But this was different.
This time the sadness was pulling me toward places I had never been, thoughts I had never had. What-ifs flew around in my brain like pigeons from hell. A dark path was calling me. I didn’t want to go down it, so instead I took the road less traveled by.
I was hoping to have a difficult time.
My hopes were greatly exceeded.
~ ~ ~
The Tour – First Day In Seney
“What do you see?”
Baha was excited.
“It looks like about a hundred people,” I said.
“One hundred and seven,” Baha said. “Not bad for the first day of your tour, eh?”
Baha is my agent. He’s a Yooper: a person who lives in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Upper Peninsula, U.P., Yooper—you get it. Being a Yooper, Baha adds the region’s idiosyncratic “eh?” to the end of every other sentence. Don’t worry, over time it becomes much less annoying. Some say it even approaches being charming, eh?
I met Baha at Michigan Technological University, the engineering school I work at in Houghton, a town in the Keweenaw Peninsula, which on a map looks like a shark’s fin sticking out into Lake Superior. MTU was founded in 1885 as the Michigan Mining School to train engineers to harvest the immense wealth of copper in the ground beneath them. In time the copper disappeared, but the university remained, and eventually I showed up.
In addition to mandatory Great Books courses, I teach a course that focuses on the impact Michigan had on Ernest Hemingway’s writing. That course inspired me to write a book, and that book led to my book tour.
It’s a good book with a terrible title my publisher insisted on using: Michigan In Ernest. I told him it sounded vaguely homoerotic and that I preferred Up In Michigan. He said my title sounded stupid and offered this compromise: use his title or go perform a sexual act on myself that was as unappealing as it was impossible.
Compromises were made, the book was published, the tour began.
The first stop was Seney, the small Upper Peninsula town where Nick Adams goes fishing in the Hemingway short story “Big Two-Hearted River.” We kicked off the tour by visiting a marker on the nearby Fox River celebrating the trip that inspired the story. It read:
Hemingway Fished Here
Baha took a picture of me by the marker and posted it on social media as part of his worldwide marketing campaign. In the caption he explained Hemingway thought Two Hearted, the name of a river farther north, worked better as a title than Fox.
Several people gave his post a thumbs up.
The town of Seney is near the Seney National Wildlife Refuge, a 95,000-acre bird watcher’s paradise where hundreds of migrating species stop to rest before they head across Lake Superior. As fate would have it, the Michigan Audubon Society was hosting a bird-watching weekend in Seney that attracted Birders from all over the state. Thanks to Baha’s surprisingly effective efforts, I was the guest speaker at their Sunday night dinner.
Bitter experience has taught me that giving a speech to a large group while they’re eating is a terrible idea. When it comes to capturing a crowd’s attention, a speaker on a podium doesn’t stand a chance against a pork chop on a plate. But since I was desperately hoping the tour would be a disaster, I was eager to speak to the feeding birders. Making my way to the lectern, I was certain they would be distracted to the point of rudeness during my remarks.
I was wrong.
They ate quietly and listened attentively as I outlined the places Hemingway had visited in Michigan and explained the impact they had on his writing. They nodded at my insights and laughed at my jokes. With growing alarm, I realized my talk was on the verge of being a success. I decided to put down my note cards and ad-lib my way to failure.
“Of course, Hemingway is well known for his love of hunting and fishing,” I said. “But did you know he also was an enthusiastic wingshooter?”
The birders chirruped what I hoped was disapproval, so I doubled down on my plan.
“For those who don’t know, a wingshooter is someone who enjoys shooting birds out of the sky,” I said. “They wait until these beautiful creatures have taken flight, then they kill them.”
The crowd began murmuring.
I pressed on.
“Hemingway shot sand grouse in Africa, jacksnipe in Idaho, quail in Arkansas,” I continued. “And ruff grouse right here in Michigan.”
The murmuring escalated into groans.
It was time for the kill shot.
“How about a round of applause for the great sportsman Ernest Hemingway, who, with great determination and expert marksmanship, killed thousands of birds all over the world?”
I smiled as the boos rained down on me.
~ ~ ~
The Tour – Second Day
Mojito Monday
“Do you see him?”
Baha was excited.
Sitting at the other end of the bar was the local librarian, who also served on the selection committee for the State of Michigan’s Notable Book awards. Baha had invited him to my book signing, hoping to schmooze him into making Michigan In Ernest a notable book.
“I see him,” I said.
“The publicity from being a Notable Book is money in the bank,” he said. “Don’t screw it up by rambling on about wingshooting.”
“I won’t,” I promised.
“You were talking to bird lovers, for chrissake,” Baha said. “More than a hundred people and not one book sold.”
I had neglected to tell Baha I wanted the tour to be a disaster, figuring the nature of wannabe book tours would take care of things for me. I was also counting on the fact that, as my agent, Baha had been more lucky than good.
I assumed his luck would change soon.
It happens.
After a lifetime of odd jobs and side hustles, Baha had jumped into the agenting game after sitting in on one of my lectures. I knew he wasn’t one of my students because he was older, dressed in overalls spattered with paint that matched the new color of the building we were in, and paying attention to what I was saying.
He also smelled strongly of marijuana, though that didn’t differentiate him from my students, and it didn’t bother me. His attentiveness was so flattering that I waited until the class was over to confront him. When I stopped him on his way out the door, he had a ready explanation for crashing my lecture.
“I’m a handyman who likes a good book, eh?” he said. “Whenever I have a job near the school here, I try to sit in on an English class so I can learn more about them books. Most of the professors know me and don’t mind, eh?”
When I asked his name he told me his friends called him Baha.
“B-A-H-A, Baha,” he said.
“That’s an ananym for a famous literary character,” I said. “My wife will love it.”
She did.
Then she died.
In the days that followed Baha kept painting the building, coming back to my class, and smelling strongly of marijuana. We struck up an odd friendship of sorts, with me exploring the great books and him explaining his get-rich-quick schemes. The ultimate goal of these schemes was for Baha to retire to the city of Zihuatanejo in Mexico, which is where the hero of his favorite novel, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, had escaped to with his ill-gotten gains.
“That’s how I got the nickname Baha, eh?” he explained.
When I explained that Zihuatanejo is in the state of Guerrero, and not in Baja, he laughed.
“You stick to literature, Professor, leave geography to me, eh?” he said.
I decided there was no point in telling him he was misspelling his name.
When Baha learned I had written a book he deemed it a promising scam and offered his services as my agent. It was his level of confidence, not his grasp of facts, that sold me on him.
“How hard can it be, eh?” he said.
I knew all too well how hard it could be, but I figured he couldn’t do any worse than the other agents I’d had. I was right about that, but not by much.
What Baha lacked in knowledge, contacts, and ability, he had made up for with his unorthodox methods and unbridled obsession with chasing literary success, which he defined as making lots of money. Foreshadow alert: most literary agents don’t throw rocks through publishers’ windows, pitch manuscripts like used car salesmen, or ply book prize judges with free drinks to win coveted awards.
Baha did.
He said it beat unplugging toilets.
Baha ignored the typical Soup-Nazi–like submission requirements publishers insisted on. He sent out queries that used the wrong font, had unacceptable line spacing, or were printed on stationery that wasn’t the correct shade of white. All unforgivable sins that will get your manuscript a life sentence on the slush pile.
Books like that— turned down after submission to publishers —are said to have “Died on Sub.” Unlike my previous agents, Baha figured out a way to escape that terrible fate.
He had only been on the job for a few weeks when he pitched my manuscript to Frank Lee, the person in charge of Michigan Tech’s university press. Up until that point Frank had refused to even have a meeting with me or my agents. Baha solved that problem by throwing a rock through Frank’s window and showing up to fix it.
“Weren’t you worried about the real repairman showing up?” I asked.
“I know the maintenance guy who handles that building,” Baha said. “I had him call me when Frank asked him to send somebody to repair his window.”
“I’m going to be Frank with you,” Frank told me later. “The only reason I agreed to publish your book was because your agent was so persuasive.”
Frank liked to make that self-referential joke whenever he could. And yes, he was the person who told me what I could do to myself if I didn’t like the title he chose.
After becoming the first agent to ever push one of my books past self-publishing, Baha’s obsession with success became all-consuming. He had great expectations that Michigan In Ernest would become a bestseller. To use the oldest of tropes, he had the highest of hopes.
Or maybe he was just high and had hopes.
“Our ship’s coming in, eh?” he said. “We are going to make a boatload of money.”
Baha’s fame and fortune fixation was why I found myself in the City Park Grill in Petoskey, Michigan, craning my neck to see the Notable Books man. I was sitting in the second seat from the end of the bar, where a young Hemingway once sat writing his earliest stories. Instead of a speech I would read excerpts and answer questions in a back room before returning to my special seat, where a pile of books sat on the bar waiting to be signed.
To his credit, Baha had made no left turn unstoned in arranging the evening. Before we went inside he took my picture standing by a statue of Hemingway in a nearby park; the young prodigy leaving Petoskey to become a reporter in Toronto, the old tragedy using his legacy to sell books.
When we got to the bar Baha posted the picture. While we waited for thumbs to turn up he urged the faithful who were gathering to enjoy the low-price libations of Mojito Monday. They took up his suggestion with great enthusiasm.
So did I.
The third time I turned and stared at the Notable Books man he walked over to introduce himself. I didn’t quite catch his name in the noisy bar, but I shook his hand.
“I’m looking forward to reading your book,” he said. “We’re quite proud of Hemingway’s connections to this area, especially right here at the City Park Grill.”
He seemed like a pleasant, friendly, well-meaning man. In other circumstances I’m sure we would have gotten along quite well. But the boos and bad vibes in Seney had intensified my desire for a disaster to drown my sorrows in. Like Edgar Allen Poe in “The Raven,” I was desperately seeking “respite and nepenthe” from my memories.
Author’s Note: in Greek mythology nepenthe is a potion that erases sorrow from your mind, Homer refers to it in The Odyssey. That evening I was experimenting with a modern version of nepenthe – multiple mojitos. They didn’t help with my sorrow, but they may have contributed to what I did next.
“Hemingway never visited the City Park Grill,” I said.
“I beg your pardon,” the man said.
“When Hemingway was here this place was called the Annex,” I said. “It wasn’t named City Park Grill until years later.”
“Of course,” the man said. “I only meant …”
“You need to get your facts straight if you plan to keep using Hemingway as a cheap tourist attraction,” I said.
The man stood, staring at me in frozen disbelief until Baha stepped between us.
“Thanks again for coming out tonight,” he said. “We really appreciate it. It’s Mojito Monday! Why don’t you drink up, the mojitos are on me, eh?”
“That would be great,” the man said. “You know, the reason they have Mojito Mondays here is because mojitos were Hemingway’s favorite drink.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said.
“I beg your pardon?” the man said.
“Jack, what the hell are you doing?” Baha said.
“In Key West and Havana his favorite drink was a daquiri,” I said. “In Paris, sitting at the end of the bar writing The Sun Also Rises at Closerie des Lilas, it was a dry martini.”
“I’d heard that mojitos …”
“The whole mojito story is a hoax,” I said.
“Well I …”
“In the late 1950s the owners of a bar in Havana called La Bodeguita del Medio were trying to drum up business,” I said. “They forged a note in Hemingway’s handwriting that said he liked to drink mojitos there and hung it up behind the bar.”
“That’s interesting …”
“That’s bullshit,” I said.
“I’m not sure …”
“It was a cheap trick that was used to attract tourists to a bar in Cuba,” I said. “Now it’s a cheap trick being used to attract tourists to a bar in Michigan.”
At this point Baha hurriedly brought us all mojitos, hoping to calm the man down and shut me up. It didn’t work, for him or for me. After several more mojitos from Baha and several more insults from me, the man threw a punch that knocked me back over the bar and into the pile of books. The books and I crashed to the floor and a moment later all hell broke loose above us. It was soon apparent the Hemingway fans who had come to see me shared his enthusiasm for barroom brawling.
I lay on the floor smiling as the dogs of war were unleashed above me.
~ ~ ~
The Tour – Third Day
Green Light
“Do you see it?”
Baha was excited.
We were sitting on the back patio of the Walloon Lake Hotel, looking across the water.
“It’s a green light,” Baha said. “Just like in his book.”
“I can’t see anything,” I said. “And he didn’t write that book.”
After much finger pointing, head positioning, and eye squinting, I agreed that I saw a green light at end of a distant dock just to get Baha to stop pestering me.
“That’s the Hemingway family cottage, eh?” he said.
“Windemere," I said.
“It’s not too windy here, but it’s sure getting cold fast now that the sun’s down,” he said. “Good thing your book signing is inside, eh?”
Windemere is the name of the Hemingway family cottage on Walloon Lake, but this was not the right time to enlighten Baha, who was still pissed off about last night. No books had been sold at the City Park Grill, to make things even worse many had been stolen during the ugly brawl.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to sabotage this book tour,” Baha said. “Promise me you won’t do anything stupid like that again, eh?”
“Nevermore,” I said.
Once again, Baha had done an unexpectedly outstanding job of preparation. We arrived at the hotel and went immediately to a Hemingway statue in front of the marina next door. It was a bit more whimsical than yesterday’s statue. This was an older Ernest sitting on a bench holding a fishing pole, a cat on his shoulder reaching for the fish on his line.
Baha encouraged me to also act whimsically, so I stood next to the statue and pretended to reach for the fish. He took my picture and posted it, a dozen people gave it a thumbs up.
After the photo op we went inside and checked out the conference room where I was supposed to do what I wasn’t able to the night before—read passages from my book and answer questions from the audience. Despite the assurances I had given Baha that I would behave myself, after last night’s debacle I was even more drawn to the sweet release of self-destruction. Assuaging my grief called for a stupid and futile gesture, and I was just the guy to do it.
The conference room looked fine, with books stacked high, lectern in place, microphone tested and ready. We went to the back patio of the hotel to watch the sun go down. As a glorious sunset lit up the lake in red, yellow, and orange, Baha gave me lessons in book tour etiquette.
“This time don’t be an asshole, eh?” he said.
When the sun disappeared Baha pointed out Windemere to me, issued a final warning to behave myself, and led me back to the conference room. We arrived to find the door locked and my books stacked in boxes in the hallway. A handwritten sign taped to the wall read, “Tonight’s Event Cancelled.” Baha let loose a string of expletives and headed to the front desk to talk to the manager. I stayed behind to make sure I didn’t have books stolen from me two nights in a row.
Baha returned and explained that the Walloon Lake Hotel staff had gotten wind of what happened ten miles down the road at the City Park Grill and were worried about a repeat performance. We were welcome to stay the night as guests, but anything involving a crowd of people was strictly prohibited. After stashing the books in Baha’s room we went back to the patio.
It was a lot colder and darker.
“No worries, I got a Plan B, eh?” Baha said. “The Hemingway cottage is still owned by the family. His nephew’s son owns it.”
“Did you even read my book?” I asked. “I interviewed Hemingway’s great-nephew over the phone when I wrote the chapter about the family cottage. He’s a nice guy.”
“I don’t know how great Hemingway’s nephew is, all I know is this guy is his son,” Baha said. “I invited him to come to your reading, but he said he was having people over, eh?”
“That’s too bad,” I said. “I would have liked talking to him in person.”
“That’s exactly what you’re going to do,” Baha said. “He invited us to come over after the reading was finished.”
“I’m definitely finished reading for the night,” I said.
“No shit you’re finished, eh?” Baha said. “So let’s go to the party.”
Baha took a moment to remind me once again of book tour etiquette. When he finished, I turned to walk back through the hotel.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“You said we were going to the party.”
“We are but we’re not driving,” he said. “We’re taking a boat, eh?”
Once again, the constantly stoned but consistently strategic Baha had made plans in advance. Now he was ready to execute.
We walked along the shoreline boardwalk to the marina and down to the end of a long dock. Waiting there for us was a pontoon boat Baha had rented for the occasion.
“I wanted to surprise you after your reading, eh?” he said. “I stashed some books on this boat, we’ll take them over to Hemingway’s party, and you can sign them for him and his guests.”
“That’s a great idea, Baha,” I said.
“You sound surprised,” he said.
“I am surprised,” I said. “I never would have thought of taking a boat.”
“I meant was you sounded surprised I had a great idea,” he said.
I laughed at what he said but didn’t deny it. We walked onto the boat, untied the ropes, and pushed off the dock. Baha started up the motor and we whined off into the darkness.
“It’s going to take a while to get there, eh?” he said. “Walloon Lake is nine miles long and a mile wide. You a good swimmer?”
“Not really,” I said.
For a while we bounced through the darkness without talking. Then Baha shouted out a confession over the howling motor.
“You know why I didn’t tell you we were coming here ahead of time?” he asked. “I wanted to see if you could do the reading without causing trouble, eh?”
“Makes sense,” I said.
“So you’re not going to cause any more trouble, right?” he said.
I shook my head in the dark.
I can’t remember if I shook my head up and down or sideways. Either way, I’m not sure that Baha could see it, or that it mattered. A short time later he began asking me a series of out-of-context questions about dead authors.
“That John Kennedy Toole guy, eh?” he said. “He wrote A Confederacy of Dunces. Didn’t get published until after he died, then it’s a big hit, eh?”
“Toole was a struggling writer who committed suicide when his book didn’t get published,” I said. “His mother took his unpublished manuscript to Walker Percy, a famous author, and he got it published. It became a tremendous critical and commercial success.”
“Big success, eh?”
Baha went on to talk about Philip K. Dick, Franz Kafka, Herman Melville, and other writers who weren’t successful until they were dead.
“Actually, Melville’s early novels were financially successful,” I said. “But he tried to write a more serious novel, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale.”
“I never read The Whale, but I’m a big fan of Moby Dick,” Baha said. “I’m a sailor myself, just like in the book, only I’ve done all my sailing on the Great Lakes, eh?”
“Unfortunately, Moby Dick became Melville’s first major failure as a writer,” I said. “He had to get a job as a customs official to support his family.”
“But after he died that book was more in demand than ice water in Hell, eh?” Baha said.
He paused for a moment, then began asking a series of questions about agents’ fees, posthumous publishing rights, copyright law, and more. I answered them to the best of my knowledge until he finally fell silent, appearing to be lost in thought. The high-pitched howl of the motor speeding us across the lake made the only sound until Baha spoke again.
“I got beers in a cooler back by the motor,” he said. “Go grab us a couple, eh?”
Rising and falling as we chopped through the waves, I carefully boat-walked my way to the back of the pontoon, opened the back gate, and stepped out onto the rear platform. Holding onto the bimini top with one hand to steady myself, I reached down and flipped open the lid of the cooler. As I bent down farther to grab a beer I had a life-changing experience.
I was shoved from behind.
A heartbeat later I tumbled into the icy black water.
~ ~ ~
Epilogue
Eh Minus
I’m not sure how long I remained underwater. Stunned after hitting the surface at high speed and in shock from the icy cold water, I felt as though my brain was frozen. At first I wasn’t even sure which way was up. The only thing I was certain of was that I was going to die.
I finally saw a light and began swimming toward it. The light turned out to be the bright side of the moon, which guided me back up to the surface. As I gulped in lungfuls of air, I couldn’t help noticing how glad I was to be alive.
Unfortunately, clawing my way back to the surface was just the start of my ordeal. I flailed around in the freezing water for what felt like a lifetime. Then, as fortune would have it, the cooler popped up next to me, snapping me out of the panic that would have drowned me and offering a floatation device that helped me make it to the shore.
Getting to the rocky beach took a lot longer than I hoped it would. At times I thought about giving up, but then I remembered how glad I felt to be alive. The moonlight helped me see where I was going as I walked back to the hotel.
Storytelling 101: First person narrators cannot be dead, unless he/she/they are a ghost, which I am not. Obviously I survived or I wouldn’t be writing this story.
When I saw Baha the next morning he said the whole thing was a practical joke.
“You gotta have a sense of humor, eh?” he said. “You worship Hemingway, I thought you’d like being baptized in his lake.”
He couldn’t or wouldn’t explain why he didn’t turn back to get me. I learned later that he didn’t tell anyone at Windemere I had fallen off the boat on the way over. He definitely didn’t tell them I had been pushed off.
I told him I didn’t think his joke was funny.
My take on what happened that night is this: I think he was on to my self-sabotaging ways and didn’t want me messing up the meet-and-greet with the descendants of Ernest Hemingway. An endorsement from the Hemingway family would help my book sales whether I was alive or dead. He probably figured I would make it to shore, but if I did drown it would be icing on the cake. The news of my untimely and ironic death—Hemingway author dies in Hemingway lake—would boost sales even more.
In the end I couldn’t prove it was attempted murder, so I had to let it go.
It was not easy.
Word about the City Park incident spread quickly, the rest of the tour was cancelled. In its absence I tried distracting myself by rereading some of Hemingway’s writing. I found a quote from The Old Man and the Sea that gave me some comfort: “I may not be as strong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.”
Resolution is a fancy word for what the Finnish call “sisu.”
Sisu means an unwillingness to give up even under the most adverse conditions. It is something the Finns who came to the U.P. to work in dark and dangerous copper mines had in great abundance. My grandparents were from Finland, growing up I spent every summer at their home near the Quincy Mine in Hancock.
Some of their sisu may have trickled down to me.
It happens.
I decided the creative process might be more helpful than the destructive process, so I’m writing another book, a fictional account of love, loss and redemption, a real hoot, eh? I hope it becomes a best-seller, but I also know that the best-selling fiction book of all time is Don Quixote, which I find hilariously ironic. A delusional man on an impossible quest seems like an appropriate metaphor for what I’m doing.
So it goes.
Hemingway ended up killing himself, which doesn’t invalidate his Old Man quote. It just means he was speaking from experience when he wrote about pain and perseverance. I’ll end this story with a Hemingway quote I find comforting in a different way: “All stories, if continued far enough, end in death.”
I was truly sorry when I heard that Baha was dead.
That night at the Hemingway cottage Baha met a documentary filmmaker who was launching an expedition to find lost gold in Lake Superior. Using his jack-of-all-trades credentials and knowledge of the local waters, he signed on as a member of the crew. A submersible vessel he was piloting went down in Lake Superior twenty miles north of the shark’s fin.
Normally bacteria create decay that causes a sunken body to float to the surface after a few days. Lake Superior is so cold year round that bacterial growth is inhibited, so bodies sink and never resurface.
Baha is never coming back.
I take comfort in the fact that he is where he would want to be, sleeping with the fishes and keeping watch for the gold.
One must imagine Baha happy.
~ ~ ~
May 2026
