I never noticed it until now—how much I was living Nick Adams without even knowing it. Just out of the Navy, my first hitch behind me, free at last.
San Diego was mine: a VW convertible with the top always down, salt air in my hair, the sun on my face, and girls on the SDSU campus walking by. I had my guitar and an armful of books, American Literature from 1910 to the Present among them.
That’s where Nick Adams found me, and where I found him.
The first story we read was “Indian Camp.” I sat in the back row of Professor Morrison’s literature class, still getting used to civilian clothes that felt too loose after four years of Navy blues. Morrison had a way of reading Hemingway out loud—his voice flat and clean, letting the words do their own work.
“‘Is dying hard, Daddy?’” he read, and the classroom went quiet in a way it never did when we discussed Fitzgerald or Faulkner.
I’d been to sea. I’d seen things. A man overboard during a storm exercise we couldn’t recover until three days later. A buddy who took a bottle of sleeping pills in Yokosuka and had to be carried off the ship on a stretcher. I thought I knew something about dying, about fear, about what it meant to be a man.
But Nick Adams—this boy in the Michigan woods watching his father perform a cesarean with a jackknife—he knew it younger, knew it cleaner. No sentimentality. No speeches. Just the facts, and the feeling underneath.
After class, I’d take my books to the Quad, spread out under a eucalyptus tree, and watch the world move around me. Girls in their summer dresses passed in waves between classes—blonde California girls already tanned in April, dark-haired girls from the Valley, exchange students whose accents made every word sound like music.
I was trying to figure out how to be in the world now that I wasn’t Navy property anymore. No more watches to stand, no more chiefs yelling, no more painting the same stretch of bulkhead I’d painted six months earlier. The freedom was almost too much. Sometimes I’d wake at 0500 out of habit, heart pounding, convinced I’d missed muster—then remember that nobody owned me anymore.
The VW was a 1962 Karmann Ghia, baby blue, with a top that leaked when it rained and an engine that overheated if you pushed it past sixty. I bought it from a guy in Oceanside for three hundred dollars and a promise to pick it up myself. Best money I ever spent.
Top down, always. Even when the marine layer rolled in cold off the Pacific, even when my fingers went numb on the steering wheel. There was something about the exposure, the openness—like Hemingway on the Pilar, or in the Spanish mountains, or anywhere the wind could hit him full in the face.
I drove that car up and down the coast—Pacific Beach, La Jolla, Del Mar. Sometimes with a girl beside me, usually alone. I’d park at Sunset Cliffs and watch the ocean bash itself against the rocks, spray flying twenty feet into the air, and think about “Big Two-Hearted River,” about Nick Adams fishing alone, finding peace in the simple, deliberate motions of casting and retrieving.
I tried fishing once. Took a rod to the pier at Ocean Beach, bought some squid for bait, stood there three hours without a bite. But I understood it anyway. The concentration. The ritual. The way it pushed everything else out of your head.
Morrison assigned us eight Nick Adams stories that semester. We read them in Nick’s chronological order, not the order of publication—from “Indian Camp” to “Big Two-Hearted River.” Birth to trauma to something like healing.
“What’s Hemingway doing with the wounded knee?” Morrison asked one Thursday, when we were reading “Now I Lay Me,” the story where Nick lies awake in the dark in Italy, afraid to sleep because he believes his soul will leave his body.
A girl named Sarah—dark hair, serious eyes, always in the front row—raised her hand. “He’s showing us the wound without showing us the wound. Nick never talks about how he was hurt. We only see the result.”
“Exactly,” Morrison said, pointing at her with his paperback. “The iceberg theory. Seven-eighths below the surface. We don’t need the explosion. We feel it in his insomnia, in his need to stay awake, to hold himself together against the dark.”
I’d had nights like that in the Navy. Lying in my rack, listening to the hull groan, the ocean pressing against a quarter-inch of steel, thinking: this is it, this is all there is between me and the deep. Not wanting to sleep because sleep meant letting go—and letting go meant trusting you’d wake again.
After class, I followed Sarah out to the Quad.
“You want to get coffee?” I asked.
She looked at me—really looked—and said, “Sure.”
We got terrible coffee in Styrofoam cups and talked about Hemingway for two hours. She was a senior, an English major, thinking about graduate school. She wanted to write too, but she was smart about it in a way I wasn’t.
“Everyone wants to be Hemingway,” she said. “Especially the guys. They want the adventure, the wars, the danger. Most of them just end up drunk and sad.”
“What should they want instead?”
“To be honest. That’s what Hemingway actually was—honest about fear, about pain, about what it feels like to be alive and scared. The macho stuff came later.”
I thought about that driving home, the sun dropping into the ocean, the sky turning orange, then purple, then dark. Maybe I was trying to live the life before I’d done the work.
I quit shaving the day after my discharge. Just stopped.
In the Navy you shaved every day or you were on report. Your face was government property. So my first small civilian rebellion was my own skin, my own hair, my own choice.
Within a week I had scruff. Within a month, a beard—reddish-brown, thicker than I expected. I looked older. Or at least I thought I did.
There were two bearded men on campus—me and Professor Weinstein, who taught philosophy and wore the same brown corduroy jacket every day. Students stared. A few girls said they liked it. One told me I looked like a lumberjack.
“I’ll take that,” I said.
By the end of the semester, beards were everywhere. Guys clean-shaven in September showed up to finals looking like prospectors. I liked to think I’d started it, though I probably hadn’t. More likely it was the times catching up with all of us at once.
Still, I wanted to believe I was ahead of something. The version of toughness I’d borrowed from Nick Adams always seemed to be.
Somebody played a dirty trick while I was away counting down days in uniform. Somebody invented pantyhose.
Before—before boot camp, before liberty ports and shore leave—girls wore garters and stockings. Real stockings, with seams up the back, ending mid-thigh.
Between the stocking top and the panty line was the happy trail. Soft, warm flesh. Terra incognita.
I’d spent long watches on the fantail thinking about that geography, remembering high school dates, drive-in theaters, the slow progress of a hand along a thigh, the catch of breath when you found the gap.
First date back stateside, I took a girl named Linda to see The Graduate at the Ken Cinema. Afterward, we drove up to Mount Soledad, parked overlooking the city lights, and started kissing.
My hand moved up her thigh. Slowly. Respectfully. Fabric. Higher. Still fabric. Higher still.
I pulled back. “What are you wearing?”
She laughed. “Pantyhose. Where have you been?”
“The Navy.”
“Oh, honey. Everything changed while you were gone.”
We kissed some more, but the spell was broken. It was like fishing for trout and finding out someone had drained the river.
Nick Adams never had to deal with this.
I tried to write that fall. Sat in my North Park studio—hot plate, phone-booth bathroom—and stared at an old Royal typewriter I’d bought for fifteen dollars.
I wanted to write about the Navy: the boredom, the fear, the strange brotherhood of men sealed inside a steel can. But everything came out wrong—too sentimental, too angry, or too much like bad Hemingway.
“Write what you know,” Morrison said. “But understand that what you know isn’t enough. You have to transform it.”
I didn’t know how. I could describe things—the smell of diesel fuel, the 1MC crackling at 0600, the roll of the ship in heavy seas—but I didn’t know how to make them matter.
Sarah said, “Maybe you’re trying too hard. Maybe just write what happened and trust the reader.”
We were seeing each other then. Coffee between classes. Long walks through Balboa Park. One quiet afternoon at the beach where we barely spoke and somehow said everything.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “And that’s something.”
She was right. Nick Adams went fishing. Hemingway made it a way of being alive.
I wasn’t Hemingway. But maybe I didn’t need to be.
We read Irwin Shaw too—“The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” “The Eighty-Yard Run,” “Sailor Off the Bremen.” Stories about ordinary people meeting ordinary disappointment with dignity.
Shaw was the Big Daddy to me. Less flash than Hemingway, fewer bullfights and wars—but a deeper understanding of how people actually lived.
“The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” wrecked me. A man and his wife walking through New York on a beautiful day. He can’t stop looking. She knows. Nothing happens. Everything happens.
That’s what I wanted to write—about small betrayals, quiet compromises, the negotiations people make just to keep moving.
Sarah and I broke up in November. No drama. She was graduating, moving back to Sacramento before grad school. I was staying in San Diego. We’d always known the ending.
Our last night, we sat on the hood of the VW at La Jolla Shores, watching waves slide in under a half-moon.
“You’re going to be a good writer,” she said. “You just need to stop trying to be someone else.”
“Who?”
“All your heroes.”
“What should I be instead?”
She kissed my cheek. “You. That’s enough.”
I stayed in San Diego two more years. Took more classes. Graduated. Worked at a bookstore in Hillcrest. Kept writing.
The stories got better, slowly. I stopped imitating and started listening—to my own voice, my own rhythms. I wrote about the Navy, about coming home, about the space between who you were and who you thought you’d become.
Most of it wasn’t good. Some of it was. But I was doing the work.
I never saw Sarah again, though I thought about her sometimes. The beard stayed. People stopped noticing it. It was just my face.
Pantyhose became normal. The world changes while you’re not looking. You can fight it or adapt.
I wasn’t Nick Adams. I was never going to be.
But I was learning the same things—how to stay awake, how to pay attention, how to turn the raw material of living into something that might matter.
