I was off of work due to an altercation with my boss who was trying to fire me as he had two others before me. I was driving north on Evergreen in South Everett late one afternoon during rush hour traffic. Hundreds of cars were stopped in both directions and I came to a stop a few blocks shy of Airport Road. I witnessed a shouting match going on between a blond kid in an old 1978 Pontiac Trans-Am and a Samoan couple in a small red car. The yelling continued and male Samoan got out of his still running car and went after the young guy in the T/A. Neither one was winning the fight, but the kid was losing bit by bit. At this point the wife/female exploded out of the car leaving the car running with their two kids in the back seat, proceeded into the fracas and showed the finest boxing skills I have ever seen in a woman. Damn, she was good! The kid was losing in a big way after her first few seconds in the fight. A guy got out of the truck in front of me and I got out. We stopped the fight in short order. The Samoan guy still wanted to fight me, but I told him to put his hands away. He didn’t scare me and he knew it. The other Samaritan was a jailer at Snohomish County jail. The cops showed up, took statements, arrested NO ONE, and no one else helped in the least. Months later I received a summons to go to court in Lynwood for this incident. I witnessed case after case being dismissed before they finally got to mine. The judge called the prosecuting attorney up to the bench and proceeded to dismiss the charges. I stood up in court and verbally berated the judge and the proceedings until the judge told the prosecutor to go have a talk with me. I told my story twice with all of these cops and court personnel watching me. The charges were dropped against the wife even though I told them she was the experienced fighter. Months later, after that big Samoan heard I was not backing down, pleaded guilty to all charges.

I believe Hemingway surveyed his literary history and then carefully chose the influences he would need to become the writer he wanted to be. Today the American tradition continues in that post-modern writers are either choosing Hemingway as a literary predecessor or are seeking the intellectual means with which to divorce themselves from his lineage.

Jeffrey Meyers notes that Hemingway “followed a Renaissance tradition of always going to the expert teachers to absorb what he wanted to know”. He traveled and lived, then studied and wrote about each new adventure and wonderful place. Hemingway showed the people of the world what he had found, so they could fall in love with it too. Marlin fishing off Key West and Cuba, bullfighting in Spain, and African Safari for the same animals he fell in love with at the Field Museum in Chicago when he was a boy.

By setting such a strong male role model, is it any wonder that the feminist movement attacked Hemingway, who died in 1961, and couldn’t then defend himself? The attack of the scholarly ranks began the dissection of Hemingway’s work primarily on the basis of its gender issues.