STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Duella Scott-Hull visited Earnest Hemingway’s gravesite while teaching at Fort Peck and pursuing graduate studies at the University of Montana. While here, she recalls, she sat at Hemingway’s grave, a gin and tonic in hand, and typed her dissertation on “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

“I still come back and take a lawn chair to his gravesite and read,” said Scott-Hull, who now lives on the Oregon coast but was in town this weekend attending the 2024 Ernest Hemingway Seminar. “I remember one year looking down, thinking, ‘I’m a few months older than he was when he killed himself. And at that moment I vowed to live every day with intention.”

The big but otherwise unremarkable slab in the Ketchum Cemetery that marks Hemingway’s grave is among the biggest attractions in the Sun Valley area, attracting visitors from around the world to see where one of America’s most famous authors was laid to rest between his fourth wife Mary Welsh Hemingway and his son Jack.

Some of the items that Lauren Allan collected at Hemingway’s grave with the permission of the Ketchum Cemetery are featured in an exhibit on display in The Community Library foyer.

There was no one visiting his grave Saturday morning—at least, not at 11:15 in the morning—save a local reporter who first learned of Sun Valley as a child when she saw a years-old Life magazine cover noting Hemingway’s death a stone’s throw from the tony ski resort.

But it was evident that many had made the pilgrimage to see Hemingway’s refuge underneath the tall pines. They had left offerings, including a bottle of Old Crow Bourbon Whiskey, Mike’s Mango-flavored hard liquor, a package of artificial sweetener, coins, pens, a potted plant, even a Ty Beanie Baby with sad green eyes.

Such offerings have been commonplace at Hemingway’s grave ever since he was buried here in July 1961 following his death in a nearby home looking out on the Boulder Mountains and the Big Wood River.

But it was only when Les Waters, an Obie-winning theater director who came to Ketchum through the Sun Valley Playwright’s Residency in 2022 to collaborate with David Cale on a play that Cale wrote while writer-in-residence at the Hemingway House, that more formal attention was paid to the items.

Items collected include a guitar pick and a scruffy lamb doll.

Waters was struck by the simplicity of the gravesite but he was even more fascinated by the tokens people had left on the grave, including lipstick, a fishing hook, friendship bracelet, a large shell, a flag, a business card and a page from one of Hemingway’s novels inside a Ziploc bag. He said he wanted to be an archeologist as a child and loved the romance of discovering priceless objects in ancient tombs.

“They’re very personal—a gift from an individual to a famous writer…a letter from someone who wanted to have a conversation with someone they admired,” he said.

Waters suggested that The Community Library collect and log these objects over the course of a year.

“The objects I found there—mostly worthless in monetary terms—were notably private offerings in a public space. Why not display these, too?” he said.

Coins and dollar bills can be found among the pine needles.

Lauren Allan, who worked on the library’s Hemingway Letters Project, took ownership.

She shuffled to the gravesite once a week for a year, even in heavy snowfall, to gather the things people had left behind, whether it be a Band-aid or a crumpled beer can. One night she was scared and all alone in the graveyard so she called her mother on speaker phone, only to be spooked by the sound of an elk which sent her scurrying.

Among the items she collected: a suspicious brown mushroom and beer cans.

“I thought he deserved better,” she said. “And did Hemingway really want a tablet of Pepto Bismo?”

Asked to pen what they would leave, attendees at the Ernest Hemingway Seminar said: A rock from Silver Creek, a wildflower representing the hills and mountains of Idaho, a thank you note for humanizing and elevating the grit of being alive. This person told of walking over from the Knob Hill Inn, coffee in hand, to say, “Hello.”

It became personal for her when a friend moving from New York to Boise made a detour with his U-Haul to Ketchum to visit Hemingway’s grave where he left a good bottle of whiskey.

“Why would people leave a good bottle of whiskey?” she pondered, noting that her friend was far from the only one to do so.

Finally, over a drink with friends in a bar, she understood. When you have a drink with friends, she said, you go to connect.

“It’s not about the liquor. It’s about two friends having a drink. People seek that connection with Hemingway.”

Inevitably, Allan said, she found herself asking: What would I leave?

“Often, I go to the river underneath Hemingway’s house and I say, ‘Hi, ‘imagining he’s there,” she said. “We honor in the dead in our own way.”