Jim Gilmore is described as short and dark with big muscles and big hands" in the third sentence.

It is unclear why Liz takes to Jim, but we can only assume it's because she lives on the sandy road from Charlevoix to Boyne City consisting of just five houses. As the reader, we assume that there are no tall men around.

In the end, Jim gets drunk on whiskey and takes Liz for a walk that turns into a romp down on the hard rough hewn hemlock planks of the dock. She lies there, suspended above water, but pinned between huge immovable boards and his sour sauced carriage, concealed by only the thin mist rising from the bay with the onset of evening. And yes, it is a rape.

It's not a rape because Liz didn't want it. It's not a rape because Jim was so inebriated he couldn't really tell right from wrong. It's a rape simply because Jim was short, and Liz decided right then and there that she didn't want it after all.

Brothers, it's all there in black and white.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5917554&forum_id=2#50223761)

Lake Charlevoix is a beautiful, serene, isolated inland bay of Lake Michigan that sits between Traverse City to the south and Petoskey to the north. Apparently they used to haul Michigan ore (mostly copper) through this area for smelting somewhere else. It's an interesting place and located only about an hour or so's drive from where TSINAH now claims to live.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5917554&forum_id=2#50223837)

Would be double d's in your case anyhow

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5917554&forum_id=2#50223983)

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Spatial Exposure in “Up in Michigan”

Hemingway uses space, exposure, and precise tactile sensations to drive home his point in this short story.

First, there is the place. Horton Bay lies in the middle of nowhere, isolated, a literal waypoint in the road between two larger communities (Boyne City and Charlevoix). Lake Charlevoix itself is described as a bay of the much larger Lake Michigan, and Horton Bay is a bay within that lake that is itself a bay invoking a sense that the hamlet is extremely protected. It is indisputably on the way to something else whether it’s the transportation or smelting of ore, timber, farmland. In this insularity, it comes as no surprise that our two characters come from “somewhere else.” Jim came to Horton Bay to be the blacksmith. Liz came for her first domestic job at the Smith boarding house. In the evenings, Jim washes up outside and comes in to eat and read the newspapers from far away Toledo and Grand Rapids. Liz looks on, safe in the boarding house. She is a proper girl—neat and clean—and even jolly, but not really seen or thought about by Jim. In this way, the author builds a dichotomous atmosphere that is both inside and outside, remote but intimate, safe and all too isolating.

Hemingway also builds tension with space between his two characters. The reader learns right off of Liz’s fondness for Jim. But here, Hemingway is careful with his diction. Liz starts off liking Jim “very much” in a bubbly and puerile way. She notices the details of his walking in the street, then the closer details of his facial hair or the whiteness of his teeth, and then going further and zeroing in, breaking the threshold into the uncomfortably close space of describing even the black hairs covering his forearms. Liz thinks of Jim in a whole variety of close, intimate ways that a Victorian girl never should. She thinks of him coming and going from the boarding house and under the covers up in her room at night. Hidden from view, she feasts on his sensuality. Even in the night in question, she lingers downstairs as the men drink and drink, wanting, no needing, a glimpse of him from the doorway, that portal between the house and the dark, mysterious outside world, so she can retreat into her safe upstairs bedroom to pleasure herself safely within her domestic realm.

Having crossed that threshold, Liz soon finds that there is no turning back. By choosing not to slink upstairs to bed after the domestic work is finished for the night, she lingers pretending to read a book, staying out of the men’s sight, but nevertheless remaining present in their liminal space. In the late evening moment when Jim finally comes to her, it is at first a thrill. She has been noticed. And even though he’s grabbing at her in a drunken and clumsy non-domestic way, it still lights that fire within her. Full of lust, she is easily convinced to go for a walk and they leave the house, the safety of the domicile, and head out into the dark outside. Now there is no fire. They are standing on the dock, suspended above water, and cloaked in mist from the lake. There is no more fire, only wetness. In addition to being wet and cold, Liz finds herself squished between the roughhewn hemlock planks of the dock and Jim’s heavy and ponderous flesh. It’s not romantic. It’s not fun. It’s not even exciting. The word choice here is precise. The dock is “splintery” and invasive against her back. Jim is “big” and it “hurts.” So she pleads for him to stop, but he keeps on—almost like a car crash in slow motion—he has made up his mind and she is powerless and voiceless to stop it now.

Once he reaches his climax, he predictably passes out from the whiskey and Liz is left with the mess of the situation. She tries to rouse him, hoping that maybe he will come to and take some responsibility for what has been done, but he barely stirs. This leaves Liz completely alone, outside of the house, and holding the weight of everything that has happened in the physical world and to her psychologically. She gently kisses Jim. She wraps her coat around him. She does what she knows how to do—but this time it’s not because she’s infatuated, it’s because this is what women do.

Liz returns to the house to go to bed completely transformed. She is no longer a girl who flirts carefully with the threshold to the house. Hemingway’s stark prose has her merely walk back, but the reader cannot help but assume that it no longer represents the home she left. Liz yearned to be the object of Jim’s affection, but by the end, that yearning is replaced by Sehnsucht for what was lost and can never be recaptured.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5917554&forum_id=2#50226529)