Walking the Edge

nowhere but down. So he changed

his ways

somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?

After that it was all gravy, every minute

of it, up to and including when he was told about,

well, some things that were breaking down and

building up inside his head . . .

When I was in college, Ray Carver was the writer we all read. Credited with blowing life back into the short story, that quintessential American form, he's been translated into more then 20 languages, been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and has inspired a generation of imitators.

Most of his own life, I now know, was a tornado: bankruptcies, booze, infidelity, divorce; his kids drove him crazy; he wrote while sitting in his car; he mopped floors in a hospital, picked tulips, ran errands for a pharmacy, managed a motel, edited textbooks. But during the '80s, even people who didn't really read might have read some Raymond Carver. He was called the American Chekhov.

He had put his finger on something. He wrote with a lean and hungry heart about the domestic chaos of characters with names like Burt and Vera, whose regular American lives were uncoiling under the strain, their anonymous jobs and perilous relationships made worse with tumblers of whiskey. "Drinking's funny," a Carver character says in the story "Gazebo." "When I look back on it, all of our important decisions have been figured out when we were drinking. Even when we talked about having to cut back on our drinking . . ."

I remember once, on a camping trip after college, a friend read aloud from the collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and it was like ghost stories in daylight. The stories are short, deceptively simple and beautifully eerie. There is always a longing for hope in Carver and what the critic Marc Chenetier called "a mother lode of threat." He begins his stories like a shot from a starter's gun, with sentences such as, "A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house." Or, "That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out of the window." The New York Times hailed his work as "masterpieces of American fiction," and Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post wrote, "His eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart."

For most of his life, Carver was not very lucky with real estate, but in his last decade, after he quit the bottle and before the cigarettes got him, Port Angeles was home. He came here to the Olympic Peninsula because this is where a poet named Tess Gallagher lives. The two met soon after Carver stopped drinking in 1977, and they spent the remainder of what Carver called his "second life" in a remarkable partnership of love and help. At his grave, there is a photograph of Tess and Ray. He looks rebuilt. He looks satisfied. Seriously, what were the odds for that?