Walking the Edge

PORT ANGELES IS PRETTY AND HARD, LIKE A BEAUTICIAN IN A CARVER STORY. Three hours west by ferry and car from Seattle, the town is just beyond commuting range of the craziest Microsoft money. Meaning the place is owned by people who live here, not by people who visit. The houses run from size small to modest. The bars pretend to be rough. At low tide, the place smells like a clam without shame.

With the strait in the city's front yard and the snow peaks of Olympic National Park in back, tourists are the main crop, but Port Angeles still works timber for a living. One mill makes plywood, the other phone book paper. So, depending on the wind, the place also smells of fresh pulp or cut lumber, slightly burnt by the blade and a little sweet.

While Carver lived here, before he lost most of a lung to cancer and had to wear a wig because of the radiation, he liked to putter around. There is a downtown, susceptible to sinking. Waterfront parks beside waterfront log yards. The streams near town struggle to sustain ancient salmon runs through the hazardous wastes of past labors. There is a harbor with a couple of freighters and a busy ferry from Victoria in British Columbia. No cruise ships come to call.

The hotels are named after fish, as in, "Honey, I booked us a room at the Chinook." One motel posts a sign advising potential guests to "Worship the Lord God and Him Only." I stayed at the more secular Red Lion, which had a banner welcoming the American Conifer Society. They'd come to the right place. The entire peninsula, which is the size of Connecticut, is either wild woods or tree farms.

In town, Ray and Tess would slide into a vinyl booth at the Cornerhouse Restaurant, and I shoveled scrambled eggs there at the counter one morning and read the short story "Fat" from his first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? It's about a waitress in a diner like this one serving the fattest man she has ever seen. The story manages to be really tense, even though the waitress is just serving extra bread and butter. Nothing happens, at least on the surface, but there is this big blue vein beating right below the skin. "My life is going to change," the waitress says at the end. "I feel it."

While I was reading and drinking my coffee, there was a young woman next to me with a tattoo that covered her forearm. I asked. It was a howitzer, a field artillery piece. She said she'd been in Iraq. She was reading the Peninsula Daily News, an article about the sudden death of the "world renowned strongman," a local named Jesse Marunde, who died after a workout in Sequim, the town just down the road. He was 27. There was a picture of him lifting a Hyundai Elantra on the front page. "Goes to show," she said, "you never know."

She didn't know Carver, so I gave her the paperback. She said she would give it a try. Carver's editor at Knopf, Gordon Lish, once described Carver's characters "like hillbillies, but hillbillies of the shopping mall." I'm not so sure. Carver himself said they were just ordinary people coming to terms with their limitations. The limits of love, the things just out of reach.

Over at the bookstore one afternoon reading through Paul J. Martin's eccentric history of Port Angeles, I learned about the Puget Sound Co-operative Colony, a socialist community of free-thinking xenophobes whose motto was "Let the many combine in co-operation as the few have done in corporations." They fled Seattle because they hated and feared the Chinese laborers who settled in the Pacific Northwest after building the railroads. The colonists came to Port Angeles to build their utopia. They established a newspaper, school, hotel, shipyard and lumber mill. They erected an opera house with the first flush toilet in Clallam County, a marvel in 1891, before their experiment went bust. Reading one of Tess Gallagher's intimate introductions to Carver's work, I remembered that when he was in third grade, his family still had an outdoor toilet, the last in the neighborhood. This was a source of great shame for him. That would have been around 1947.

Alan Turner, the owner of Port Book and News, moved here as Carver's lights began to flicker. The bookseller admires the writer and is sorry they never met. "I'd guess that 99 percent of the people who live here have no idea who Raymond Carver is," Turner told me. "But nobody reads anymore." Then he said, "I don't know why I carry half the crap I do." Meaning literature and especially short stories. "A tough sell," Turner said. "I'd be a rich man if I sold ice cream instead." A few dozen people a year come into his shop and ask about Carver. "They're all from overseas." Germans, Brits and Japanese mostly. Turner points them toward the cemetery.

AT 5 O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, I MET A GUIDE NAMED JIM KERR AT THE GROCERY STORE IN NEARBY FORKS, "the logging capital of the world," a one-stoplight village that was a battleground during the timber wars of the 1980s, when locals took to driving around with bumper stickers that read: "I Like Spotted Owls -- Fried."

The bitter feud between environmentalists and loggers over the clear-cutting of old growth timber has mostly calmed, as forest jobs and spotted owls steadily decline. Forks is the second-wettest town in America but chooses to emphasize its proximity to miles of wild beaches, mossy rain forests and fishing. It is called Forks for a reason. The Calawah, Bogachiel and Sol Duc rivers come together here. The west end of the Olympic Peninsula is a last stronghold of wild steelhead trout. Carver liked to fish. Several of his stories feature fishing trips. One, "So Much Water So Close to Home," is about a group of "decent men, family men, men who take care of their jobs," who discover a dead girl wedged into tree branches on the river, but they keep fishing. When director Robert Altman made "Short Cuts," a movie based on Carver stories, he included that one.

I didn't know a thing about steelhead, so everything about them was mysterious. They are rainbow trout that leave the freshwater rivers and hunt for several years in the ocean and then return to their natal river to the exact spot where they were born to spawn the next generation. Why? "Because that's what they do," said Kerr. He has a goatee and lives in his camper and fishes for a living. We went down the Bogachiel in his drift boat, casting caddis flies to steelhead we could see and not see. I was telling him about Carver, who wrote a poem called "The River" about edging out into the deepening dark moving water, "watched by the furious eyes of king salmon." Kerr admired that. He'd never read Carver but remembered Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. Carver's work was influenced by Hemingway's short stories. Kerr remembered how the Cuban fisherman, Santiago, went far out to sea in a boat not much bigger than the one we were in, and how he caught the great marlin. He recalled his favorite scene, when the fisherman fought a school of sharks for hours with a knife he tied to his oar: "He twisted the blade and as the shark slid loose he said, 'Go on, galano. Slide down a mile deep. Go and see your friend, or maybe it's your mother.'"