Walking the Edge

Kerr said, "I don't know why, but I think about that part." After drifting the river, we beached the boat and hitched a ride back to his truck with a young woman who'd just graduated from college. She was waiting tables but was about to start work as a counselor at the state prison nearby. "I cried when I had to come home to Forks," she said, having failed to gain enough speed to escape the gravitational pull of home town. "Catch any fish?"

We told her we saw steelhead, but none would bite. I wasn't complaining. I saw them. The fish were silver, immense, like giants to me, longer than my arm. "I drew breath and cast anyway," Carver wrote in that poem. "Prayed nothing would strike."

THE MARINA IN PORT ANGELES IS FILLED WITH FISHING TRAWLERS, with names like Mary Catherine and Carol Jean hand-painted onto their bows, boats girdled with old tires fending off the docks, working boats crusty with dried guts and streaked with gull excrement, boats listing to starboard in their own oily bilge water, boats rigged with FOR SALE and BEWARE OF DOG signs, boats headed for the bottom. Carver kept his boat here, too. He liked to go out for the salmon in the strait when they were running. He was reported to be a fisherman of unremarkable skill but uncanny luck. "We'll go out into the sunny harbor and have fun," he wrote in a poem called "My Boat," dedicated to his friends. "But nothing dangerous, nothing too serious. The idea is simply to enjoy ourselves and not get scared."

And not get scared. One sunny day, I went kayaking toward the strait, out into Dungeness National Wildlife Refuge, with exactly the same idea, with Don Rice, a high school English teacher from Sequim. The refuge includes a wide, shallow bay, protected from the rougher waters of the strait by a long crooked arm, the Dungeness Spit, one of the world's longest spits, a geological wonder of a bar. We paddled a tandem kayak, Rice narrating behind me, how the sand spit is growing, 16 feet a year, according to the U.S. Geological Survey; how the place was named New Dungeness by Capt. George Vancouver of the British Navy, who explored these shores in 1792 and was reminded of a similar spot in the southernmost part of Kent along England's Straits of Dover.

A muscular tide was pushing us out to the sea, swept along on a swift race, the buoys attached to the crab traps lying on their sides in the current. The beaches were dotted with harbor seals and their gray young, and I was counting bald eagles -- 5, 10, 15, 20. "The eagles are waiting for dead pups," Rice said.

We floated over eel grass. We passed Graveyard Spit, named by the white settlers who buried 18 Tsimshian Indians from up in Canada who had camped on the sand in 1868 and were killed by a band of Clallam Indians. Only one of the Tsimshian survived, a pregnant woman who made it to the New Dungeness Lighthouse at the end of the spit and was rescued by its keeper, William Henry Blake, and his wife, Mary Anne. That story is told at the lighthouse itself, which operates both as an aid to navigation and a living museum.

We dragged the kayak up onto wet sand that was covered in shells. Rice and I ate a bag lunch on the picnic table beneath the lighthouse. There was a sign by the beach that read "Reality 5 Miles," with an arrow pointing to the mainland. We talked about books.

His students wrestle with the same high school canon I read years ago -- Jane Eyre, The Crucible, 1984, Death Be Not Proud, Hamlet, etc. Rice said the kids find it heavy. "Their lives are already so serious," he said. He thought that what they needed maybe were some light comedies. Later, I asked him about Carver. Was he taught?

He'd never heard of him. Still, it was one of those marvelous days on the water, just a buzz of sun and salt. We saw clouds of Caspian terns rising, a pair of rhinoceros auklets, an elephant seal. Afterward, I ate dinner at the Three Crabs Restaurant, with its view of the spit. They served a special called the Taste of Dungeness, a bucket of little neck steamers, oysters, scallops, shrimp and halibut, steamed in beer, all out of the local waters, the textures a mix of rubber, soft, firm and squish. Later, I heard that the Three Crabs was a Carver joint.

TESS GALLAGHER AND I DRANK A CUP OF TEA AT THE CORNERHOUSE. I noticed the busboy was an old man. We ordered a fish sandwich to go for Peggy, her Boston terrier, sleeping out in Carver's old Mercedes-Benz, a car he bought with cash after he became famous. In photographs, when Carver was alive, Gallagher's hair was long and dark, but now it's short and gray, and she's happy to have any hair at all, after surgery and two rounds of chemotherapy for breast cancer. Like a lot of people who have postponed death, Gallagher's eyes are so bright you could get lost in them. She looks like a Buddhist nun. She just published her first book of poetry in 14 years, called Dear Ghosts.

We drove over to Sky House, her place on Morse Creek, where Carver wrote 200 poems. The poetry is different from his stories, particularly after his drinking and his marriage with first wife, Maryann, ended. In his later work, Carver uses exclamation points! The style is less brain surgeon, more country doctor. I should say something about Maryann Burk Carver, who released her memoir last year, What It Used to Be Like: A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver. She loved Carver. Carver loved her. They shared two kids and a life. They dreamed together and got drunk together. He also put her in the emergency room. He'd shoo her off to work as a waitress and then drink up her tip money. His "Bad Raymond" days.

Peggy the dog sat on my lap looking out the car window. Gallagher was born and raised in Port Angeles, the daughter of a tree-rigger in the forest. Carver grew up in Yakima, in the middle of the state, the son of a saw-filer at a lumber mill, who somewhere along the line just broke down. Both fathers, unrepentant alcoholics. Both children, poets. What are the odds?