Walking the Edge

"I grew up on deer meat and smoked salmon and wild berries," Gallagher said. She traveled the world, a peripatetic poet and teacher. Carver spent his life trying to get away from Yakima, hated going home. "I couldn't wait to get back to Port Angeles," she said. You can ask Gallagher anything you want about Carver.

"In the last 19 years, I have had a lot of time to think about him," she said. "He was just a fantastic person, so warm and generous. He had a sense of humor and a wonderful laugh. People who don't know wouldn't think that." She takes a moment. "But he needed someone. God, that alcoholism is a crusher. He needed a rock. He used to call me his rock." Gallagher says it is a miracle that Carver quit drinking, and though he came close once or twice, he never slipped.

The outdoors, the natural world, runs through many of Carver's poems. But "Ray didn't like to walk," Gallagher said. That surprised me. Her brothers taught him to fish for salmon, took him hunting for elk. "Ray was not used to horses, and that ride up to elk camp was a torturous adventure for Ray." He liked to entertain friends, but strangers made him nervous. He was subject to "the willies." He took Valium for his anxieties. "Ray was an avoider," Gallagher said. He'd unplug the phone. He liked to read in his bathrobe and smoke cartons of Now 100 cigarettes. In magazine stories written about Carver in the '80s, the journalists note how he liked to eat, always snacking. He was a steak-and-potato man, a junk food guy. It might have been a sugar crash, a physical echo from his drinking days. He and Gallagher would drive up to Hurricane Ridge behind their house in Olympic National Park and eat lunch at a picnic table.

Carver did walk with Gallagher along Morse Creek, the setting for his poem "Where Water Comes Together With Other Water," where the stream breaks through the beach and enters the strait. He wrote:

But these coastal rivers!

I love them the way some men love horses

or glamorous women. I have a thing

for this cold swift water.

He once caught a salmon here, just dangling a lure off the foot bridge, and brought it back to Sky House and cut it up in the kitchen, leaving the linoleum floor smeared with scales and blood. Gallagher took me to the creek. It flows through her housing development past signs warning trespassers of private property. There's a second poem carved into the black stone at Carver's grave, called "Late Fragment," and it is one of the last poems he wrote. It is also his epitaph:

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

This creek was one of the last places Carver had the strength to walk. There are tennis courts beside the stream, and a nine-hole golf course. What does it matter if this swift, cold river runs beside a putting green?

William Booth is a writer for The Post's Style section. He can be reached at boothw@washingtonpost.com. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon.