Walking the Edge
Raymond Carver's often-turbulent life and ground-breaking fiction reflected the rugged beauty of the Olympic Peninsula

By William Booth
Sunday, September 16, 2007

RAYMOND CARVER IS BURIED ON A BLUFF ABOVE THE TOWN OF PORT ANGELES, upwind of the smokestacks that stoke the local paper mill. His grave overlooks the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and on sunny days, when the fog curtains part, you can see across the rumbled water all the way to the woolly green islands of Canada.

Some knotty old-timers lay alongside Carver in the lawn at Ocean View Cemetery. The veterans of wars and sawmills, they're buried with missing fingers beside beloved wives and mothers. One lumberjack's headstone includes an engraving of his logging truck. The older families are marked with tree trunks carved in stone. For this is a country of falling timber, where wood puts food on the table.

I was standing there in the twilight. Carver's grave is newer, bigger and more wordy than his neighbors', his bones covered with a slab of black granite. The words read: "Raymond Carver, May 25, 1938 -- August 2, 1988, Poet, Short Story Writer, Essayist." I was thinking, if you like the art, you want to know about the artist. You're supposed to be curious.

So I had driven out to the Olympic Peninsula, out to the edge of Washington state. I drove with all the windows down, past lavender farms and Indian casinos, across rivers plump with fish, through clear-cuts so raw with splintered stumps that the hills look as if they had been shelled. I guess the idea was to visit "Carver Country," which is both a physical landscape (he lived here, he died here) and a way of paying special attention. For a couple of days this summer, I walked around with Carver in my pack. I visited a cemetery, a cafe, a creek. I read his poems, my elbow on a lunch counter, drinking weak coffee. I read his stories with my back against a tree. It was a vacation. Only some of it happened just in my head.

One of the first poems of his I read was etched in full into the stone at his grave. It is called "Gravy," and it begins:

No other word will do. For that's what it was. Gravy.

Gravy, these past ten years.

Alive, sober, working, loving and

being loved by a good woman.

Eleven years

ago he was told he had six months to live

at the rate he was going. And he was going

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?

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.'"

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?

"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.