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The Yakima Haunts was a project undertaken by Whitman student John Wiseley. Along with a paper, John also took photographs of the area. Thanks are due to John for allowing his project to be shared with everyone.
By John Wiseley
During my attempt to take a picture of the site of Ray’s first home at 1515 S. 15th road in Southeast Yakima, I found myself feeling out of place and uncomfortable. I wound up taking a picture that gives a very poor representation of this neighborhood. This is located deep within the area that is known as "the hole" where living is difficult and money is scarce. So, I knew it wasn’t going to be a nice neighborhood. The neighborhoods in "the hole" that I have been to before don’t come close to what I was to see on 15th street. As I turned down 15th just one block south of the home of the Central Washington State Fair, what I saw was poverty to the extent I really didn’t know existed in Yakima. The hole I knew was old run down houses, and burned out cars, but this part was barely habitable trailers and trailer homes with broken windows and spray paint. Some of them were slanted on a broken foundation and had dirt yards full of sticks and dead trees. When I got to the end of the road I didn’t want to go back down to take the picture, so I hopped out and quickly took a picture, and only got one strange look from residents (that was more than enough for me.) This picture reminds me of the shame I felt, for being born into an easy life, everytime I look at it. It is interesting to see on the map that this area is still not within the Yakima or Union Gap city limits. In the history of Yakima the city limits have spread westward to include more of the affluent side of town. Neither Union Gap or Yakima, however, want to account for this destitute neighborhood that Ray once lived in. As Ray recounts in "Shiftless" this was the poor part of old Yakima. His house had an outhouse out back and he has talked about the shame this brought him in his early years. Today the neighborhood has only grown poorer. In "the hole" some historical houses from the earliest inhabitants of Yakima remain, and many people outside "the hole" don’t know this. It appears that all the old homes in Ray’s first neighborhood have all been replaced with trailers. The addresses on this block of 15th increase by halves, indicating that on a plot where one home used to be, there are now two trailers.
Tess Gallagher informed me that the fair grounds was a place that Ray spent a lot of time as a child. He grew up less than two blocks from fair grounds. During Carver’s Yakima days the fairgrounds was the place where all community happenings went on. At the fairgrounds I realized that if any gazebo sticks in the memory of a Yakima resident, especially that of Raymond Carver, it is the gazebo at the fairgrounds where the bands play bluegrass and country-western. In the story "Gazebo" a couple (Ray and Maryanee) recall a drive "out past Terrace Heights" in an area called East Valley. During this recollection of the woman’s she remembers a gazebo behind some friendly old people’s house, and how they told her that people came there to play music a long time ago. From what I know of Carver’s story writing and the gazebo at the Central Washington State Fair, I’m sure he is thinking of this gazebo.1 In the story he describes this gazebo in a way that it had seen great days but now the paint had come off and weeds had grown up the steps. I wonder if times with Maryanne at Gazebo in their days of young love led him to the use of a rare Raymond Carver symbol. After the lady explained the history of the Gazebo, the younger woman in the story expresses an old desire to be like that. It can be seen that rather than being like that old couple, they turn out like the gazebo, a burnt out remnant of better times. Although I know Carver did not like to use symbols, this inanimate analogy doesn’t compromise Carver’s writing morality.
In "The Sturgeon" Ray recalls a time with his father at the Central Washington State Fair, and a story about a huge sturgeon. As I read this I recognized the story. When I was a child I remember looking at the picture of a twenty-six or thirty-six foot sturgeon. This was at the tourist center at Grand Coulee Dam, one place Ray’s father worked. Ray stated that memory was a bit fragmented, and so is mine, but I can add that they wound up taking the fish out with two tractors after the team of horses failed.
Another place where Ray’s father worked is Boise Cascade, as a saw filer. Boise Cascade is one of the largest and oldest industries in Yakima. As I was driving to Boise Cascade I saw a heap of clothing in front of a small apartment complex. When I saw this I got some picture of what Carver describes in "Why Don’t You Dance?" and the poem "Distress Sale." This image is certainly not unique to Yakima, but I thought it was an interesting thing to stumble upon while looking through Carver’s Yakima. I also passed an old laundro-mat and dry cleaners on my drive to Boise Cascade from Carver’s first house, that quite possibly could have been the drycleaners that he went to with his father in the poem "Another Mystery." It is interesting to see the prevailing theme of death on this laundry cleaner’s.
Prosser is a town about fifteen miles east of the reservation, about seventy miles down I-82 from the town of Yakima. In the poem "Prosser," Ray recalls the fields of Prosser and a goose hunting trip there with his father. Liggett Taylor informed me that another of Ray’s regular hunting grounds lies outside Granger on the Yakima River about thirty miles from Yakima. This is the place where me and my buddies end our duck hunting drift boat float. The actual place that Ray hunted in Granger is probably at, or very near, the place where a little park with dinosaur statutes is located today. The river he refers to in "Prosser" is the Yakima. He depicts the weather typical of November, in the middle third of hunting season. The rain he mentions is rare during October in the Yakima Valley. In November, though, it begins to rain frequently until it becomes cold enough to snow in December. In this poem he describes the timelessness of the land, something difficult to ignore when a person gets in touch with it. Prosser is an agricultural Mecca where it is virtually impossible to remain unmoved by one’s rural surroundings.
Another goose hunt is mentioned in the poem "Limits," which takes place north of Hanford Nuclear Plant, at the bluffs of Walluke. Hunters hide in blinds on the cliffs (bluffs) above the Columbia and hope the geese fly low enough when they leave their beds on the water to feed in the corn and wheat of the area. The poem "Hunter" probably refers to this area too, because of the "bleak landscape" he mentions and the description of the geese "rising, rising up this Gorge." I too have hunted here with my friends on the occasion that we feel like getting up at 4:00 in the morning to goose hunt.
The story "Sixty Acres" is set in the Lower Valley on the Yakima Indian Reservation on Toppenish Creek. This is a very popular place for duck hunting. All the land along the creek is either privately owned or owned by duck clubs. The history of the reservation is filled with the sad mistakes of Native Americans selling their limited lands to white farmers and duck clubs. Today sixty acres is toward the upper end of acreage owned by a single Native American family. Whether he knew this or not I’m not sure, but land leaving Indian hands is the grounding of the story.
The road that Lee Waite’s "Sixty Acres" is on is Cowiche Road, which doesn’t exist in the Lower Valley. Cowiche is a town, a creek, and a road Northwest of Yakima. The creek, not surprisingly, is what was dear to Raymond Carver’s childhood. I’m sure that Carver just used Cowiche road because it was an Indian name that he remembered, and a place he was fond of. In "With a Telescope Rod on Cowiche Creek" one can see in how fond his memories of this creek are. Cowiche Canyon (the lower part of the creek) now has a well maintained trail for nature hikes, and fishing is illegal.
In the story "Nobody Said Anything" as Liggett Taylor pointed out to me that what Ray refers to as Birch Creek is in fact Bachelor Creek, a creek Ray fished as a child. He also pointed out that the walk is a well accounted path to the creek from one of his old homes on 11th Avenue in Yakima. The road he referred to as Lennox is actually Washington, and there is a Chinese restaurant, Ding Ho, on Washington and 16th. The cemetery he refers to is actually on 24th, not 16th. When Mr. Taylor explained to me the location of Bachelor Creek, I was a bit surprised because I did not know that anyone fished this creek. There is a hatchery right above the place where Ray described catching a fat green trout. It is still legal to fish at Bachelor Creek. The steelhead that the children caught, however, are not legal to keep now from any river in the Yakima except the Naches.
A poem that seems quite similar to "Nobody Said Anything" is "The Kitchen." In this poem, while fishing Ray looses his rod in a pond (Sportsman Pond) in Sportsmen’s Park on the eastside of Yakima.
Raymond Carver says that "This is not true for me," in response to Flannery O’Conner’s statement that nothing needs to happen to a writer (to have enough to write about) after they are twenty years old. Although it is true that most of Carver’s material is acquired from years past the age of twenty, he has repeatedly gone back to his times in Yakima which is where his life was based from the ages three to twenty.
---------------- 1Also, Tess had bought a magazine about building gazebos. The whole "gazebo" thing apparently started after John Gardner built a gazebo, and it inspired Tess to become interested.
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