The blurb on the back cover of Anthony Doerr's novel "About Grace" mentions that part of the action takes place in Alaska. What it doesn't mention is the detail and care with which Doerr treats Anchorage, where he sets much of his story. While "About Grace" was published in 2004, I didn't encounter the book until the days before 2011, and I was charmed by the intimacy Doerr -- in reality a resident of Boise, Idaho -- has with Alaska's largest city.
Usually, as a reader in Alaska, a book's setting is a faraway, remote idea. But here I was seeing street names, businesses, neighborhoods that I knew. I began to write down all the places around Anchorage, places I could actually visit, could actually see and touch. I wondered how Doerr had become so well acquainted with Alaska's locations.
Doerr, who has received considerable acclaim for his work -- among them two O. Henry Awards for his short stories, and Washington Post "Bookworld" book of the year recognition for "About Grace" -- spent two summers in Alaska in his early 20s, including one working at a salmon processing plant in Ketchikan.
So -- why set a novel in Anchorage?
"I felt I understood a bit the atmosphere and light in the city," Doerr said in an e-mail. "The big tides, the sense that the city is still a city, but bowled in by wilderness.
"I love the city's name, too," he said. "Anchorage: A place where a ship is fit to be secured, a place to leave and get into trouble and then return to."
The first part of the book takes place in Anchorage in the 1970s -- a time many residents still remember well, when Tudor Road was just a two-lane dirt track and apartment buildings were being slapped together in midtown. The book's protagonist, David Winkler, is a hydrologist at the National Weather Service on Seventh Avenue who has grown up in Anchorage. The early parts of the book see Anchorage through young Winkler's rose-colored glasses, like looking at a sepia photograph in words.
The Snow Goose Market. Ship Creek. Government Hill. Fourth Avenue. Knik Arm. Lake Spenard. Huffman Road. All these places and many more in Anchorage make appearances, fleeting or otherwise, in the book. Other places are mentioned: Haines, Prince Rupert en route to Alaska. An extended portion of the book takes place at a location called Camp Nowhere, a tiny cold cabin that sits somewhere on the far outskirts of the Interior Alaska town of Eagle, and where Winkler and a University of Alaska Anchorage student attempt to keep insects from hibernating, tricking them into ignoring their own bodies.
The plot of the book is fairly straightforward: Winkler, a quiet man with few friends, is blessed with an ability to foresee events in his dreams, sometimes small and seemingly insignificant moments, sometimes enormous, earth-shattering events that have the potential to change his life forever. He meets and begins an affair with a woman, Sandy, with whom Winkler eventually runs away to Ohio. Sandy is a married woman but pregnant with Winkler's daughter, the titular Grace.
Soon, Winkler begins having dreams of a terrible flood that fills his Ohio home. He attempts to escape with the still-infant Grace in his arms, but the water is too high, the force of it too inexorable, and she drowns. Terrified by this premonition, Winkler flees to New York, where he hops a freighter to the Caribbean and spends the next 25 years in a sort of exile, never knowing if Grace has survived after he has removed himself from the equation in his dream.
Winkler eventually returns to the U.S. to find out if Grace is still alive, unsure of Sandy's or Grace's whereabouts. After visiting Grace Winklers from Nebraska to Arizona to Idaho, he heads back north to find out from Sandy's former husband whether or not Grace is still alive.
Winkler's search takes him to locations around Anchorage, a town that, like Winkler, I've known all my life. Struck by the detail with which Doerr depicted the city, I attempted to follow Winkler's course.
SPOILER ALERT: Much of the book revolves around whether or not Grace has survived, so be forewarned; parts of my retracing of Winkler's steps in the town where he grew up will reveal important plot points.
About Anchorage
Winkler gets around in "About Grace." He rides the bus everywhere, and Doerr admits this is how he got around as he was spending two weeks in Anchorage as he wrote, "pounding out the final scenes and wandering the city to make sure I had rendered most of the details plausibly." Following Winkler takes me all over the city, from the southern Hillside to downtown, along Lake Otis and Northern Lights. It's a sunny day, and I feel like I'm taking a solo road trip. I contemplate stopping to buy beef jerky and pretzels.
The first place Winkler goes after his long-delayed return to Anchorage is Grace's apartment. Yes, she's still alive, and she has a young son, Christopher. Her name is now Grace Ennis, a remnant of a short-lived marriage to a fisherman further south. Doerr even gives us an address: 208 East 16th Ave. I head toward the 200 block of 16th, excited to see a place that, until now, has been only faintly tangible. Winkler had worked his way through the course of his life to this point, and I share some of his anticipation.
As I make the turn off of A Street, following Winkler's route after he steps off the bus, my brow furrows. I'm down the street from Sullivan Arena. Across the street -- where, in the book, Winkler sits on a playground swing and contemplates Grace's front door -- sits a long apartment building. Where 208 East 16th should be, there's only Mulcahy Stadium, Anchorage's baseball fields, where the Anchorage Bucs and Glacier Pilots play their summer games.
I walk up the block a little ways, but I know in the back of my mind that I won't find anything. I feel like a Sherlock Holmes fan visiting London, only to discover there's no 221B Baker St.
I cruise more of East 16th, which stretches in broken segments for several miles, looking for a place like the one Doerr describes in the book. The 1200 block is a sliver of road an eighth of a mile long, sitting on the precipice of a dropoff that reveals a mishmash of tightly packed structures below. More apartments, with a few single family homes on the other side of the street. I glance over and see, eerily, two Winkler Plumbing and Heating box vans in a lot where luxury condos are being erected.
Discovering hidden Anchorage
As I head toward my next stop, across the bridge over Ship Creek and into Government Hill, I wonder how many other locations aren't real. I think of incongruities in the book; Winkler grew up on the north side of Ship Creek, but walks down Spenard Road later in the book to reach his old home -- a geographical impossibility. Sandy is buried 14 miles north of Anchorage up the Glenn Highway, at a place called Heavenly Gates Perpetual Care Necropolis. According to several phone books and a Google search, no such place exists, although Doerr references it again in his e-mail.
"The settings in my work are almost always based on visits to various places," he said; "whatever limited observational skills I have, I think I use them best when I find myself in a strange place, slightly uncomfortable."
Winkler's childhood home was a "bankrupt furrier's storehouse converted to apartments" that sits somewhere in Government hill, where Winkler can see the rail yard, Ship Creek, and even Mt. Susitna beyond. The only place where all of those can be observed is in the southwest corner of the neighborhood that sits above the Port of Anchorage. As I head that way, I'm in unfamiliar territory.
I've lived in Anchorage for most of my life, and consider myself well acquainted with the city. But as I cross the bridge and turn left toward the port, I realize that I've spent little time in this part of Government Hill. It's one of the oldest parts of town. I pass by small houses on large lots on one side, a tree-lined bluff on the other.
At the very end of Harvard Avenue, there is a park that I've never seen before. It's a small park, nothing more than three picnic tables and a totem pole sitting on the side of the bluff. "Brown's Point Park," says a sign. It's a clear day, and the corner of the bluff affords a grand view of Mt. Susitna reclining across Knik Arm. This, I imagine, is where Doerr stood when he decided where Winkler would have grown up. It's quiet, aside from the sigh of an occasional semi truck passing below on its way to the port.
So there's no former tannery that sits here. I'm not disappointed this time; in fact, I'm almost pleased to have discovered a quaint little park in a town I already know well. It's like finding out a new and endearing fact about a longtime partner.
Rediscovering the familiar
My next stop isn't quite so foreign; Winkler gets a job at the Lenscrafters in the Fifth Avenue Mall. He spends time with his grandson in the food court on the fifth floor, sitting in the "big, sun-heated atrium." Christopher finds a cocoon in one of the potted trees, a species foreign to Alaska.
I haven't paid attention to the ceiling in the Fifth Avenue Mall in a long time, and it's easy to forget how much glass is up there, a huge skylight supported by enormous white beams splaying out from a nexus that sits above the elevator bank. Again, I imagine Doerr, sitting in the food court, eating something as wholly unspectacular as mall food, and looking up and seeing these broad beams, a plane passing far overhead.
"I don't necessarily feel like I'm always presenting a real, actual place in every part of my work -- often the settings in my stories and novels are more like mythic versions of real places," Doerr said. I feel this is especially true here, although I don't think it's quite as mythic as Doerr makes it out to be. To visit a place for the first time is to look at that place through the eyes of a child; everything is unfamiliar, foreign. I feel that way, looking up for the first time in a long time, at the ceiling of a mall.
The next location is similarly unspectacular. Grace is an employee at Gottschalk's at the Dimond Mall. Now defunct, the store once occupied a space now anchored by Forever 21. I stop there only briefly, and it seems to fit in with the nonexistent places theme. I get the sense of trying to grab a wisp of smoke and close my fist around it.
The same goes for a Chevron gas station where Grace tells Winkler to meet her after he confronts her for the first time. Grace says it's located at Lake Otis and 64th, but in reality, the streets don't intersect. As I tick off numbers on the way down Lake Otis -- 88th, 84th, 72nd, 68th, I realize that I've never seen a Chevron on this stretch of road. I'm giving up hope on this location before I even arrive.
But just as I see the light at 63rd and Lake Otis, a flash of red, white and blue catches the corner of my eye. A block away from 63rd, right where 64th would be, is a petroleum supplier who sells -- what else? -- Chevron products. Again, I'm appeased somewhat as I imagine Doerr riding the bus down Lake Otis, an open notebook in his lap, as he glances up and decides to place a pivotal scene of his book there.
"Settings and stories usually come to me simultaneously," Doerr said. "That is, the landscapes and the stories grow out of each other."
My last stop is a few miles up Huffman, into the foothills past Elmore Road. Sandy's husband, Herman Sheeler, lives up here. In the book, it's Lilac Way, but there in reality, just as Doerr describes it, sits Lilac Drive. At the head of the street there's a huge stone sign, the word "LILAC" engraved simply in black. It's a narrow road bordered by large houses set far back from the street. They have the wintertime equivalent of well-groomed lawns, smooth expanses of snow without footprints leading up to the walls of the houses.
Herman's house is supposed to be stucco, with an archway and a "little grey satellite dish screwed to the eave." The address, like Grace's, doesn't exist. I imagine looking awfully suspicious as I slowly cruise through the neighborhood, stopping occasionally to get out and take pictures. I wonder if anyone is eyeing me warily through their front windows.
There's one house with an arched entrance and a satellite dish, but no stucco. It's the closest I see, so I get out of my car and stand dumbly looking at it from the street. I imagine this is where Winkler stood and waved to the neighbors gardening outside. I imagine Winkler waving. I imagine Doerr waving. I imagine myself waving. But there's no one around; it's winter still, although it's warmer than it's been. From a curve in the street, I can see down to Cook Inlet, clumps of ice floating leisurely on the surface.
Seek and ye shall find
There's nothing particularly spectacular about any of these locations. But looking at them through the eyes of a person in search of something, there's a beauty to each of them. Doerr was searching for inspiration; Winkler was searching for answers to his lost life. Their searches through Anchorage sent me on my own search, and what I found was an Anchorage I hadn't seen in a long time.
"What strikes me about Anchorage," Doerr said, "is how friendly everybody is, and how grounded. People live comfortable lives, for the most part, but they are surrounded by landscape in large scales, and that lends them a familiarity with weather and light and rocks that few folks have in the United States. In places like Anchorage, the natural world is always reminding folks how old it is, and how powerful."
Contact Ben Anderson at ben(at)alaskadispatch.com.