PORT ANGELES — When you fall in love, when you’re young and strong, you figure ain’t nothing bad can happen to the two of you.
So believed Maddy, the sassy river guide, and her hot husband, Dalton. They marry at sunrise beside the Buffalo Fork, the Tetons rosy above. The couple move from Wyoming to Ashland, Ore., to start their own business, Half Moon Whitewater.
Then Maddy suffers from dizzy spells and other symptoms that don’t make sense. She discovers she is pregnant, and then is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
Maddy and Dalt embark then on a new journey, one fueled by love, in If Not for This, the new novel by Pete Fromm.
Free reading Friday
Fromm will give a free reading at the Port Angeles Library, 2210 S. Peabody St., at 7 p.m. Friday.
Copies of If Not for This as well as Fromm’s other books, which include As Cool as I Am and Indian Creek Chronicles, will be available for purchase.
The trip to Port Angeles is part of a long book tour for Fromm, who lives in Missoula, Mont. He could have skipped remote Clallam County. But Fromm is a longtime friend of Alan and Cindy Turner of Port Book and News, so Fromm and his wife, Rose, are coming out — and then driving to Spokane for the next night’s reading.
In If Not for This, the writer is sharing a story that took shape in his mind a decade ago. The novel, he said in an interview, started as a short story he wrote for a magazine.
Happily ever after?
It only covered the dawn wedding of two young river guides and how the groom thinks it’s pretty darn romantic, while the bride reminds him that it’s freezing out there.
“She was just funny and tough and sarcastic,” Fromm said of Maddy.
Later, the writer wondered: What would become of that couple as they forged ahead?
He wanted to explore the notion of happily ever after and how a couple weathers the storms that do come.
He also wanted to tell a love story — about what happens when life deals the lovers a harsh hand.
Fromm, a four-time winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award for Indian Creek Chronicles, How All This Started, Dry Rain and As Cool as I Am, proceeded to conduct copious research on multiple sclerosis.
If Not for This isn’t his own story, Fromm has had to tell a lot of readers. But like anyone, he’s watched many couples cope with serious illness.
MS diagnosis rate
The Northwest has one of the highest MS diagnosis rates in the world, and Fromm found a lot of theories about why, but no definitive answers. He also asked a neurologist and two people with MS to read his manuscript.
If Not for This has received some good reviews and some not so good. But the comments from the MS patients — mostly “you got it right” — were equally important.
Fromm also values something a friend, also with MS, said to him about the book.
With this disease, she told him, “life isn’t over. It’s just different.”
________
Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
