Northwest Passage : IN DIFFERENT TIMES: A Fictional Memoir By David Gregor , (Alki Press, 2819 First Ave. Ste. 220, Seattle, Wash. 98121; 206-441-5380: $10.95; 258 pp.)

The American Northwest from Montana across to the Pacific speaks for itself in luridly overstated landscapes. Yet the best stories are not always told from up on the high passes amid the sheet lightning and cascades of thunder.

Rather, the circle of storytellers here draws from the quiet of small towns and meadow bottoms to produce unexpectedly reserved, human-scale chronicles--books wherein the carpentry is as unpretentious and direct as in a hardwood rocking chair, and where the effect is enriched by placing the rocker on an old front porch that opens onto America’s most desirable territory. And to stretch the metaphor, these also are stories with the mood of the rocking chair’s calm nostalgia.

Writers like Ivan Doig and the late Norman Maclean, to name a couple, are the masters of this quiet literature about a region that now finds its greatest mark of distinction, fresh wild open space, disappearing under the blade of bulldozers and behind the no-trespassing fences of human crowding.

So these writers are inclined to take us backward in time to seek the essence of the Northwest and the people it begot. And, of course, to recall a misplaced tempo of life.

With his first novel, Northwest bookseller David Gregor steps forth as a noteworthy newcomer to this school of storytelling.

“In Different Times” is his mid-fortysomething “fictional memoir” about coming of age in the Puget Sound shipyard, munitions depot, ferry-dock town of Bremerton, Wash., during the great upwelling storm of the Vietnam War.

Both the time and the place are complicated. In the summer and fall of 1966, America was stumbling toward turbulent days. And blue-collar Bremerton lies inside one of the most mysterious backwaters of the Northwest--the maze of deep-sea canals, lagoons, inlets, forested islands and mountainous peninsulas of Puget Sound, where fierce tidal currents swirl the rich and cold waters under melancholy skies.

But Gregor’s story is free of drag from these complications. College dropout Eddie Carr is 19 and lives in a beach shack in this town in that summer with a boy’s easy drive and a man’s looming obligations.

Nothing could stop the man-boys of those summer days; they went wherever life took them. And if Eddie Carr wondered what was profound, why, he could meditate on the hippie nightclub singer down the beach who swam in the fog without her clothes on. And, oh yes, the day in June when the Sun carried a front-page story about the first Bremerton man-boy to to die in the war.

Ask Eddie’s father what was important that summer and he’d tell you it was the length of that kid’s hair. And the filthy mess in the beach shack and, Eddie, your mother misses you at home.

In short, nothing too sharply distinguishes Eddie Carr from thousands of other middle-class, draft-age American males of that era.

Behind the counter at his fine first-edition Gregor Books in West Seattle, the author says that by calling his story a “fictional memoir” he means “73% of it actually happened”--and probably to you if you grew up in those days.

So, with the overactive self-indulgence of a man emerging from but not yet free of his teens, Eddie pursues (and is pursued by) the opposite sex, daydreams a life of rock ‘n’ roll music, samples the hard knocks of work on the waterfront, dabbles with drugs and never questions whether friendship or love is undying.

Eddie Carr can shoulder such a big load through this quick book because he is 19 and doesn’t dwell on things. He lives in the present and goes along easy, whether it’s a get-rich-quick scheme to catch dogsharks in the sound for the cash bounty or a job loading bombs onto ships bound for Vietnam.

War bears down around Eddie and begins to cull his friends, forcing the others to consider their choices. Eddie hesitates and diverts his mind to the ancient skeleton of an Indian woman excavated that summer. A bittersweet legend of the Skomish Indians emerges recurrently but judiciously through the story, surely not so much for its symbolism as for its sentimentalism.

Finally, Eddie makes his choice about the war because there is no longer a choice to do otherwise. Hundreds are dying every week. America is calling to duty. The communists (remember them?) are on the march. That last summer of discovery and freedom has passed into winter.

“I never thought it would turn out this way,” Eddie shrugs.

“None of us did,” comes the reply.