Most of Karl Marlantes’ “Deep River,” a sweeping novel of Finnish immigrants who flee political persecution to settle in logging communities along the Columbia River, takes place near a fictionalized version of Naselle.

In the book, the Naselle River becomes Deep River, Aberdeen becomes Nordland and the town of Willapa combines Raymond and South Bend.

After reading Marlantes’ novel, which at over 700 pages I’ll confess took a handful of recommendations and a few months for me to unshelve, I took off one Sunday to explore some of the riverbanks, towns and forests visited in the book by siblings Ilmari, Matti and Aino Koski.

From Naselle, I drove out U.S. Highway 4 and took a road from Rosburg to Altoona. There, I passed road signs with some characters’ Finnish names, counted the number of cars I passed on one hand and found many farmhouses and fishing boats easy to imagine on Marlantes’ pages.

On the drive back to Astoria, I took a loop road through the town of Deep River itself, not a prominent setting in the book but the inspiration for its title, and stopped beside an old Lutheran church and a bridge for a few pictures.

Marlantes, who was born in Astoria and raised in Seaside, took inspiration from family stories and from the “Kalevala,” a national epic of Finland, in crafting the novel’s characters and settings.

Like many historic accounts of life along the Columbia, although fictional, “Deep River” is an ode to perseverance in the region, a story deeply intertwined with its landscape.