But instead of waiting for my Annie Oakley to come along, I instead tried to persuade the women I dated to change their lifestyles to suit my own. My first victim, Kristin (let's call her that so her friends won't know what an a—hole she dated) wore fishnets and loved punk rock. We were so wrong for each other.
The day of our first kiss, I nearly lost her in a creek. I had taken her fishing, given her pretty bad instructions about how to put on chest waders and then watched her sink like a can of beer. Poor girl. All she was really looking for was someone to share a pack of clove cigarettes with, but she wound up with an unwanted lesson in wilderness survival.
Things went on like this for a while. Every time I met a girl, I'd charm her with talk about the magic of a deer moving across fresh snow, or the unique joy of waking up to the sound of howling coyotes. Before long she'd tell me she, too, loved those things. Or that she at least wanted to love them, just as soon as I introduced her to them. My photo albums from those years look like Cabela's catalogs full of women holding wet fish and wearing uncertain smiles.
After college, I moved to Montana to study writing. I chose the school largely because of a group of female rafting guides I'd met when I visited. Their legs were plastered with bug bites and scrapes. I felt like a conquistador who had stumbled upon the Seven Cities of Gold. I knew my future bride was wandering those streets.
I did meet outdoorsy women in Montana, and each one was more trouble than the last. One particularly wild girlfriend threatened me with her shotgun. Then she really broke my heart by giving away my secret hunting spot. My luck with women was so bad (and my ability to see my part in it so nonexistent) that I hatched a plan to move out to my remote Alaskan cabin, order a bride from a fishing village in Siberia and call it a lifetime.
That's when fate stepped in. I sold my first book, which was about my experiences hunting and fishing, and went to New York City to meet my editor for drinks. She brought along her company's new director of publicity, Katie Finch. While Katie claims to have had only one thought about me—that I was too brusque for TV—I couldn't keep my eyes off her. She wasn't my type (her heels would have gotten her laughed out of Alaska), but she was intriguing. Her cheekbones reminded me of Cate Blanchett, and she processed everything I said with the caution of a CIA interrogator. I'd never met anyone like her.
For the next year, most of my professional dealings went through Katie. I'd call her while picking cactus spines out of my knees, and she'd be sunning herself in the Hamptons. There was a time when I would have found her lifestyle silly (who wastes time tanning when there are fish to catch?), but she was so confident in her choices that I couldn't knock them.
