Flashback to 2002; the first cougar book was out and I needed a new book to work on.

I had learned the hard way that sensational material in the hands of someone new to the writer’s craft is risky. It’s like trying to manage a magic lamp inhabited by a mischievous genie. (I had been writing professionally for about four years when my coauthor and I decided to write that first book. Some people learn fast but I do not, so four years hadn’t taught me as much as you might suppose).

At the time I had just retired from a longtime summer job as a wilderness whitewater raft guide. As I moped through my new, town-based life, I didn’t understand why I was so sad. Guiding involved a lot of dishwashing and  guest mollifying and a little bit of excitement. Now I was free to, say, keep a garden. And write more. And seek out wilderness on my own, something I’d not had time for as a guide. But of course being a guide, living and working in wilderness and not just visiting there, had become integral to my self image.

One day I remembered someone else whose longtime river career had recently ended. His name was Clancy Reece, and not only had he been a raft guide until age 50, outlasting me by a decade, but nearly everyone who had known the guy had admired him, in some cases to an almost laughable degree. He was the subject of improbable stories which made him sound like Paul Bunyan on a caffeine buzz. His career had ended, not by choice, but when the river he loved took his life.

That was the book I would write, I decided almost the moment the man’s name popped into my head.

First I went to bookstores. I quickly saw that nothing quite like my book existed but that similar books did, although few as well-written as I knew mine would be.

Then I testdrove the idea past friends, including other writers. Every single one tried to discourage me. Repeatedly.

“Write about someone famous,” they said. “Pick a bigtime adventurer, not this nobody.”

“Sure, the guy sounds like a cool story,” they said. “But it doesn’t matter because you won’t be able to sell it.”

I listened to my friends just hard enough to argue them down. People would read this book because it would be so well-crafted, so polished, that it wouldn’t matter what it was about. They’d read it because it was good!

I tossed Susan Orlean’s very cool “The Orchid Thief” at them. That book was lovingly and expertly written — about a nobody. And Orlean’s nobody wasn’t even admirable in most of the ways we use that word, whereas Clancy was. “The Orchid Thief” had sold.

Then I hit them with “Into the Wild.” Jon Krakauer’s book was also an exploration of a guy who loved wilderness and strove for a close-to-the-bone lifestyle many would consider crazy, and who died as a result. Krakauer’s book got made into a mainstream movie. Maybe mine would too!

But the bottom line was this: All I cared about was writing a book I’d be proud of. I was fixated on the belief that that’s what I had. In this book I could teach people about wilderness values; give them a glimpse into a world I had loved and still pined for; and share with them a man who knew the value of simplicity and freedom.As much as I had once wanted to see my name in print, I wanted now to hold up a book I had written that did not make me uncomfortable.