When my dad got a terminal cancer diagnosis at age 41, he decided to teach me to fish. I was three years old, but he was determined to spend the rest of our time together making sure I knew what I was doing. He wanted me to be okay without him and believed if I knew how to catch my own food (and outfish any man who dared underestimate me), I’d be okay enough.
Thirty years later I love it as much as he once did: fly-fishing for trout, bait fishing for bass, spin fishing for salmon with lures as bright and feathered as Vegas showgirls, even commercial fishing (which I don’t do myself but love being around). This is how I wound up, one dark February morning in 2017, at the edge of the Bering Sea in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. I’d gone to the town of Dutch Harbor, a busy commercial fishing port across a great roadless wilderness roughly 800 miles from Anchorage, to report a magazine story on the town’s community of bald eagles. In the depths of winter they nearly outnumber human residents and cause a ruckus—from stealing groceries outside the local Safeway to attacking anyone unlucky enough to wander too close to the nest behind the post office. They cover the boats in the harbor and swoop down on people out walking their dogs.
Like me, the birds were attracted to the influx of fishing—and fishermen. Unlike me, many of them were already paired up.
I don’t think I would have admitted it at the time, but dating felt dangerous. It opened me up to caring about people, and caring about people meant worrying about losing them. So I only chose people I knew I wouldn’t get close to. Painful as it was, it was safe because the endings were inevitable. Before I left for Dutch Harbor, I’d had enough dating chaos to last me a decade. I approached my romantic life a bit like a dim sum brunch—the more unfamiliar the offering, the more I wanted to try it. Professional cowboys, a taciturn chef, a surfer who lived on a crab boat and sent me home in the middle of the night after we’d hooked up because he “had to walk his dog” early in the morning. Tech workers employed by companies that sounded like children’s toys, nearly all of whom just wanted a manic pixie dream girl to take to Burning Man. After a few of these last situationships ended messily, I’d sworn off dating entirely and was busy nursing my own aching disappointment. Now, being someplace where the wind gusted hard enough to knock me off balance and the snow blew horizontally, I was grateful that at least the outside matched my insides.
One morning I went to the hotel in town to get some writing done. It was around 11 a.m., and I was the only customer in the place. I’d just finished eating a crab omelet and a side of fruit that tasted like a plastic replica of fruit when a tall man walked in. He was wearing the Bering Sea uniform of Xtratuf rubber boots and a navy blue hoodie from Alaska Ship Supply. But he didn’t have the sallow look of many of the men in town who worked in the fish-processing plants. Or the hungry wolfy gaze of the cod-fishing or crabbing crews returning after weeks at sea who catcalled me from the boats but got too nervous to speak when I approached them to ask questions about birds.
The man piled up his plate at the buffet and sat down a few tables away. He was close enough now that I could see he was beautiful. Too beautiful to be anything but trouble, I figured. And I was not looking for trouble; I was looking for eagles. But also we were the only people in the restaurant. It seemed awkward not to say anything. I asked him how his meal was.
“It could be worse. It has been worse,” he said, and introduced himself. His name was Josh, and his family had been commercial fishing for generations, mostly wild salmon out of Kodiak Island. After a stint as a journalist in the Middle East and a forced departure at the beginning of Yemen’s civil war, Josh went back into fishing. Now he traveled back and forth to Alaska from Seattle.
We exchanged business cards and a handshake. That, I thought, would be the end of that.
But two months later I was in Seattle to present my eagle story as part of a live stage show called Pop-Up Magazine. In the interim Josh had reached out via email and offered to meet up for a drink. I couldn’t tell if he was interested in more than friendship, but in one email he’d included a selfie reading my last book, so I was hopeful. I thought it might be a fun one-off adventure with an interesting man I’d met in the Bering Sea. A good story, safely contained to another city.
The night of our date it was raining, so I wore a dress with rubber boots. I figured since we’d met in the Aleutian Islands, Josh probably wasn’t expecting me to show up in heels. I was doing a final check in the mirror before heading out when I realized the dress was see-through. I grabbed a slip, nude-colored and matronly, that fell past my knees. Just as well, I thought. An incentive to keep my clothes on.
When my Uber pulled onto Ballard Avenue, Josh was already waiting on the wet sidewalk, his hands in his coat pockets. He was even taller than I remembered. More handsome than I remembered too. He seemed nervous. This was sweet. He sort of didn’t know where to put his hands as we walked. We threaded through clutches of people in dark rain jackets to a back room with flickering votives. We ordered old fashioneds. He lit up telling me about his life in Yemen and Egypt—about the magazine he’d edited and the rock climbing club he’d founded. He told me stories about being recruited to play professional basketball on a Yemeni team and about the time he’d taken a delegation of Yemeni Special Olympians to Boise, Idaho, to participate in the Winter Games. Now, though, he was tired of always being on the move.
“You sound like a wild horse,” I said. “That’s what I am too.” But I felt a small twinge. I wasn’t sure if I still wanted to be a wild horse.
“To wild horses,” he said, lifting his cocktail.
“To wild horses,” I said, clinking my glass against his. It was the kind of night where everything else becomes two-dimensional, like the backdrop in old hand-drawn cartoons.
On our second date in as many days we went to the annual blessing of the commercial-fishing fleet at the boat harbor in Josh’s neighborhood. Then back to his house, where he said he was going to make me his favorite food: salmon dip.
“Smell,” he said, offering me the open can of smoked salmon in olive oil. The fish was from Kodiak Island, canned at the same cannery where Josh had grown up commercial fishing with his dad and where his dad had fished with his grandfather. Four generations of fishermen in the same family, plying the same Alaskan waters. The meat was smoky, briny, and rich and took me back to my summers fishing with my own dad, to a time when I wasn’t quite so scared of caring about anyone or anything.
Josh used the whole can of salmon and oil to make the dip: a rich red concoction dotted with chopped cornichons and streaked with mayo. We ate it on crackers standing at the counter in his kitchen. It was creamy and deliciously tangy but with a hint of woodsmoke and a soft bite of chile. It was better than anything I’d ever eaten before. I felt a pang. I did not want to love this man or his salmon, but this, I realized, was now outside of my control.
Three years later we got married on top of the hill at my family’s avocado ranch in rural Southern California. No one was more surprised than me. Josh and I stood under an old oak tree that had been ravaged by wildfire but was just beginning to leaf out again. It was September 2020, the middle of the pandemic and two weeks after my mom had died of pancreatic cancer. I was grief-stricken and horrifically sad. But by now I knew that allowing love into your life requires making room for loss too. You cannot have one without the other. Just like you can’t have happiness without sadness, often at the very same time. After we said our vows, we went back to the house and danced to the music of a local mariachi band while the bats came out in the darkening sky.
We served Josh’s salmon dip to our guests that night—a handful of our closest family and friends—scooping it up with hunks of fresh sourdough bread. And then we toasted. To how we’d caught one another when we didn’t expect it, and perhaps even when we hadn’t wanted to.
