I knew Ben would have loved the senior prank a friend and I proposed — a series of odd, unexpected happenings throughout the day, like hiding alarm clocks in the ceiling panels, and switching teachers’ desks. But I’d barely started my presentation when Caleb Grossman (not his real name) cut me off.

“Jenny’s idea is stupid,” he announced to the class, some of whom began to snicker.

Caleb was Ben’s perfect foil, at least in my literature-obsessed brain. Both boys were brilliant, but Caleb was as cruel as Ben was virtuous. In English class, Caleb made frequent and obscene references to the nature of my relationship with our teacher. He criticized me during discussions. And I’d often catch him watching me with a malicious look that seemed to say: You’d better watch out, little girl.

“My prank is called the Plague of ’98,” Caleb continued. “We’re going to buy 10,000 grasshoppers and release them in the school.”

Pathetically, our high school mascot was the grasshopper.

“And how are we supposed to pay for 10,000 grasshoppers?” somebody asked.

“That’s easy,” Caleb said, then looked straight at me. “We’ll use the money from Ben’s memorial fund.”

I don’t remember how I removed myself from the front of the room. But the second I made it to safety, I started sobbing. I couldn’t stop. I cried through my free period, skipped my physics class, and was finally given permission to leave school early.

Before I left, a teacher made Caleb stand face-to-face with me in the school lobby.

“Sorry about what I said.” Caleb’s face was impassive. He might as well have been talking to a wall.

“OK,” I said, and walked away. But it was not OK. I felt furious. I felt bullied.

Of course, it’s not easy to define bullying. Look at the controversy over recent revelations about Mitt Romney’s high school behavior. What might be school-age antics to one person is violent assault to another.

So did Caleb’s treatment toward me constitute actual bullying? Even at the time, I feared I was overreacting. But as an adult, I can see that his aggressive, leering behavior in the classroom was a subtle kind of sexual harassment, and his outrageous comment about a boyfriend I was still mourning – a blow delivered in front of 120 classmates — felt like the culmination of a long, systematic campaign to wound the parts of my identity that mattered most.

Caleb and I didn’t speak after that debacle. Graduation came and went. I left for college, then moved to New York and became a journalist. I began writing a novel inspired by Ben’s death, and as I wrote, I thought about Caleb. Neither he nor I were the social crème de la crème of our school. We were both outcasts of a certain kind. In another world, we would have been united against more popular forces, not against each other. But instead, we were nemeses. Underdog fighting underdog became a central theme in my book.

As it turned out, Caleb had been thinking about me, too. A few years later, I received the following email:

Hi Jenny: This is Caleb — you may remember me, we went to school together for about ten years. I believe we may have played Orpheus and Persephone in Sue Jagger’s fourth grade production of the Orphic Tragedy. I have my own condo in Foggy Bottom and a job in the city, (where) I will be working for the immediate future. I also have my own car. Anyway, I hope everything is going well and look forward to hearing back from you soon! Caleb

The first thing I thought was: Of course I remember you. You made fun of my dead boyfriend in front of the entire senior class. The second thing was: I did not play Persephone in Sue Jagger’s fourth grade.

I read the note over and over, wondering why Caleb’s email sounded like he was proposing marriage in 16th-century Europe. “I have a fantastic job in the mud-pie-makers guild and can offer you five ducks and one cow,” it seemed to say.

But I couldn’t help myself: I wrote back immediately. I had to see what this was all about.

As it turns out, Caleb wanted to take me on a date. This seemed like a practical joke — a long-delayed maraschino cherry of meanness to drop on me, as if his mission hadn’t been completed. But my curiosity was too great. I said yes.

The day before our date, I received a lengthy, apologetic email from Caleb.

Jenny: I am embarrassed to say I was unable to get a prime time table at any of my favorite places — for instance Eric Ripert’s WestEnd Bistro. However, I have made alternative reservations for 8:30 at a few very viable locations.

Caleb proceeded to list restaurants and the qualifications of each, as if he were some Chamber of Commerce lackey: At Sabores, he wrote, “the dishes are scrumptious thanks to the mastery of Executive Chef Daniel Amaya. The atmosphere is hip and vibrant YET subdued and lounge-like.” At Matisse, he told me, “one of Washington’s foremost wine experts has combined the culinary and visual arts to complete an ambiance of dining bliss.” And finally, the email concluded, “A cheesy but perennial default favorite: Benihana. I have gotten a big kick out of the sense of community + belonging I get from dining with others (I come from a broken home).”

Talk about bizarre. The Caleb who was apparently trying to date me was so wildly different than the villain I’d created in my mind. He seemed less mean than awkward. Almost childlike.

My best friend from high school sent me a message: “Jenny, this is way too weird. will you call me before you go and when you get home?”

I went to meet Caleb, fully prepared to be stood up. I had chosen the “hip and vibrant YET subdued and lounge-like” Sabores, and picked a table in a well-lit part of the restaurant. Caleb arrived and proceeded to order us a ridiculous amount of food and ply me with drinks. I told him I was driving and had one cocktail. We had a stilted conversation over dinner, but I barely had the brain space to listen to him. I just kept wondering: What am I doing here? Does Caleb even remember what he said to me senior year? I didn’t bring it up, and neither did he. Instead, he flattered me incessantly, and I became so uncomfortable that I left early. I arrived home to find the following email:

Jenny: Thank you again for meeting me for dinner tonight. Seeing how as I had a crush on you since like fourth grade, it was sort of a dream come true! You have grown up to be a truly impressive woman and I hope we can stay in touch! Caleb

And there it was. An explanation.

All this time I thought he was a bully, but he was really a misguided kid, with an inability to read social cues.

When I was in the second grade and a boy made fun of me one day, my teacher said he was only doing it because he had a crush. Later, in fourth grade, it was Ben who had a crush on me, one that took me years to reciprocate, a fact about which I still harbored tremendous guilt.

Now, I felt like Caleb was attempting to shove himself into Ben’s role. He offered a hot-air balloon ride, a dinner cruise and, ironically, a pilgrimage to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s grave. But I didn’t want Caleb, a substitute for the boy I’d lost. I thought about all the experiences Ben and I had never shared, and I felt guilty all over again. I’d been so slow to see Ben for who he was, to figure out how good he would be in my life.

In the end, Caleb made a kind of confession — an acknowledgment that we’d been wrong about each other. In an email, he wrote:

With regard to the fourth grade Orphic Tragedy, I realize now that it was Rebecca Marshall — not you — who played Persephone to my Orpheus. I guess the mind (heart?) has a way of rewriting the past as it wishes it were!

I felt for Caleb. I understood his compulsion to strive after something he wanted so badly but would never have, because I felt the same way. But I also knew that the past couldn’t be rewritten or even revised. The last line of “The Great Gatsby” describes the current carrying ships ceaselessly into the past, but I wouldn’t let Caleb drag me back into those old struggles and adolescent longings.

I was forging ahead.

V was the first Indian-American I’d ever met who actually liked to camp. I’d always associated camping with white people, along with sunbathing and being grounded, but here was V at REI — testing compasses, lusting after tents — with a thrilled, drifting look in his eye. I kept thinking about a term that a friend and hiking enthusiast had once taught me — “poop trowel” — two words that returned to me now with great foreboding.

But as I trailed along, I found myself vaguely infected by V’s enthusiasm. It was one of the things I liked best about him, his ready embrace of adventure. He had once done a seven-day solo hike through the Himalayas, sans guide, and slept at a tea house each night. Before I bought a bicycle, V got me to double on his and we rode all around New York City that way, though it took me a while to loosen my clench on his waist.

Ironically, it was that very sense of adventure that seemed to prove us incompatible. We were plagued by the question of where we would live for the next 10 to 20 years, if we were to get married. Prior to meeting me, V had spent a year in rural India and three years in Sierra Leone. He had always envisioned living and working abroad, either in India or Africa; I had never even entertained the possibility. The question of where led to a multitude of what ifs. We tried coming up with timelines and spreadsheets that would fulfill both our geographical needs. Google Docs became a primary form of correspondence.

I think we both believed that we would soon be parting ways, and that this camping trip would be some lovely, pastoral memory we would linger over, long from now, when we were married to other people. I agreed to go hiking, mostly because of his enthusiasm, and how much I would miss it.

Not 15 minutes into our hike, I was faced with a number of immutable truths — that my backpack was the approximate shape and weight of a mini-fridge, that my one prized possession, a king-size Hershey bar, was somewhere in his backpack instead of mine, that we had to first ascend a mountain in order to descend it. V went ahead of me, leaping from stone to stone, chatty and upbeat, immune to my slightly exaggerated mouth-breathing. The first bad sign came early on, when we were met by a hiker descending the mountain. He said that the weather, on his way up, had grown so chilly and cloudy that he’d decided not to go above treeline. We told the hiker where we were planning to go: up the mountain, along the ridge, through a ravine, along another ridge, and into a colony of shelters by sundown.

The hiker took one look at me in my oversize yellow poncho, bowed under the weight of my mini-fridge, and asked for our full names. “Just in case,” he said, leaving off the rest.

This is the point in the TV movie where you curse the foolish hikers and urge them to turn back. In our defense, a park ranger had initially approved our route, had even guessed that a yellow blob like me could tackle the whole journey without a problem. The views, he said, would be worth it.

But at the top of the mountain, the landscape turned lunar, drained of color, bereft of plant life. We stood among the gray rock, surrounded by cloud on all sides, a far cry from the turning leaves we had come to see, the livid orange and garnet that lavished the slopes at this time of year. This was a more desolate beauty, remote and isolating. But we’d been planning this trip for weeks, and after a mere hour of suffering and no sign of those magical, mist-clad mountains, we weren’t about to turn back around.

I decided to adopt a certain philosophy toward the hike, which was something like my approach to life at 26: I don’t know where I am but I’m keeping on. I was living in New York City, working as an assistant editor on a documentary film, writing my first novel in the evenings, and trying to negotiate with the mouse that lived in the bowels of my gas stove. Around that time, I read Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet,” in which I’d starred these lines: “Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question.”

As the hike went on, I found myself living a lot of questions. I kept waiting for the visual rewards that the White Mountains website had promised us — a sapphire lake, a giant, sleepy moose — but no. The uphill climb flattened out into a hostile field of gray boulders. Buffeted by wind and nearly horizontal rain, I struggled to keep my balance.

And I learned another word — “cairns” — cryptic little piles of stones that marked the trail. Those stone snowmen became for me tiny totems of authority and hope in our increasingly bleak surroundings. After we crossed the boulder field, we checked the map. We weren’t covering enough ground to stick to our original plan. We had no time to sit and eat. Instead we took turns shoveling mixed nuts into our mouths from a sweaty Ziploc bag, and though I hate mixed nuts, I nibbled with a feral intensity.

Cold and wet and miserable, I focused on composing a series of speeches, which I planned to deliver as soon as we found ourselves within reach of a proper toilet. Rhetorical questions included: Why couldn’t we have started with a day hike? Why didn’t we obey the several signposts that read, DO NOT GO PAST THIS SIGN? But the light was fading too quickly to pause and interrogate. The sun had begun to set by the time we reached the ravine, a steep descent among jagged rocks and a rather anemic stream. We had no choice but to strap on our headlights, like miners, and scoot from stone to wet stone on our rears. Propelled by resentment, I led the way.

At some point, I turned and noticed that V had fallen a good bit behind. When he finally reached me, he showed me his hands, which were pale and trembling slightly. His lips were going numb, making it difficult to talk. Hypothermia, he guessed. I could see he was scared. I pressed his wet-gloved hands between mine. It didn’t help.

We went on boulder-scooting, slowly now. Every so often, I called behind and he replied, but if his voice was too distant, I waited until he reached me. Soon, the dark engulfed us completely, and all I could see was the small tunnel of light from my headlamp, brightening the few steps ahead but nothing more. The snowman totems were lost to us. Our map had fallen apart. All we had was the sound of our names in the dark, or I’m here, or Go on.

It was pitch black when we reached the bottom of the ravine, and yet instantly warmer below treeline. We stumbled along what we thought was the trail and finally arrived at a group of rickety lean-to’s in which hikers could pitch their tents. Climbing into a lean-to, I felt an almost deranged euphoria. I didn’t even mind, later that night, when we realized that V’s sleeping bag had been soaked through by the rain. We stuffed ourselves into my lady-size sleeping bag, packed so tight that I couldn’t move my torso or legs, a sort of two-headed sausage. As was his custom, V fell asleep within minutes. Exhausted as I was, I lay awake, listening to him snore, never so content to be partially paralyzed next to another.

As I write this, I’m in New Delhi and V is in Mozambique, but usually we live in Washington, D.C. We got married two years after our White Mountains hike, and while we spend some months out of each year in different countries, I’ve come to believe that the question of where we’ll live 15 years from now is as foggy as who we will be. Ours is a marriage that some of my relatives call “modern,” and by modern, I think they mean inscrutable.

And as married folk do, we’ve recounted That Time We Went Hiking to our friends so often that we can call up the smallest details, like the squirrel scratching all night at the skin of our tent. (Another rodent negotiation.) What I don’t remember as readily is the growing panic, the uncertainty behind every step. The memory of that fear fades a bit with every telling.

In retrospect, the happy ending of our hike seems a fated eventuality, but logic — and a hundred other hiker horror stories — suggest otherwise. There is a multitude of other routes the story could have taken, that our story could still take, twists and boulder-scooting turns that no Google Doc spreadsheet could foresee. Such is the wilderness of marriage. We continue calling across the dark, across continents, and so long as the other answers, I’m here, we are safe; we keep on.

We were really starting to feel the crunch. I think two years prior to me being laid off we had to cut our hours back and so everybody worked and got paid for 90 percent instead of 100 percent of the time. So everybody had one day unpaid every two weeks. And so that was the first big sign that things were getting bad. And then it just continued to spiral until we couldn’t keep as many people on. And I was the low man on the totem pole. I was the assistant planner, which is the lowest step, and also I was the most recent one hired so I had the least seniority. I knew about almost six months before I was actually going to be laid off, they’d already told me that it was me.

So what happened?

So I got the word that I was going to be laid off and one of the women in my department, she’s the analyst, she had been working on a special project with some of the head supervisors. She wrote a grant to get this old-fashioned river ferry replaced thanks to the stimulus fund. And the boat was about to come online and she, first she just turned to me really casually and humorously and said, Well you know, go work down on the ferry. And I thought, I really could. I could do that. And there’s a lot of benefits to doing that. I would continue to work for the county, so I’d keep my seniority and all of my benefits, which are excellent.

But wait a second. Do you have any experience with boats?

No, none! My dad has an outboard motor little tiny thing, but I’ve only been on it a couple times. I’ve canoed and kayaked occasionally. But I’m not a boat person. I barely hike, I like to go camping, but I bring along everything and the kitchen sink if I do.

So what part of you thought that you could work down on the ferry?

It seemed very idyllic. It seemed like a very pretty place to work. It seemed very peaceful. Without thinking it through I just thought, this might not be terrible. This could possibly be something I could do. And also just looking at the other available jobs in the county, which were road crew. Which means building roads and repairing them. This also seemed like the least physical and in some ways the easiest. So I sort of just went with it.

And that’s what happened? When you were laid off you had your choice of available openings in the county?

Yeah, thanks to my union, really, it’s one of the rights that we have is to take any other job that’s open that you meet the minimum qualifications for. And the minimum qualifications to operate a ferry are very loose. You know, have a high school education which, uh, I have a master’s degree.

No prior experience required?

Oh none! I mean how could you have prior experience operating a river ferry? There’s not a lot of opportunities to gain experience.

So what happened? Did you just go down there one day or did you have to take courses?

I had to interview for the job, which was very simple. And they basically said OK we’re hiring you and my very first day when I showed up and instead of going upstairs to the office and sit with co-workers and do my regular job, I went over to a different building and found the boss over there. And on the first day, let’s see, I got all these weird supplies. I got about nine keys to various things, I got a hardhat, which terrified me, safety goggles, a bright orange reflective vest, you know, three different types of pairs of gloves. By 10 o’clock the first morning I’m already going, Oh my goodness what am I getting myself in for here?

This is not Kansas anymore, right?

Yeah, exactly! And then that same day, the crew leader basically said, OK, let’s go up to the boat. And I thought, Oh god already? So we drive up to — there’s two ferries in the county. The Wheatland ferry and the Buena Vista. And when I started, the Buena Vista hadn’t opened yet with the new boat. So he drove me up to the Wheatland ferry and basically said all right, start working, they’re gonna train you. And he drove off and came and picked me up like six hours later. It was terrifying.

I need a picture here. Some of the ferries that some of the people who are listening to us will be thinking of these monster 200-car ferries with two diesel engines and big propellers. What exactly were you in charge of?

The easiest way to describe it is, it’s the size and shape of a long driveway. It holds nine cars – three across and three deep. And that’s the size of the Wheatland. The Buena Vista is two cars across and three deep. It’s very small.

But at the same time, the second you put your hand on the throttles and you realize, I’m driving this, you realize, this is a humongous piece of machinery and they’re letting someone with no prior boating experience, no experience with anything, drive this.

How do you land them without all that marine experience?

It takes a lot of practice. The landings are the hardest part. When you’re in the middle of the river you just push the throttles forward and sit back until you’re close to shore.

You don’t have to steer it any?

No, so you’re going parallel across the river, and there is a cable that runs underwater that’s connected to both shores and then connected to the boat. So that keeps you from going too far downstream. And then the upstream side there’s cables that connect from the boat, up high there’s power lines and then a very strong cable. The boat’s connected up in the air about 40 feet up for the Buena Vista, to the power lines and the cables above, and then I’m also connected under the water. So even if I tried, I couldn’t just suddenly go downstream. So you really can when you’re going across just put the throttles in motion and then sit back. Because when you’re in the middle of the river, no matter how bad the current is the boat will just go along with where the cables are guiding it.

What’s involved in landing it?

It’s like learning a language. You have to learn to read the river and read the boat and read how the boat is moving with the current and where you think it’s going to go. Pretty soon you just know it’s going to curve this way when you get to the landing ramp. But you bring the two throttles back to neutral and put it in reverse and play with them. So there’s an upstream motor and a downstream. So you have propellers on either side. So with the throttles you can thrust forward and back and turn the angle of the boat at the same time slowing it down. The hardest part to learn is how to land and you just angle it in for a good landing.

But you’re the only operator there, right?

Yes, once I got my training and I had my license, I’m the only one there so if I screw up it’s my fault, I better fix it.

You were a writer. Were you losing your enthusiasm for it? Or you weren’t happy with what you were producing?

No, the stuff was pretty good. For some reason it wasn’t feeding me like it once had, I guess. Writing into the void on a daily basis was a hard thing and I did it for a couple years, where you don’t know where your story’s going. It’s a fight. And I think I got to where I liked the fight. There was less of that.

Did you have a plan B?

No, I had to just reassess. The ground kind of went out from underneath me, and my folks had retired to a farm that was about a half-hour away from where we were. So, I started doing some work on it. The farm was beat up. So I started going fishing at 4 every morning, just before sunrise, and cleaning out the pond down there. Doing some work around the house, cleaning up. Kind of getting my hands dirty a little bit.

So where did knife making come from?

As I started to kind of become a little more interested in the world around me I started to realize that I had developed this itch to make things on a daily basis. I mean, this is what you do when you write, you sit and create a scene or a sentence or turn a phrase. And these are things you’re really proud of. At the end of the day, you’re like, I made this thing. I created this thing from nothing, from thin air. And that gets to be addictive.

I was in a spot where I didn’t really have that. And I figured I’d go back to the writing, but I just needed a break. In the meantime I started messing around, making stuff with my hands. I made a cool mosaic coffee table. I made my dad some bookshelves for his office and some paddles for the canoe out on the pond. And jewelry. Various things like this. At some point it seemed like it was the right place to try something like making a knife. I didn’t intellectualize it too much. I just thought, this might be cool, and gave it a shot.

You don’t have the tools for this in your average workshop. Like steel and steel-cutting and all that stuff. So you chose something you have to get a fair number of tools in order to do, right?

Making your first few, no, not really. One of the nice things about it is it didn’t require much of an investment. I just picked up a rusty old bar of steel from one of the equipment sheds on my folk’s farm, and I took an old belt grinder that belonged to my grandfather, a hand-held belt-sander, and I clamped it down to the workbench with a couple clamps and turned it out and just sorta went and tried to make something that looked like a knife.

And I burned that thing out — it sort of stopped after a couple hours. And I went to the local hardware store and got another one and then killed that after another couple hours. And then I did have to look into what I’d need if I wanted to keep doing this. Some sort of better, proper equipment.

When you look back to the starting point, have you been able to put your finger on what you liked about holding the steel in your hand? What it was about that?

There certainly was a moment of discovery. I’d always thought of a piece of steel as something so unchanging. Steel — you don’t bend it, you don’t cut it. You don’t affect it. So to learn that steel moves similarly to wood or any other sort of soft stone or soap. You can carve it and you can shape it. And like any other thing, once it’s gone it doesn’t go back. You get to a point pretty quickly where you wish it would move a little slower than it does. That was a moment that was kind of cool.

And was it easy to get something that felt good in your hand?

Yeah, it actually wasn’t that hard. I mean, it wasn’t pretty and nobody else would have thought it was pretty or nice or good. But to me, it was awesome.

And you could put a good edge on it?

No, those first knives I made, they were just made from a steel that I couldn’t identify, so it was just like mild steel. Basically they were knife-shaped objects. They wouldn’t cut anything or last. But it was an attempt, you know?

How easy was it then for you to do the research to figure out what was required to make a real knife?

Pretty darn easy. You can learn how to do just about anything these days on the Internet. It’s a kind of an astounding research tool. So there are these gathering places for knife makers and learning knife makers on the Internet where you can ask questions to folks who’ve been doing these things a long time, or you can search for questions that have already been asked. It’s a fairly small community too, and knife makers tend to just spend a lot of time alone in their shops. So they’re happy to hear the phone ring and chat with somebody about, how do I do this? Is there a special heat-treating process for this? These kinds of various things. So you can get these guys on the phone pretty easily. And then books. There are a few books out there that are sort of thought of as bibles for knife making.

There’s also this stuff about where do I find steel? And what’s the difference between hardened and carbon steel? When did you say OK, I think I got this?

It’s not really a very complicated process. I think probably I felt in my head that at least of the very basics that I could write down, say, the 10 steps that it would actually take me to make a knife, there are a few really simple tutorials out there. So I had the basic steps in my head within a week or so. The trick is they’re all pretty simple but it takes a long time to master each one.

So where were you getting the steel to make a knife?

There’s a place called Online Metals. You can order like O1 or I think A2 from those guys — there’s a couple kinds of tool steel that make pretty nice knives and you just search for the thickness that you require, the size that you want, put in your credit card number and hit the send button, and it shows up a week later.

And once you’ve shaped that, once you’ve worked with it, does it then have to be treated in some way?

It does. There are a couple ways to do it, but there are a few professional heat treating facilities around the country, that this is all they do. The folks that I use for my stainless stuff now is Meadville, Pennsylvania. It’s like a military grade facility, so they have these giant walk-in ovens. And you just send them your stuff and you leave them a note and they bill you a week or two later.

And so what is it about watching a piece of steel turn into a knife in your hands when it’s something that has that gleam to it, something that’s got a wonderful edge to it, something you just like to look at?

Yeah, it’s a funny thing. It kind of happens in a split second. You’d think it would happen over a length of time. But what happens is you actually work on the blade itself. Or what I do is I finish the blade completely and then I tape it up and then I start to work on the handles. So when the blade is done, without any handles on it, it’s beautiful, but it’s not a finished knife.

And then when you sort of affix your handles, and you work with an epoxy with these things, and it gets glopped all over. And you’re grinding and shaping and sculpting a handle on it. At the very end, when you’re finally just about done, you just need to clean, round off the spine a little bit, and round off the area where your forefinger will go. You pull off this tape that you’ve put on the blade. And all of a sudden a knife appears before you. And that’s a pretty awesome moment.

But you’d think it was growing in your hands all along. And I guess to a certain extent it is. But that final moment when you take the tape off and you finally see it and it sits before you as a knife. And either it has that something special that makes it a great knife, or it doesn’t. That’s a pretty cool moment.

You’ve been making knives for years now. Is that still true for each knife that you make? Like, I like this one, or, this one’s better than the last one.

Yeah, absolutely. I think for a very long time we’ll still be learning and getting better and better. And my goal with making has always been to, that the knife that I’m working on now be the best knife that I’ve ever made. So I push for each one to be better than the last, and more perfect in whatever way I see perfect at that time.

I’ve heard chefs talking about the balance of a knife in their hand. Is that important to you when you’re making it?

Oh yeah. I’d say the way it feels in your hand. Balance is one part of it — but I guess it’s probably all balance. The way that it feels. There’s a certain life that gets passed to the knife. If it spends its whole life in one maker’s hand, something of that maker … the entire time you’re making it you’re making adjustments. One of the maxims with knife making, and probably a lot of craft, is if you see a scratch you get it out then, you don’t wait. So all the way along you’re making these minute adjustments. So at the end if that’s the case and it’s been in your hands the whole time, for, say, 15, 20 hours. For your first few knives for weeks on end. There’s something of you that’s going in that piece. And there’s not mistaking that or faking that. It’s a little difficult to quantify. But you know it when you feel a handmade piece. Absolutely.

People are willing to pay good money for a good knife, right? Like 3, 4, 5, 6 hundred bucks for one of your knives?

Yeah my chef knives go for about 600 bucks.

But that in and of itself is a recognition of your skill, isn’t it?

Yeah, I’d say so. I’d say probably so.

It’d be one thing if you had a whole window full of them priced at 600 but nobody bought them. But — (laughing)

Yeah, yeah. The issue too is that I can only make so many. I can only make about eight knives a week and I usually end up making between four and six, so. Supply is pretty darn limited. So whatever demand is around. I’ve never had a problem selling knives, since my first couple pieces. It’s always been an issue of can you make more?

Is it art for you or is it production?

I wouldn’t say it’s production. But I also wouldn’t necessarily say it’s art. I’d say it’s craft. And I think there’s a difference.

That’s a great word. I was just sort of missing that in my –

It’s that kind of middle ground. I don’t think that what I do on a daily basis is art, no. Even when I’m designing a new piece. Folks say that and I don’t tend to correct them, but no. I don’t tend to think of it as art. I feel like I’ve made art before, and I probably still do sometimes and will again. But the knives that I make, I think it’s — and I don’t like to — I don’t think that craft is in any way at all a step down from art. I think it’s a noble, beautiful pursuit.

Do you still do any writing?

I write a lot of emails, but really that’s about it.

The reason I’m asking is, I wonder if that same itch that led you to study writing and write books and try to do that is the same kind of itch that keeps you motivated as a craftsman.

Yeah, it’s exactly the same. I’ve thought about this. I’ve spent a whole lot of time at the grinder or at a task, it leaves my mind a little freer than necessarily at the computer. But it’s the same thing, you know. You put yourself in the space to do the work and you do whatever you’re doing as well as you have it in you to do. And then, when the work is done you walk away and hopefully you’ve made something beautiful.

But one evening in March, I sent Nick an email. My hands were trembling as I typed. It was subject lined “things you may or may not remember,” and this is what it said:

“My friend Charlotte is getting married in New Orleans on May 13, and I will be going. May 13 also happens to be the day I met you, six years ago on Royal Street with a lump on my head the size of a lime. (Life is WEIRD, right?) I’d like to see you. Is that possible?”

I hadn’t seen Nick since he came to New York City in the spring of 2007. The morning he left, we woke early and watched an episode of “The Wire,” and then he walked me to the subway in my Brooklyn neighborhood. As I descended the steps he remained at the top, peering down and smiling. He did this whenever we parted, a habit that unnerved and delighted me at once. I’d wave him away while I stood in the security line at the airport – you can go now, I’m OK – but he would just stand there. Not going anywhere, he seemed to be saying, although that was clearly a lie. A few weeks after the New York trip, he called one Friday night and ended our relationship.

“You deserve someone who can be there for you,” he said.

I responded in the most articulate way I could muster under the circumstances. “Oh, fuck off.”

—–

The story of how I met Nick is one I have told many times. I have told it at parties, and in essays (even in this publication), and so I might as well tell you now.

It begins six years ago, when I was in New Orleans for a different wedding. I was walking along a quiet stretch of the French Quarter with two friends around 1 a.m. when a kid yanked my purse and, when I didn’t let go, clocked me above the left eyebrow with a pistol. Nick was the detective on the case.

“That’s so romantic,” people sometimes say, although I can assure you it was not. It was violent and horrible, and flirting was the furthest thing from both our minds that night as I rattled off a description of the kid while holding an ice pack to the side of my head. (OK, it was not the furthest thing from my mind. I did look for a wedding ring. He had one.)

It never occurred to me that anything would come of that case. This was a year after Katrina. Bodies were still being found in abandoned attics. But eight months later, I received a photo lineup in the mail, and I was surprised to discover that even after so much time had passed, I knew exactly who the kid was, knew it in my bones. Four months after that I was flown to New Orleans to testify at a pre-motion trial. I mean, life is WEIRD, right?

When I came back to New York, I was seized by a feeling that I should send a present to the recently separated detective who sat with me after the trial while I tried to shake off a grief I could not articulate. (I sent him the first season of “The Wire.”) That gift sparked a correspondence that lasted for six months. A few weeks after the kid pleaded guilty and got 15 years, I returned to New Orleans to see Nick.

“It doesn’t seem fair,” I told him once, sitting on his puffy leather couch in the nondescript one-bedroom where he’d moved after the split from his wife. “That kid gets a prison sentence, and we get each other.”

“That’s cute,” he said, threading his fingers through my hair.

“That I care about that kid?”

“That you think life is fair.”

Around the time we began corresponding, Nick moved to the homicide department. It was grueling, thankless work. Little romance in that, either, though I romanticized it anyway, besotted as I was by true crime and mafioso grandeur and David Simon. At the time, I wrote a blog about pop culture for a sex site. Of course I wanted to hear about guns and blood spatter. Nick, meanwhile, was happy to hear about pop culture and sex. We were the perfect escapes for each other, and we had both been searching for open hatches.

When people write about falling in love, I tend to cringe for them, because love requires a delusion that is deeply personal and impossible to explain to the world. So I’ll just say that I have doubted every relationship I’ve ever had, until that one. I was absolutely certain that Nick and I were meant to be together, and I was right. I just failed to specify how long.

When Nick broke up with me, I was devastated. Stunned. Nothing he said that night made sense to me, because it ran so contrary to the 500 conversations we’d had about how the other one was stitched into our DNA.

“The way I felt about you changed,” he said. “I don’t know why.”

If a duck calls you up one night, and tells you he’s an elephant, what do you say? How do you respond?

I responded the best way I knew how. “Oh, fuck off.”

In the five years that have elapsed since that conversation, we have spoken only a handful of times. We have tried to be friends – he missed me, I knew that – but then our conversations would lead me down the same sorrowful path, crying in my Stella Artois, and I’d grow incensed when he didn’t return an email or call me back.

I dated other men. Kind men, whom I quite liked. But in that eye-rolling way that is native to sensitive types, and writers, and alcoholics, and hoarders of memory and other people’s affection – of which I am batting a thousand – I held on to Nick, to the idea of Nick, to the hope represented by Nick through five years of recession woes, drinking problems and personal catastrophe. I did crazy things, which I can only admit now because I don’t do them anymore: I slept in his police shirt. I got insanely drunk one Sunday afternoon and called a dozen friends, begging them to convince me not to call him. Oh, the drama. Oh, the sturm und drang. Self-pity that could rattle the cupboards.

While I bled openly in public, he remained behind a fortress of stoicism. He is as much a cop as I am a drama queen. I don’t mean to say he is callous, because Nick is a tender person. His favorite movie is “Casablanca.” I have found this to be true of other cops, who manage to wall off some soft patch of sentiment behind the barbed wire fence. One night we were at the bar when I saw him talking with great passion to another detective. I figured they were discussing a case. Turns out, they were talking about their love for “The Notebook.”

But the few conversations Nick and I did have were a tangle of “do not cross” tape. I asked him things like, “How are you?”

He said things like, “Great.”

I said things like, “Great?” with a bit of eager anticipation, hoping he might sketch out a more detailed portrait.

Instead, he would say, “Yup.”

There was one thing Nick told me during the breakup that did make sense, and which I held on to with both fists. He said, “I met you at the wrong time.”

I’d be walking along the Hudson River one Saturday afternoon and those words would float up into my head. Well, what would be the right time? And when I moved from New York back to Dallas, a 90-minute flight between us, those words returned. Could the right time be now?

I scoured the landscape for signs that we were supposed to be together, or that he still thought about me. A New Orleans fleur-de-lys insignia at the restaurant where I was dining: What could that mean? A book about an NOPD murder crossing my desk: Why that, why now?

It was ridiculous, it was pathetic – let’s all agree as a group – but I could not stop clinging to the notion that the universe would bend itself so that our lives would entwine once more.

And then came Charlotte’s wedding.

I sent Nick an email late at night, when I suspected he’d still be at his desk, and by the time I woke the next morning, he had sent his response. Yes, he’d be happy to see me again. Lunch, drinks, whatever. It was exactly the answer I anticipated, which brought tremendous relief. But what came next blindsided me.

“If she’s free, can I invite my wife?”

So much can happen in five years. When I took those long walks along the Hudson, I used to wonder if Nick had remarried. I made up so many stories about him, and that was certainly one of them. What she might look like. Who she might be. I also wondered if he’d gotten back together with his first wife, the on-again, off-again high school sweetheart he married at the age of 22, three years after they had a baby together. Divorces take a year in New Orleans, and our relationship tracked exactly with that time period. He broke up with me the same week his divorce was final.

Even now I don’t know if the email he sent refers to his first wife, or his second wife, or his third wife or his 40th, because I could not muster the nerve to ask. The fact that I find it easier to write an essay on this subject is one of a thousand strange quirks that makes me who I am. The fact that he will not tell me any of that stuff until I ask directly is one of his.

In the days that followed his email, though, something shifted inside me. It calved like a glacier. It burst like the prick of a safety pin held up to the swirly rainbow curve of the world’s largest bubble. I would have told you this was impossible. I swear to God I thought I would spend the rest of my days clinging to that stupid blue police shirt, a modern-day Miss Havisham, but now I felt different about him, much as he had once felt different about me. I did not hate him. In fact, I adored him. But I did not want to see him again. The longing was gone.

I emailed Nick a week later. The subject line read, “on second thought.” I told him I thought it was a bad idea that we see each other. I told him I had been mistaken.

I had been mistaken about so many things. I’m not just talking about Nick now. I’m talking about the stories we tell ourselves about our lives: That it is absolutely going to be this way, or it is absolutely going to be that way. It is fated. It is doomed. It is destined. It is done. I have believed so many lies about myself, for so many years, and closed the lid to lie down inside those coffins. I thought I could never stop drinking, but I did. And I thought I could never be happy in the city where I grew up, but I am. And I thought I would go to my grave crying for the cop in New Orleans who didn’t love me back, but I don’t feel that way anymore. In fact, I feel kind of grateful. I’d be a horrible cop’s wife. Are you kidding me?

We don’t know how our stories end, and the greatest plot twists are the ones we never saw coming. There is a line that I love. “God is a first-rate novelist.” It’s from Richard Price’s introduction to David Simon’s book, “Homicide.”

So I went to New Orleans, six years to the day after I’d been pistol-whipped, but that date has a new significance to me. Charlotte’s wedding was so lovely. It was full of personality, and color, and the peculiar language shared by two people as their lives interweave. After the ceremony, we paraded through the French Quarter behind a brass band in a Second Line procession. As we passed crowds watching us on Chartres, I kept wondering if I might catch a glimpse of Nick. I did not. But somebody did run into Leonardo DiCaprio. (Life is WEIRD, you guys.)

The next afternoon I took one last stroll through the Quarter before heading out of town. I snapped a picture of the sign on Royal Street, the same street where I had been mugged, the street where I first told Nick I was in love with him. That street is a knot of complicated meaning to me.

I couldn’t help laughing at the big ONE WAY sign hanging right below it. I know it doesn’t mean anything. But I took it as a message from the universe that it was time to move on.