Was commercial fishing the first dangerous job you tackled?

No. I flew out West on my own, rented a car, and spent two months with smoke jumpers. No contract, no assignment. I just wanted to write about these guys. I spent the summer going back and forth, chasing these fires around, and then came home and wrote an 80-page chapter.

My agent sent it to Men’s Journal; they said if you boil this down by three quarters, we’ll run it. That was the first story I’d ever sold to a national magazine. And I did the same thing with the Andrea Gail. Wrote an 80-page chapter, and sent it to Stuart.

Another of the chapters was going to be on war correspondents. I thought, Either that will be a chapter, or the book will fail, but I’ll have gotten experience as a war correspondent. So I spent a couple of months in Bosnia.

Again with no assignment?

God, no. I was completely clueless. I joined up with a couple guys who knew what they were doing, and we went to Sarajevo. I thought, This is as good as it gets! Then I got a fax from Stuart saying he’d sold my book on the Andrea Gail.

I stayed over there a while anyway. I did radio reports and some newspaper work. Which was great experience; it taught me how to work under pressure. I was writing 30-second radio spots in 14 minutes.

Were you in mortal danger yourself?

In Sarajevo they were shelling, and that’s a random danger, so just being there involves some risk. Two artillery shells hit the building I was in one night. Scared the hell out of me—an artillery shell going off is just indescribably loud.

There was one time when our car broke down near the front line, which was pretty active, and we had to run into a town past these bunkers on a ridge overlooking the road. Even when you’re driving you have to drive like hell because they shoot at you. But we had to do it on foot. It was like a kilometer [0.6 mile], very exposed. But still—nothing whistled by my ear, so I don’t know if I was in mortal danger or not.