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Finally Asked” was set into motion. While she was off doing that, I asked a woman who was working in the section how much the table and chairs were and the price was slightly out of my budget.
    â€œWhat about just the chairs?” She told me their price and offered to call the warehouse and have them dropped off for me to pick up. “Here’s the thing,” I said, and I recounted the story of what had just happened. The woman took heart and made a few phone calls. It was against store policy to sell the floor models, but she understood their sentimental value and made arrangements anyway. She had them boxed up and sent to my apartment in Virginia and you can find them today in our home.
    We returned the next day to register for the table only to find out that Bean had discontinued its wedding registry just months before. After the greatest weekend of my life—eating, lounging, dreaming, and roaming with my new fiancée—I wrote a letter to the then chairman of the company, a grandson of the man who gave it its name. He responded with a handwritten note of thanks and congratulations. He apologized for the cancellation of the registry, but wished us well in our life together. If you visit our home, you’ll find that letter there too.
    B y that point, I was living in Virginia and had taught myself to fly-fish (I even worked, for a short time, in a fly-fishing shop after graduation and before my move south), something too snobby and New England to ever be considered by my deeply midwestern sportsmen relatives. Fly-fishing was for the fancy class, as was L.L.Bean. No, the Heimbuchs were Cabela’s people. Cabela’s is like a prairie version of Bean. Its catalog, I remember, was thick and utilitarian. There were no pictures of families camping along an inland lake, no campsite ice cream makers, just pages and pages of guns and camo and gun cases, locks, and cleaning kits. Cabela’s was, and is in large part, for hunters and serious fishermen. I tried hard to get into it the same way I did Bean, but it wasn’t the same. There was no nuance, no story. The Cabela brothers were real people, but you never got a sense of who they were. Bean prided itself on tradition. L.L. was a real person. Babe Ruth was a customer. Cabela’s had, what? A myriad of options when it came to fish finders and floor mats for your truck, but no romance.
    Fly-fishing and Bean represented a certain divergence from family sporting tradition for me. I liked the idea of backpacking the Blue Ridge more than of taking a buck from an Iowa cornfield, or of casting a weightless fly to a graceful trout instead of a heavy lure to a gnarly toothed muskie. And then there was the hunting thing.
    My anxiety about hunting came from the fact that I had never, really, done it before. On three occasions, I had been privy to a hunt. The first was when I was around eleven or twelve. We were visiting my Iowa family, and my dad wanted to go pheasant hunting. He, my uncle Paul, a cousin, and I walked with a couple of dogs through a cornfield that had been partially harvested, hoping to scare some birds up. My uncle Mark stayed on the other end of the field with a black powder rifle waiting for any deer that might get scared up by us walking through the field. It must have been about three degrees outside, because I remember my breath condensing in the scarf my mom had wrapped around my head and freezing. My dad had told me that you almost have to step on a pheasant in order to get it to flush up out of the corn. He told me this so that I wouldn’t be surprised when I stepped on a crushed stalk and it came alive with flapping wings, but what it actually did was make me terrified to put my feet down. I didn’t have the same relationship to wildlife that my dad had growing up. He grew up hunting those Iowa fields, raising livestock, and engaging in other pursuits that allowed for hands-on interactions with beast and fowl. I grew