Starting Over II

After three years my second wife decided that she did not want to be married to a part-time worker, part-time writer. For almost two of those years I wrote and mailed an eight page monthly survival newsletter. I had also written my first two booklets during this time, as well as writing articles for several outdoor magazines. I set up a business and had a seperate business checking account. I did not yet have a lot of customers but was building up a list. We had purchased a lake lot in Northern Wisconsin which was to be survival headquarters. The end came when in May of 1990 I took a five week fishing, camping, survival trip. I had to quit my job to do it and this did not set to well with her. I covered three states (WI, MN, MI) on the trip and did quite a bit of survival experimenting including backpacking and the testing of equipment. I wrote two issues of my newsletter while on the road and mailed it to her. The agreement was that she would retype the newsletter, get the copies and mail them out to the subscribers. When I got home from the trip she hit me with the info that she wanted a divorce. She said I was lazy and did not want to work, just run around hunting and fishing. When I told her it was all part of my writing business she informed me as to what I was full of. She tried to take everything I had bought since the marriage, including my van. I came into the marriage with a van and a station wagon. When I purchased the new van I gave my old one to my son and the station wagon to her son, yet she felt that she should have the van. She also tried to get my canoe which I had ten years before I married her. I got out of the marriage with my van, my canoe and any of my tools that her son had not stolen. I then found out that she had never sent out the two issues of the newsletter as promised, that she had stripped the business account of all money plus she claimed that her computer had crashed and she had lost all of the names on my mailing list. The only names I had left were the labels I had pre-printed for the newsletter. Even though I lost amlost everything I worked for for six years, that divorce was the best thing that ever happened. I moved back to Wisconsin and into a one room apartment and went back to practicing my survival skills. I will finish this tale next post.