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Like many women before her, New Yorker Jessie Knadler wondered why it was so hard to meet a good guy in the city. A women’s-magazine writer and editor, she had a busy, exciting life: a prestigious job, a great group of girlfriends, a tiny but cozy apartment in Chelsea. But then, on an assignment for a magazine, she met a real-life cowboy, fell in love and packed it all in for a life on the ranch.
In her new memoir, “Rurally Screwed: My Life Off the Grid With the Cowboy I Love,” out this week, Knadler chronicles how she went from working for Cosmo to making tomato wine on a chicken farm. Here, she tells her story to The Post . . .
I was very much a Condé Nast girl. I had worked for all the women’s magazines — Cosmo, Glamour, Jane. I lived on West 20th, between Ninth and 10th. My style was like a mixture of H&M and sample sales. I had some Prada pieces, some Miu Miu, a mix of high and low. I loved going out dancing at clubs. But then the big clubs, like Twilo, went away, and I just started going out drinking, like everyone here does, and to little tiny clubs on the Lower East Side.
Meanwhile, I was dating a man who was emotionally retarded. It was one of those things where we kept breaking up and getting back together, for like a year and a half. He was so gross. I still have nightmares about him. My friends were like, “Break up with him! What is wrong with you?” over and over.
I was kicking around moving out of the city, thinking about LA. I had always turned up my nose at my Montana upbringing. I hated the farm, I hated that life. I spent my childhood summers at my grandma’s ranch, standing in vast empty fields and vowing to live a life of glamour and sophistication. I had been in New York City since 1992, where I went to Hunter College. I got a third-rate education — but I got to live in New York, which was a good tradeoff.
In 2003, I had just quit my editing job at Jane and was freelancing for a small outdoor-recreation magazine called Unlimited. It assigned me a story on the Bucking Horse Sale in Miles City, Mont. It’s a rodeo with all untried, untested stock, which means they’re not professional bulls and horses. They’ve never been ridden before, so they are completely wild.
It was the second day of my trip, and I was hanging around backstage behind the arena, looking very New York girl. And all these cowboys were around — tall, thin and hot.
Then I noticed one guy in particular. He was wearing these really stylish chaps. Most of the cowboys were wearing very garish chaps, like neon green and orange. This guy’s chaps were brown with gold overlays, very classy. My first impression was, “Wow, he has good taste.” The second thing I noticed about him was his Wranglers. I’m not the kind of person who looks at people’s butts, but his was insane. And then I saw his face. This guy is gorgeous!
I’d seen him being thrown off a bull earlier that day, so I went over and asked him a few questions, under the pretext of an interview. He said his name was Jake Wilson, and he was hesitant to talk — out there, they’re not used to girls who are that ballsy. But when I looked into his eyes — this sounds crazy — I was like, “This is the man I’m going to marry.” There was an immediate connection.
I knew there was this street dance happening that night, so I asked him, “Are you going to be at the dance?” He said, “Maybe.” I said, “Well, maybe I’ll see you there.” I couldn’t stop thinking about him for the rest of the day.
That night at the Bison Bar in Miles City, which is the Bucking Horse Sale hangout, it was completely wild, packed with cowboys.
I was there for probably 10 minutes, and I felt this tap on my shoulder. I turned around, and it was Jake, holding a can of Coors Light.
It was so loud in there, we couldn’t really talk — he grabbed my hand and we went outside to where the band was, and we danced. He’s this fearless dancer. And I’m so used to leading, in my life, but when you partner-dance with someone, you can’t lead. He told me, “Let me lead.”
Later on, I was trying to find out about his background, trying to find out if he was a real cowboy. I learned that Jake’s from Baltimore, but he was living the cowboy life, riding a bull, working on a ranch like a cowboy, so he was walking the walk. He’d been there for three years. He has some cowboy sayings: “Golly dang” and “Golly geez.”
Our first kiss was that night; at last call, we walked out in the street. I think he thought I was a little forward. I could tell he was a little hesitant, but I went for it anyway.
My last day there, he asked me to come visit him on the ranch. I drove out to see him. He was working with a horse in the middle of a field. It was a very Robert Redford, “The Horse Whisperer” kind of moment.
I asked him, “Do you think we’ll ever see each other again?” And he said, “I have a feeling we will.” We traded information. He gave me a Lipton tea bag, and on the inside of the bag he had written “I’m gonna miss ya!”
A week later I got this envelope in the mail, with a Post-it note on which he’d scrawled this tiny letter. He didn’t have a computer out there. And Jake isn’t an iPhone kind of guy.
Soon after that, the woman he was working for auctioning off her cattle. A farmer in New York state happened to buy 12 of their cows, and when Jake heard “New York” he said, “I’ll drive the cows out there!” He loaded up these cows in a livestock trailer and drove 36 hours to New York, and he picked me up in the city — I don’t know how he did that, I think it’s illegal to drive livestock into Manhattan. All of a sudden there was this tractor trailer downstairs from my apartment. He couldn’t park it, I had to run downstairs and jump in the truck. We drove them up to near the Canadian border, and on the way back we unloaded the trailer and drove his truck back to the city. He spent the night in the city with me, and we went to dinner with my friends. It was two worlds colliding.
We walked to SushiSamba on Seventh Avenue. He was so dressed up — he had this huge silver belt buckle, and his Wranglers were really tight, and he was wearing this big cowboy hat. I was embarrassed — I thought it was overkill. But he was super-confident. He loved the fact that he was walking down the street looking like one of the Village People. People were like, “Yee-haw, cowboy!” He was acting a little like Crocodile Dundee. When we walked in, everybody in there turned and gaped at this desperado.
My first friend who met him, I think she thought he was just a hot piece of ass. But it was more than that. At any rate, they all liked him. They thought he was very sweet.
Jake’s not cynical, he’s very upfront and he doesn’t really do irony. He is a Christian, but he’s not a Bible pusher. If he was, we would have had a problem. He respected my beliefs, or lack thereof.
He went home, and I started getting these handwritten letters every couple of days. We became very serious about each other very quickly, and I think a lot of that was facilitated by these romantic handwritten letters.
And then one day he called me up and said, “I got deployed to Iraq.” By February he was gone, and I didn’t see him again until the following March. When he came back, I was so excited, and he sat me down and said, “If you’re going to be with me, you need to know there’s a chance I’m going to be deployed again.” We almost broke up after that; I didn’t think I could deal with that kind of life.
But then I realized: Am I going to break up with the love of my life because he might get deployed again? I just accepted that that’s our life together. He’s been deployed three times now.
The thing about going to war is it makes these big decisions very simple. We just decided since we loved each other, let’s get married.
I knew that if he came to live in Manhattan it would destroy his soul. Because he has to be outside. He doesn’t hang out at bars, he doesn’t go to Whole Foods, he doesn’t go to rock shows. He said he would move here for me, but I just didn’t see it happening.
Plus, at that time, in 2005, the city just seemed like such a strange place to me. The whole city just seemed like an episode of “Sex and the City,” which was a big turnoff. I was ready to move.
He got back in March, and we kicked around some places to try. He suggested going to check out Virginia, where he’d gone to college. “If you hate it, fine,” he said, “but we can say we checked it out.”
We drove down there, and the first house we looked at we loved so much. And I looked at my life and thought, “What do I have in New York that’s so great? I’m alone, I live in a shoe box, I’m unhappy. I’m just going to take a leap of faith.”
The house is on 8 acres, but it’s a little bungalow: only 1,200 square feet. The property has these rolling hills, a fire pit, a hammock, a gazebo, an orchard with eight fruit trees.
We got married there. His best friend, who’s a pastor, officiated our wedding. From then on I was a farmer’s wife. The one thing I couldn’t do is get rid of my New York clothes. I have like a thousand pairs of shoes. Even though I mostly wear clogs and overalls, I can’t bear to part with the high heels.
Jake wanted to run a chicken farm alongside his fence-building business, so that’s partly what we do for a living. I feed them, clean their coops and collect the eggs — and we slaughter the meat birds together. On the side, we also make tomato wine.
Down here it’s such a man’s world. I felt like I had to compete on that level: “I have to be tough, too, because that’s what it takes to get ahead in New York.” So I forced myself to help with fencing, and I hated it. At work, Jake is super Type A and very focused, and he kind of morphs into a drill sergeant. I sometimes would start crying. He figures, “She’s on a job site with me, I’m just going to talk to her like she’s one of the guys.” I was so far out of my element, and he wasn’t making allowances for me.
At a certain point, I had to start honoring my own skills; I’m a writer. So I started freelancing again and launched a blog in 2009, which really helped me out in a big way.
I also teach Pilates. I’m like a rock star down here. They think I’m awesome — they have nothing to compare it to!
We’d been here five years when I got pregnant in October of 2009. Jake was totally involved — he was my birth coach. He loves kids. And ever since I had our daughter, June, he’s been talking about having more. Now, when I look at my life with Jake and June, I think, even though I’ve given up a lot, I’m right where I’m supposed to be. I would lose myself again and again and again for a love this big.
sstewart@nypost.com