February 19, 2016
I Do
If you've been paying close attention to the pages of this journal over the past few days you might have noticed a few details that seemed unusual, out of character, or over-specific. There's been talk of county clerks, of important life decisions, of change. Two days ago we left behind the small country towns and quiet rural roads that brought us all the way from Florida to Texas in favor of the wide streets of College Station, a place that seems like Manhattan in comparison. And ever since we rolled into town we've been eating good food and drinking good beer like we're celebrating.
If you haven't noticed these things or haven't been following along with this long bicycle journey we've been on for the last month, don't worry, I'll just come right out and tell you: today Kristen and I are getting married.
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Since late this summer we'd talked in vague terms about marriage, but that's as far as we'd come. It seemed inevitable, so there wasn't a need to press. But back in the middle of January I took a trip to Seattle for work and to spend time with family. As I drove to the airport to board a flight that would take me away from the city I lived in for twenty-eight years – the city where all of my family and so many of my friends live – and bring me to Los Angeles, something in my mind didn't feel right. Through check-in, security, the shuttle ride to the north terminal, boarding, take-off, leveling out at 35,000 feet I couldn't shake it. Something just felt off. Then in the pitch-black skies over Northern California it hit me: knowing that I was going to see Kristen made it feel like I was going home. I realized that wherever she is, that's where I want to be. What had only hours before been vague became in an instant immediate and necessary.
I had planned to ask her to marry me a few days later during the weekend, at some special, poignant, memorable moment I hadn't yet had the chance to invent. But like so many of the major turning points in our lives, that plan never got off the ground because something unexpected stepped in and took its place. We were in the bedroom at Kristen's parents' house. As happens so often, I'd just said or done something stupid. I don't remember what, and it doesn't really matter. What matters is that I then said to Kristen in an off-hand way, "So you still want to marry me, right?"
Without missing a beat she smiled with her usual big, happy, energetic smile and said, "I'd marry you right this second!"
Half-second pause.
"Kristen Waddell, will you marry me?"
The big, happy, energetic smile returned in an instant.
"Yes!" she said with so much joy in her voice. "I couldn't not."
And then there was much rejoicing.
That was only about five weeks ago, but with as much as this trip has occupied our minds and bodies it feels like five months.
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We thought we'd seal the deal this summer, either in Portland or in Washington state, on Cypress Island, the place of rare natural beauty and isolation where we bought land together last spring. We joked a few times that we might not be able to make it that far, that we might just have to get hitched during this trip along the side of the road somewhere in Louisiana or in a small town in Texas. But it was just a joke – until one day last week when all of a sudden it wasn't. Kristen started to research what it would take to get married in different states we'd be riding through, like Texas and New Mexico and Arizona. The farther this research went, and the more we talked about what getting married on the road would mean, the more we both agreed that it sounded like a grand, wonderful, adventurous idea.
And so we found a way to make that idea come to life. To get a marriage license we needed to pass through a county seat somewhere out in East Texas. As it turned out, our route took us through the thousand-person town of Groveton, the county seat of Trinity County, at exactly the time they opened for business on the Tuesday morning following Presidents Day. For the low, low price of seventy-two dollars, a couple of IRS documents to verify our social security numbers, and swearing that we're not related by blood, ten minutes later the license was ours. The only limitations were that we had to get married in the state of Texas and we had to wait at least seventy-hours. Three days of riding brought us to College Station and that brings us to today.
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It turns out the Brazos County Courthouse isn't located in College Station but in Bryan, the next city over. To get there we ride bikes, just like we've done every other day for the last month.
"I feel surprisingly not mental," Kristen says as we pack up in our motel room.
I don't either. Unlike so many American weddings this one is simple, uncomplicated, easy. The logistics and the paperwork and the fees have been taken care of. All we have to do now is show up.
It's less than five miles across town. After riding fifty or sixty miles most days it's like nothing at all. And yet halfway there we have to stop to get lunch. Those fifty or sixty miles a day mean our appetites are out of control. We eat all morning and day and night, wake up feeling like we could demolish a fat stack of pancakes, and still we're as thin as we've ever been in our adult lives.
The short ride brings us to a somewhat fancy guesthouse within walking distance of the courthouse. Compared to the tent and the low-rent motels where we've spent most of our nights on this trip it's the height of luxury. The overriding feeling of the next few hours is calm. There's no stress, no worry, no frantic rushing around. There's only a little of that half-excited but also half-sick-to-the-stomach feeling. Instead it's unrushed showering and preparing of clothing and dressing. Music echoes throughout the room. It's a playlist I created for us not long after we met, one we listened to over and over against in the small, dark studio apartment I called home in Portland. It's a bridge between what's about to happen and everything that came before.
A little after four we walk ten or twelve blocks in the eighty-degree heat with the wind rippling the lower edges of Kristen's dress. I notice how both of us have extreme tan lines from the socks we've been wearing in the sun every day and scratches on our ankles and calves from crashing through forest underbrush to set up the tent every night. We end up at a county office building that's quiet late on this Friday afternoon, except for the handful of people that showed up to cast their votes for the presidential primary, state representatives, sheriff, and so on. We're early, so we spend a few minutes in a waiting room, where Kristen remembers with fondness the first time I told her that I was in love with her.
And then it starts to happen. We walk through a series of doors then enter and take a seat in the judge's chambers. He's an older man, Hispanic, with dark hair and glasses and a mustache. Khakis and white tennis shoes flash out from beneath his black robes as he moves. He asks us a few procedural questions, signs and dates the marriage license, and then all three of us get up, pass through another door, and find ourselves in a small, empty courtroom. With its carpeted floors and white walls looks more like a windowless office than a courtroom. He asks Kristen and I to stand facing each other, perpendicular to the dark wooden bench where he sits during normal proceedings. He then stands beside us, to my right, to Kristen's left.
"By the authority vested in me by law and by virtue of this marriage license," he says, "I am about to celebrate the rites of matrimony and join together in Holy wedlock Kristen Waddell and Jeffry Arnim. If there be any one who show cause why this couple should not be united in matrimony, let them speak now or forever hold their peace. And, nope, I don't see any hands. Jeffry, do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife? Do you promise to love, honor, protect, and cherish her in sickness and in health as long as you both shall live?"
"I do."
"Kristen, do you take this man to be your lawful wedded husband? Do you promise to love, honor, protect, and cherish him in sickness and in health–"
"I do!"
"–as long as you both shall live?"
"I mean, yes, I do."
There are no rings. Kristen's is a family heirloom and still in Los Angeles. Mine will be made some time this spring in Portland from one of the thirty-six spokes of her bike's front wheel.
"I understand you've written your own vows," the judge says. "Jeffry, if you'll go first."
I pull from my pocket the vows I wrote out by hand on a piece of off-white notebook paper a few hours ago.
"Kristen," I say. "It's you. It's been you from the day we met – that day of cold and snow where icy sidewalks and streetcars mixed with the smiles and laughter and the vibration of new-found possibility. You are curiosity. You are passion. You are adventure. You are radiant smiles, the love of simple pleasures, the joy of life personified. Deep respect for animals, uncompromising reverence for the natural world, the willingness to say yes to everything: that's you.
"You are the person that in my wildest dreams I hoped existed but in my practical mind I believed couldn't possibly exist. That we ended up living six blocks from each other in Portland, Oregon – a city of 600,000 people, a city that covers 145 square miles, a city you had called home for just four months and me for just three days – is the kind of inexplicable, incomprehensible twist of fate that causes my brain to hurt when I try to make sense of it, and for which I will always be grateful.
"In two years we've already seen and done so much together: the hikes in the woods and mountains and deserts, the city walks with no destination in mind, the road trips in the van, the holidays with family, the carefully curated playlists, cycling 10,000 miles across New Zealand and Australia and America, going to rock shows, buying land on a remote and magical island on a whim, celebrating both the life and the death of the dog we loved so much. The memories of these things and the myriad little moments and inside jokes that surround them run through my head every day in this life-affirming loop that only shuts off when at last I fall asleep. When I think about all that might lie ahead of us my heart and mind start to soar and sometimes I just have to walk over and give you a big hug and a kiss because I can't hold back the joy any longer.
"On a day like this it's easy to make grand promises about that future. It's easy to think this is the first square in some kind of life flow chart, where our hopes and dreams will unfold before us in the order and with the speed and quality we imagine of them. But the only thing I know for sure is that what stands before us is a lifetime the shape and texture and content of which are unknown and unknowable. It's so many branches filled with so many figs.
"In the face of such a vast, uncertain challenge my vows to you are in fact just one. And it is simply this: to be the man, the husband, and some day the father of whom you can always be proud. It's the guiding principle that has helped bring us so much love and happiness and contentment. It will continue to stand as the light in the yard that will always help us find our way home."
Kristen's vows have been clutched in her hand the entire time. They too were hand-written on a piece of notebook paper earlier in the day.
"Jeff," she says, "I asked you once, 'This is good, right?' Well, it's so far beyond what I thought possible then and still sort of baffles me how it came to be, all that has come since, and just how good it is. From that first snow day to this, our wedding day, you have made me think, made me laugh, made me blush, and made me push to find heights inside myself I didn't know were there. I fell in love with you so fast. Your thoughtfulness and silliness, the way you look at and move about the world. You have become my hero and my very best friend. A life with you is the fig I choose, without reservation or regret that it could have gone any other way."
"There is a passage from the book Paradise Lost by John Milton where Eve speaks to Adam. She expresses this very real and fundamental wonder and appreciation for the world but also how it comes alive with meaning with him by her side. She says:
Sweet is the breath of Morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the Sun
When first on this delightful land he spreads
His orient beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flower,
Glistering with dew; fragrant the fertile earth
After soft showers; and sweet the coming on
Of grateful evening mild, then silent Night
With this her solemn bird and this fair moon,
And these the gems of Heaven, her starry train:
But neither breath of Morn when she ascends
With charm of earliest birds, nor rising Sun
On this delightful land, nor herb, fruit, flower,
Glistering with dew, nor fragrance after showers,
Nor grateful Evening mild, nor silent Night
With this her solemn bird, nor walk by moon,
Or glittering starlight without thee is sweet.
"That's how I feel with you in my life. And that's why choosing to be by your side feels like such a real and fundamental conclusion. It's so easy. Through the quiet country roads hinting summertime or shitfucker highways in the snow, through finding, losing, building, and nurturing, I promise you that every hug will mean it and I will look you in the face with love for every adventure, every storm, every day."
"I love you."
I'm moved by her words but also still in low-level shock over the term shitfucker highways, and how Kristen is the first person in the history of the world to have said that in their wedding vows. That she said it in front of this older judge, the one with the religious sayings posted prominently in his office, the one who in all his years behind the bench has probably never heard anything like it before, makes it for me the height of comedy.
Like a true professional, the judge regains his composure.
"Please join your hands," he says. "In as much as you have agreed to live together in Holy matrimony and have pledged your faith in one another by repeating these vows, and by joining your hands, by the authority vested in me by law in the state of Texas as justice of the peace, I now pronounce you husband and wife. Whom God hath joined together, let no one separate. Jeffry, you may now kiss your bride."
And then the judge steps away. I place a hand on the small of Kristen's back, she places a hand on the side of my neck, and we dive into our first kiss as a couple of married people.
In a matter of seven minutes it's all over.
We walk out of the empty courthouse building and through the streets of Bryan.
"I don't think anyone could be happier than me right now!" Kristen says with delight.
We make our way to a cafe where local art covers the walls and songs from Fleet Foxes, Iron and Wine, and Local Natives play over the speakers. Around us it's young women in black-rimmed glasses, dudes in slim-cut jeans, older women with canes made of hand-carved wood, and all sorts of other diverse, hyphenated goodness. In the open space behind us a band sets up for a show. In true Kristen style, she gets a sandwich with like eight kinds of vegetables. In true Jeff style I go with a pizza with chicken and bacon and tons of cheese and a few artichokes just for laughs. It's a modest but wonderful meal to celebrate a modest but wonderful day that we hope marks the continuation of a life together that's been modest but so, so wonderful.
"We dun did it," I say as we eat our food, sneak little half-smiles at each other, and revel in the joy of a wedding day that feels entirely without flaw.
We dun did.
After dinner we call a few family members to share the news, then travel somewhere between walking and floating back to our room. There we eat chocolate-covered strawberries and drink top-shelf champagne, both thanks to Kristen's mom. Instead of going through the standard wedding procedure of a reception with a three-course dinner, toasts, speeches, and then so much dancing to so many songs by Journey, it's just the two of us, left to ourselves to talk of all the ways we love each other and to dream of the myriad adventures still to come.
Today's ride: 5 miles (8 km)
Total: 1,393 miles (2,242 km)
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