American Currents: Our Separate Honeymoons

I am not an outdoorsy kind of guy. I love and respect nature, but I’d rather curl up with a book and a bourbon-and-soda at home.

Not that I lack direct experience of the outdoors. My folks took their boys in Volkswagen vans and tents to Alaska and Mexico, and across the U.S. into Morocco and up through Europe. My brother Ken and I pitched a two-man tent in Norway, in Brittany, in Greece, and along the Dalmatian coast of what was then known as Yugoslavia … all before I was 15.

So when I met Carole more than two decades later, I still owned a goose-down mummy sleeping bag from U.S. Army surplus in Germany. She may have gotten the mistaken impression that I was an inveterate hiker and camper.

I did drag her up Mount Storm King in the Olympics for the view of Lake Crescent and the Strait of Juan de Fuca the fall of our first year together. We also went on an overnight camping hike up the Eagle Creek Trail (the one ravaged by wildfire last summer) with another couple, and climbed Saddle Mountain in the Coast Range east of Seaside.

We had been seeing each other for two years (more accurately, I had moved into her condo early in that window of time) when she suggested a kayaking expedition in Glacier Bay, Alaska.

A company based in Juneau called Alaska Discovery (sadly no longer in business) hosted week-long trips in double kayaks that carried all the food and camping gear. We would paddle from the mouth of Glacier Bay near Gustavus to visit two of the glaciers before heading back to the starting point.

This was not Carole’s cup of tea. She regularly joked that “roughing it” means no room service. But she wanted to have at least one major outdoor adventure, and I have to say, the prospect sounded fantastic to me!

So early in 1993 she booked the trip with Alaska Discovery for early September (by which time of year the pesky mosquitoes and tourists have left). She trained hard at the gym to prepare for the trip.

Later that spring she suggested we get married. Why, I asked. She countered with: Why not? I didn’t have an answer to that. So we agreed to tack a wedding onto the front of our Glacier Bay vacation, which I began to refer to as our “shotgun honeymoon.”

Now, Carole was a lapsed Catholic and I was a former Unitarian. On the West Coast, the Unitarian membership is probably a third deist, a third agnostic, and a third atheist, but one hundred percent social activist … however, I still like to say the church was “too organized” for my taste. We opted for a civil ceremony with a friend of hers who’s a judge to officiate, and wrote our own vows.

McMenamins had just opened its newest facility, known as Edgefield, in the grand old building that had been the county poor farm when it was built in Troutdale near the mouth of the Columbia River Gorge in 1911. If we had invited both sides of my family, the party would have been more than 200 -- far beyond our means as hosts -- so we decided to limit the guests to our immediate families and a couple of friends, and booked the five-room administrator’s cottage for an overnight party.

Only a few weeks before showtime, however, we got a call from the people at McMenamins. They said they had double-booked the white cottage and the other folks had gotten it first. Could we come in to discuss other options?

Furious, I went in ready to play hardball: I donned a gun-metal grey, three-piece pinstripe suit I’d bought at a thrift store in Cleveland during my drive home from Boston in the summer of 1987.

But they were so nice, we were utterly disarmed. As compensation for their error, McMenamins offered to provide the catered dinner we had already ordered on the house. They would also set aside the wine cellar and tasting room, which is not normally closed to the public, for our reception.

Carole and I were more than satisfied, and booked rooms for the wedding party on the main floor just upstairs from the wine cellar. (“You’re gonna have a slumber party for your wedding?” one of her sisters asked.)

Everything was set for the evening of Friday, August 27, with the ceremony to be held in the wine press room, a step outside for a couple of dances by Bridgetown Morris Men (the group I had co-founded a year or two before; that Fremont-Bridge-and-rose-logo that appears in an embroidered patch on each dancer’s chest was designed by Carole), the reception party in the wine cellar, go upstairs to bed, and breakfast in the Black Rabbit Restaurant before heading to the airport for our flight to Juneau. We would have a couple days in Alaska’s state capital before our kayaking adventure in Glacier Bay.

But then Carole injured herself at work. All too willing to tackle a task that was not in her job description (she was a marketing manager for an industrial tool distributor), Carole carried a ladder on the warehouse floor and pinched a nerve in her shoulder.

She was experiencing a lot of pain and severely limited mobility. “How much of a risk taker are you?” her neurologist asked. He was leaving it up to her whether to go through with our strenuous honeymoon adventure of a week of sea kayaking and camping in the wild. Oh no, I said; we are NOT going to gamble with the rest of your life.

But our contract with Alaska Discovery wouldn’t let us cancel without losing a huge chunk of our deposit. The only solution we could see was for me to go ahead with the Glacier Bay kayak trip and take my best male friend. Carole would find something else to do in the Alaska panhandle for the week I would paddle and camp with my buddy and a dozen other adventurers.

Carole took the ferry from Juneau to Haines and Skagway. She rented a seaplane flight over Glacier Bay and actually got a shot of our campsite near the foot of McBride Glacier, where our guides had whipped up gin and tonics they chilled with thousands-year-old ice chipped off the glacier.

We reunited for the second week of our “shotgun honeymoon” in Sitka, a lovely artist colony founded by the Russians in 1804 as New Archangel. It’s on the ocean side of Baranof Island, which is accessible only by boat or plane, and has only 14 miles of paved road.

Sitka gets very brief visits from thousands of tourists every summer. Disgorged by cruise ships during the day, they eat and buy everything in sight, then reboard the ship and disappear. Once the locals noticed Carole and I hadn’t vanished in the evening like all the rest, they turned friendly and began to talk with us.

My new spouse bought me this beautiful whale bracelet in Sitka, and I sprung for the wrap-around ring of Eagle and Raven for myself: