Married at Camp Westwind, OR
I'm back from a whirlwind tour of the Northwest, followed by a subdued layover in Austin, TX, where they have a beverage called "Sparks" that is in a can painted to resemble a battery, and which is a Red Bull knockoff with 6% alcohol. Regrettably, I didn't learn of this until I was in a car on my way out of town.
Jane and I had a great vacation. We went to see our friends Kelly and Kali get married, and it was total blast. The wedding was at Camp Westwind, OR, which is about 500 acres of sandy beaches, rocky coast, saltwater marsh, and forest trails that lead to grassy meadows featuring 20 mile views each way up and down the coast. The fact that about 70 wedding goers had those 500 acres to themselves for four days seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and it was the kind of location that would virtually guarantee a great time.
Everybody began the weekend blown away by the location, and the fact that you had to take a ferry across the salt-water riverhead at high tide to reach the camp. With 70 degrees and sunshine by day and stars and moon and bonfires by night, it was pretty much perfect. But by the end of the weekend people weren't talking about the location as much as they were the outstanding wedding and overall weekend. Most of the people I surveyed were saying it was the best wedding they had ever been to.
The level of preparation and attention to detail for the wedding was impressive. It was a communal wedding in the sense that everybody was asked to pitch in with cleaning, meal preparation and so on. Everybody knew this going into the weekend, and I think that gave the weekend a different feeling; we were all going to need to pitch in to make this well-planned, fun event happen in this great place, and I think everybody was very pleased to do it.
The band, an African funk jam outfit called Jujuba, was brilliant and mesmerizing, and by the end of the night also extremely high. The meals, in particular the deserts, were outstanding. The beer and wine were excellent, as were the many cheeses and crackers that were consistently plundered by people with mysterious latenite appetites. At one point my friend Kevin and I were standing in a walk-in freezer in the middle of this very nice commercial kitchen, surrounded by a veritable smorgasbord of tasty goodies of all persuasions, and we realized that Kelly and Kali had taken us to Heaven for a weekend.
Even the things that weren't planned went well. They got married on the beach at sunset, but the ceremony was somewhat loose, so there didn't seem to me to be any serious attempt to say "I do" at any particular moment in relation to the horizon. Several people in the crowd, myself included, kept a close eye on the sun as it started to dip into the ocean. Just when it seemed they weren't going to get it done with the sun still visible, it was time to say "I do". I stuck the camera up and pointed it West, and caught about the last third of the bright red ball above water. We stood and watched Kelly and Kali start their walk across the beach to the lodge for about 10 seconds, and then we turned to catch the last bit of the sun as it went down. It was perfect without even trying to be.
Actually, it wasn't totally perfect, because of something I said during the wedding ceremony. I was one of three people, aside from Kieran, who was to speak during the ceremony. Kelly and Kali hadn't given me much direction for content, and I hadn't asked for much direction. As usual, I thought I would just speak from the heart, and since I wanted to be topical, I left some of the content pretty loose until the wedding itself. This, combined with the fact that I don't like to work with anything more than a loose outline when I speak, makes public speaking a bit of a highwire act for me. Most of the time I think it works for me in a postive way, but sometimes it does not, and when that happens I look like a total assclown. At least, I perceive that I do, largely because of all the people pointing at me and saying "Nice job, assclown."
I think I was largely fine, or at least smooth and coherent enough to keep people from lingering for too long on awkward transitions or misplaced words. But then I started to get a little verklempt, which I sometimes do at weddings, and especially weddings of good friends. Then I looked directly at the then-blazing horizon sun, and that combined with the very slight tear in my eyes effectively blinded me for about 10 seconds.
During that time, I was talking about what I had learned about marriage, which is in reality very little, but one particular thing I have learned is that people get bored and frustrated with the people around them, including their spouses. But I have also learned that people get bored and frustrated with themselves, and in those low moments your spouse is your salvation.
Now, isn't that beautiful? Your spouse is your salvation when you start to lose that sense of joy about living each day. I think it's true, and that's what I took to be the kind of from the heart thing I could share as my friends moved into marriage.
The problem was that I got verklempt, got blinded, got confused, didn't have an iron-clad plan outline in place soon enough, and I mentioned that you get bored and frustrated with the people around you twice, instead of once. I simply got lost and repeated the phrase. Some people even told me I said it three times before getting to the "salvation" part, but I really couldn't say. There is a thing that happens when you start to lose it in a speech where time may either speed up or slow down, but it doesn't take you with it. Whatever you see and hear in your head has no relation to what your audience is seeing or hearing, and what has been a 20 second gap of slobbering silence to you will have been a dramatic pause to ponder your wisdom to them. Or vice-versa.
Anyway, the point is that I ended up going a little heavy on the boredom and frustration rhetoric, and a little light on the salvation theme, all with my lovely wife Jane standing in the front row of the crowd. Now, to be perfectly honest, I wasn't fully aware of what happened while I was speaking. I was aware it wasn't my best speech while I was giving it (a terrible feeling), but I didn't realize until people started cracking jokes to me later about which specific part I messed up. It wasn't long before I realized it looked like I had just performed some kind of weird reverse romanticism ceremony, where I stand on a beach during a sunset in front of my beloved and a bunch of other people and declare that I am Bored and Frustrated.
At first I was taken aback. Didn't anybody hear the part about Salvation? Unfortunately, after critical self-examination as I replayed the speech in my head, I knew that my fuck up was probably severe enough that even while I was gratefully concluding this rocky stretch with Salvation, people were probably too busy still thinking about the odd repeated mentions of Boredom and Frustration and staring at the back of Jane's head, or perhaps her enticing, shapely rump.
I felt terrible, both for Jane and for Kali and Kelly. I should have had a more definite outline and transitions together, and if I had chances are better the slip-up would never have happened. Also, I should accept that working from notes is sometimes appropriate and necessary. The whole weekend was so beautiful, and I wish I had done more to take advantage of that chance to be a special part of it.
But then again, I'm not objective. I tend to be oblivious to my flaws, but once they are pointed out to me I either deny that they exist or I dwell on them. I couldn't deny that I had not prepared as well as I should have, so I dwelt on it. Soon I was convinced I had given the worst public speech since Mike Love's when the Beach Boys were inducted into the Hall of Fame. But was it really that bad? I couldn't tell. I felt like I should apologize to Kelly and Kali, but they were busy, plus I wondered if it was best to not mention it yet. Maybe it didn't even seem that bad to them, though even if it did I don't think they would tell me.
Certainly I apologized to Jane profusely, and because she is wise and just, as well as a great mother and wife, she has helped ease my mind with regard to the destructive impact of the speech. She has been, dare I say, my salvation. And, on the bright side, if I'd given a prepared speech the chances they would have finished right on time with the sunset would have been much lower.
Anyway, the wedding officially kicked ass. I should have known when I got the invitation CD in the mail that we were in for something special. One of the other things I mentioned in my speech was that while all weddings are special, they don't always mean a whole lot. What I mean is that some kick-ass weddings produce shitty marriages, and vice-versa.
But in some cases, I think a wedding can tell you a lot about what kind of marriage two people will have. When two people can pull off an event like this, you take notice. They made it happen by thinking about what was possible, in a literal kind of way. They made it happen by asking their friends and family to chip in, and by having friends and family that wanted to do it. They made it happen in a beautiful place, and they made it happen while they told their friends and family what it truly meant to them to be married, and why history's view of marriage is something we should all think about. It takes a certain grace to pull all of that off, to master all the details and engage the different people and express a contagious faith that it's going to work. Then when it does work, it makes you think those people could do anything they want as they live their lives together.
Weddings like that stay with you for a long time, and somehow, even if it's not you that's getting married, they make you feel alive. You think back to your own wedding, and you are glad the person you said "I do" to is still standing next to you, watching the sun slide into the ocean and getting ready to dance the night away.
11:42:40 PM 
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