A very odd September

The end of August, and September, is when the move really happened. Looking back on it, it's a small miracle that it actually did happen, but somehow it did. And we're talking everything here--concept evaluation, logistics, planning, packing, divesting, orchestrating, and interweaving.

We decided (after some heroic work by Cathy in trying to figure out how the whole strange business works) that trying to ship both cars up to Alaska was not at all cost-effective, and ended up arranging to ship Betty separately, to arrive shortly after Cathy would arrive up north--to minimize the amount of time she'd have to use a rental car. The process involves taking everything out of the car except the factory jack, and a sheet of paper which is a permission/release form. (This detail would be important, later.) I've gotta say, it is a weird sensation to drive a vehicle that you have a real attachment to, to be picked up by a transporter truck, and watch it get carried off by someone else. (The transporter truck was a real trip, too--for anyone who appreciates electro-hydraulic gizmos, that is one cool toy.)

Looking back at it, it's amazing how late in the game it was that we actually decided who would move our belongings, and by what means. It was all chicken-and-egg sort of stuff; “if we have this much stuff we should take option A; but if we might have this much stuff we should really consider option B” and so on. In the end we went with Pacific Alaska Freightways, a freight company that will occasionally include a household move such as ours. We lucked on an extremely helpful representative who constantly re-engineered things to help us get a better price, and she was good at it. In the end I suspect we paid less than half of what the other options might have cost us, even with how convoluted it all was and with the few extra things that popped up along the way. If for some reason you want to move up north and join us up here (an excellent idea!), we can highly recommend Kelli at Pacific Alaska Freightways.

The task ended up to be simple, kinda: we would put all our household goods on pallets, and they would be picked up from the haus in Lakewood, to be trucked to Tacoma, barged to Anchorage, and then trucked to an (unknown at the time) address in Palmer. Finding the pallets, and learning how to load and wrap them, became Kevin's task.

It all came down to the wire. With Betty enroute and the clock ticking, we had to book Cathy's flight into a real date, which became October 1. She did everything she could in the time she had in Colorado, and then had to completely shift gears into being the point-person up north. It must have been very abrupt and stressful, but she handled it as gracefully as anyone could ask.

Oh, and in the middle of all this, mind you, there was also the issue of what to do with the Lakewood house. Sell? Ha, not in this economy. At one point people had been telling us that we would not be affected by the current housing bubble-burst, but one by one those predictions dried up, and eventually we not only came to entertain the idea of renting our house out, but selecting it as the best available option. We decided to use a property manager, since it is one thing to manage a rental property across town, and another thing entirely to try and do so from over 3000 miles away. It was and is a risk, one more thing to worry about, but we took the plunge, and LuAnn even got us an appropriate tenant pretty quickly, too. Hopefully the arrangement continues to work on both ends!

We had an official “going-away” soiree, at which we gave away a goodly amount of stuff to good homes, and in general got most of our goodbyes accomplished. There were plenty of tears here; mostly tempered by the overfull docket and the unreality of things being this far along, but they were there: what we will miss most about Colorado are our fantastic friends. (In my case, what I will specifically miss most about Colorado is playing music with Dave Cialone; I am fully aware that the likelihood of finding a convergence like that up here is all but impossible. That I got the privilege at all, in the first place, is prima facie evidence that Something Bigger must be kinda fond of me from time to time.) There was a final gig for Kevin's tenure with Guitar Circle Colorado (at which the Norwegian Wood arrangement finally saw an official debut), there was a final shoot at Ben Lomond Gun Club, there was a serenade send-off by favorite local band Crowboy featuring a remake of “North To Alaska” with an updated lyric, and there were a handful of little visits that we fit in, even though we couldn't, because they were important. These things happen when you are fortunate enough to know people like we do.

And then, abruptly, I had to go drop Cathy at the airport. We'd been doing the Headless Chicken for a solid month, and suddenly we were here, and I knew I wouldn't get to see her for three weeks. Man, that sucked.

August 2008 -- weddings and reunions and moving, oh my!

As if we didn't have things booked out well enough, my 20-year high school reunion came up this year. (Whoever decided that August in Houston was a bonny time for a social event, should be strung up.) We decided to make a trip of it, so that Cathy could see the place I grew up in, and I myself hadn't been back in some 15 years.

In spite of the heat, it was a real hoot. Cathy tolerated and was even amused by my incessant gaping and pointing at things that had changed in the area, and also things that hadn't. (You know the kind of logic I'm talking about here.) We ended up walking by my old house, having dinner in an old classic Clear Lake City restaurant (The Colosseum, still there), and doing a goodly amount of driving around. We even took in some time at NASA--sorry, it's “Space Center Houston” now--and the sense of ambivalence was palpable. A few things were genuinely interesting, after the initial shock...most notably, the Saturn V rocket is now in a building. This is just wrong, in the aesthetic sense, but the preservation angle was actually reasonably compelling, and I thought they did pretty well with it. The main center is of course truly Disney-fied now, with very little real that you can still walk up and touch, but we were expecting that. What just about got me to start huckin' rocks, though, was the shuttle tour, which featured the full-on airport “government-issued photo ID” and metal detector treatment, plus an additional insult not even the airports are arrogant enough to impose: for the ubiquitous “security reasons”, you must submit to having your picture taken--and nein, nein mit ze sunglasses, damen und herren--and, wait for it, you may even purchase this extorted photo for an additional fee if you want a souvenir. Suffice it to say that the steam coming out of my ears could have powered the bus in its entirety. And, after you have, ah, “voluntarily” suspended your rights under the Constitution, what do you get in return? You get a shuttle ride along a fixed path (concrete bollards along the route), bypassing all the buildings we just drove up and walked into in my youth, stopping only at the rockets and at the “new” Mission Control, which now features two redundant instances, neither of which is the historic room. In the end, there was much there that I'm glad Cathy got to see, but she'll never really understand what it was like for a kid to grow up there and have the kind of access that I did at the time. When we left, I distinctly felt both wistful and dirty.

By complete contrast, we also ended up at the San Jacinto monument on that trip, to which we simply drove up, walked in, looked around, and left with no hassle whatever. People can say whatever they want about Texas, but I submit the contrast between NASA and San Jacinto as a self-evident study in comparative human dignity and trust.

Then there was the reunion itself, which was fantastic in a most unexpected way. As I imagine is pretty common at such things, I had a list of people that I was specifically hoping to run into after all these years...and I saw almost nobody on that list. Oh well. However...what I was not expecting was to see so many people that I knew not just from high school, but from elementary school--we're talkin' all the way back here. I ran into Chris Koontz (who, it turns out, actually knows about Guitar Craft!), Kate (Katie) Ramsey, Wendy Sutterby, Robin Campbell, Rachel Breeding, Irwin Stewart...names I hadn't thought about in a really long time. The absolute “made my evening” award, though, must go to Simone Campbell, who tried so hard to place me without looking at the name tag...when she finally looked, the expression on her face was literally priceless. (And I'm not sure Cathy stopped giggling at me the whole night.)

It was great to run into Liesa Sava and Karyn Erickson, as well, catching up on spouses and family stories (and of course with Cathy and I taking notes for our own impending adventure); how each one had somehow become even more beautiful than they were twenty years ago, I cannot explain, but sometimes life just seems to better itself for the heck of it. It was really good to see so many people doing so well.

The next morning, we had breakfast with Judy Switzer, a good friend of my family who has been a teacher in the area for a long while. It was a delight to be able to discuss education with her from the standpoint of an educator; she seems to share the same general attitudes towards teaching and learning that I have developed in my own career, and we definitely seemed to have to work a little to keep from going on all day. Cathy, of course, simply laughed at us both. Marvelous.

Recall that one of the more quaint ideas we'd had, when planning out the concept of a move Up North, was that we'd use the planned August trip to Seattle, for Cathy's cousin's wedding, as a launching point for our personal transportation to Alaska. We'd arrange to have our stuff picked up in Denver, drive to Seattle, attend the wedding, and then drive onto one of the Blue Canoes for a little cruise to the new digs. Great idea, but it wasn't to be. Instead, we ended up with planes, trains and automobiles. Seriously, and literally.

First, we caught a plane to Minneapolis-St. Paul, and attended Cathy's cousin's wedding in Stillwater, MN. This was a simply delightful affair which was particularly endearing to me because of Jakki's use of the hunting theme in the wedding itself, as a gift to Ryan...the sugar trays on the tables were clay birds...camo incorporated tastefully into the men's vests...and my favorite, the boutonnière flowers “growing” out of empty shotshell hulls. At the reception, instead of clinking glasses to get the couple to kiss, you had to come up to the head table and use the suction-dart gun to hit the picture of the deer. This was a big hit...especially with the kids, who were getting pretty good by the end of the night!

From there, we caught an Amtrak train from St. Paul to Seattle, and other than the typical absurdity of government-hijacked “security” measures (which require the peaceable to render themselves defenseless) it was a delightful trip, accompanied by Cathy's parents, sister, nephew, and grandmother. Highlights included the route around the southern tip of Glacier National Park, meals in the dining car, and in general a marvelous slowing-down of our usual frenetic pace.

In Seattle, we attended another wedding for a Cathy cousin, which was held at a simply astonishing residence in Everett. In the back yard there were two conspicuous gaps in the trees, through which you had unobstructed views of Mount Baker to the north and Glacier Peak to the east. The day was marvelous, Jen and Steve were gracious hosts, and the whole thing just came off as fun. Around the event itself, we also managed to weave in a couple of choice meals and a quickie trip to the Olympic peninsula featuring the Washington State Ferry system, which I think was new for everyone except me. (Those silly boats should not be as cool as they are, but, well, they just are.)

And, after the plane to Minnesota and the train to Seattle, we got to drive home, courtesy of Dave & Cathy Sweeney, who had timed their West Coast driving vacation specifically to coincide with us in Seattle. This was a great road trip along a splendid scenic route, covering some territory I had not seen since I was 7 years old, and other territory that was completely new. In that latter category was Washington's coulee country, including Grand Coulee dam. I was not prepared for how beautiful some of that country is; were it not for the consistent stories of 110-degree summers, it would have been a very tempting relocation alternative. As it is, I've now got yet another place in the American West I want to go back to at some point. From there, we went on through Idaho's panhandle, including a brief glimpse of beautiful Coeur d'Alene, and into Montana enroute to Glacier National Park.

This was a trip I'd looked forward to for a long time. As a 7-year-old, I have an indelible memory of a driving vacation that culminated in Glacier and Waterton National Parks, with the clearest photo-perfect memories of Glacier that you could imagine. Many things that happened well after that I remember less or not at all, but Glacier really made an impression. And, from the time that we dropped into the Flathead Lake valley, it all started to come back. We took the Going-To-The-Sun road, of course, and even did a little diehard walking at the summit of Logan Pass (it was chilly and sleet/hailing at the top, so we limited our distance) but mostly it was all those little mental snapshots coming back, that really made it for me. There is just nothing like the Canadian Rockies!

From there, we beelined into Bozeman, staying the night with my parents, and then made off for Yellowstone, which we whirlwinded even more completely than Cathy and I had the previous time we'd been to Bozeman. The comparisons were fascinating; this trip was in high summer whereas we had been there previously in late fall, and it was interesting to see how different a face the park put on in its most popular time. From Yellowstone, we headed down the eastern canyon to Cody and--it sounds funny even to say it--managed to cover much of the famous museum complex in just the couple of hours we had available to us. (Even Cathy said she found the firearms museum interesting, mostly because she found my kid-in-a-candy-store attitude and incessant rambling on about all sort and manner of things to be interesting in and of itself. Me? Yeah, I'd go back. :-)

From there, we pushed hard back to Colorado, and then had to face a bit of reality. We still had most of the move work to do, we were halfway through the pregnancy, and we had just lost a lovely three weeks of time farting around on vacation!

July 2008 -- the early packing

Knowing that we were going to be moving at the end of the summer, we decided to get a “head-start” on things (boy, does that seem like a quaint notion now!), and that took the form of paring down our worldly belongings in various creative ways. The big stroke of genius there was Cathy's use of the PaperBack Swap trading site. Basically, we culled out only the books that were one of a kind or that we couldn't live without, and Cathy posted just about everything else on PBS. One by one, our books went out into the virtual ether, and we piled up credits to be redeemed once we made the move. Less weight, less bulk, less hassle! We had an initial garage sale, and tried to pack things up that we wouldn't need to get to until after the move. It was a good lot of work that we managed to accomplish, and we certainly learned a great deal about the process of evaluating one's own possessions. It's one thing to pile all your books into boxes and toss them into a U-Haul, but it's another thing entirely to consider the cost of moving them to Alaska. There is no such thing as the “we'll just make one more trip with the truck to get the last of it”. We thought we were well ahead of the game, and maybe we were, for a ten-minute period or so...

Also during this time frame, we took Cathy's Jeep, with its brand-new front bumper and winch, into the Flat Tops. The year prior, hunting elk with my father, we (Dad, Cathy and I) had started up a 4WD road that went quite a way up into the heart of the Flat Tops, but turned around due to conditions and not-quite-total confidence in Dad's ZJ to make the trip without a companion vehicle. It was the right choice, then, but we wanted to see where that road went, and a newly spiffened Betty (Cathy's Jeep is named Betty, after her grandmother) was just the way to do it. In the end, Cathy did a marvelous job driving that road (and in hindsight we concluded that the choice of place to turn around the previous November had probably been exactly right), which was a goodly distance of honest 4WD challenge, and Betty was typically magnificent. The end of the road, as well, was well worth reaching--the country at the top was outstanding elk habitat, and stunningly beautiful. (The Flat Tops are among the things I will miss most about Colorado, as is elk hunting. Alaska apparently does have elk, in Southeast--the panhandle--but it's not like Colorado, which is the king of elk states.) The Flat Tops trip was memorable for more than just the drive and the scenery, though--as it happened, we ran across what must have been an absolutely freakish mosquito hatch, by zoological standards (everyone we met up there who was familiar with the area said they'd never seen anything like it), and we very nearly came down the mountain completely rather than camp as we had intended. On our walk up to the pass, even with a light breeze, they covered us like a carpet. At one point I estimated probably 200-300 insects on cathy's hat alone (yes, we did have DEET on), and they swarmed around our faces relentlessly. Even Cathy, who grew up in pretty reputable mosquito country (northern Wisconsin), said she'd never seen the simultaneous combination of number of insects, tendency to swarm around her face, and willingness to bite, like this.

And then the breeze went away. At this point we were walking specifically to evade being smothered, and we beelined to a mountain pass, the surest place on the planet to find a stiff wind. And there was nothing. Even the elk we saw were continually moving up there, and it sure wasn't because of us! Staggeringly beautiful countryside, really, but impossible to appreciate through a gray, buzzing haze.

June 2008 -- Trip to Stillwater and Chicago

Cathy's brother Tom had accepted an opportunity to go teach English in Thailand (Phuket) for a while, and when he announced a send-off soiree (in the form of an old-fashioned minor league baseball game), we immediately put it on the schedule and drove out to see the Saint Paul Saints. A marvelous experience, replete with doting host, family and friends, and old-fashioned mini-donuts!

Cathy's sister Theresa also took charge, while we were there, of an impromptu baby shower for us. The theme, since everyone knew at this point that we would be moving, was your favorite children's book, plus an explanation of why it was your favorite children's book. Theresa also took on the task of keeping these books for us until after the move, and then shipping them up once we had an address--so we wouldn't have the bulk and weight to worry about. Cathy's family is so good with cool ideas like that...

From Stillwater, the timing worked out well enough that we just headed on into Chicago, for the General Federation of Women's Clubs' international conference. Now you might say that I am “not a fan” of Chicago, but that simple phrasing doesn't really capture the quantity of contemptuous disdain I have for the famous political machine and its contemptuous and conspicuous disdain for the concept of individual sovereignty. It might be more accurate to say that there is no way I would set foot in the place by my own choice. (From that point, I actually start to get nasty, so I'll stop.) This gives you some idea of how much I love my wife, and enjoy these GFWC events. And as a real added bonus, we got to see friends Nathan and Maria and I even got the treasured chance to play guitar with Nathan for a short while.

This trip was also the maiden voyage of the new Jeep Cherokee, which was acquired primarily to be a better riding vehicle for Cathy during the pregnancy. (The Subaru was so low to the ground that she got very uncomfortable on long trips in the seats.) I named her Pearl, after a woman I worked with remotely at IBM, and quickly remembered how delightfully right that vehicle is for me. It's just a joy to drive, capable of anything my stomach is capable of off-road, and makes a viable family vehicle as well, while being quite efficient for its size and power (there's a reason that engine did not change materially for over fifteen years). Cathy, too, remembered how much she enjoyed having a Cherokee in the stable, and we were set for the summer.

May 2008 -- Decision point and planning

I have to admit that I had not expected that our relocation would be to Alaska (even after the honeymoon), nor so soon. I had figured that we would spend a year or two evaluating places and then pick one in the lower 48 as the best practical compromise. We had lots of criteria we were trying to work with, but one of the killers was getting away from the heat--we both just get absolutely wilty when the mercury nears 80, and by the time it hits 100, we're lucky to even be conscious. (Yes, it can get “too cold” even for us, but you really have to work at it.) In doing our research, only a couple of places even came close to our goal; most of them were really little different than Lakewood--”average” summer temps in the 80s, with altogether too many days in the 90s, and even a few 100s to add insult to injury. In order to get substantially better than that, you had to get really high (Crested Butte, CO, at 8900' elevation, was a possible)--or, you could go to Alaska, which from a numbers standpoint, was simply perfect--but again, through even March and April, I did not even count it as a possible.

Why, you ask? Get this: I simply didn't realize how much Cathy dug the idea. I knew exactly how much I thought it was the perfect plan, but I had been trying very hard not to put any pressure on her, as it didn't seem like the kind of thing that someone would “just go along with”. I had been up there before, helping my parents move my uncle from Anchorage back to Bozeman--during hunting season, no less--and it's a bloody miracle I came back at that time. (Good thing I did, of course, as I ran into Cathy shortly thereafter!) So imagine my surprise when--sometime in March/April--we had a conversation in which we each learned that the other was privately holding Palmer as the undisputed first-choice for relocation. !!!!!

Well, what on earth were we waiting for, then?

Of course there were and are all kinds of answers to that question. We are rather conditioned from birth to look at things this way--why disrupt anything / there is risk / think of all the things that could go wrong / what about family and friends / what about job--and we went through them, systematically. And somewhat to our surprise, we found that only one thing really tied us to the Denver location--our magnificent friends. Huh.

What pulled the pin on the grenade was news of the pregnancy. It was at that point that we made the fateful choice to turn the question--why go?--on its ear: why not go? Even better: if not now, at this point in our lives when we are not tied to a geography, when? And you know, as soon as we looked at it that way, the decision just kinda made itself. Neither Cathy nor I wanted to look back on things twenty years from now and say, “I sure wish we'd taken the chance and tried to live the dream when we had the ability to do it.” So, it was decided: we would move to Alaska to raise us a rug-rat. Great. Okay, when?

Well, now we had a lit fuse, and thus a time frame. What to do with it? We asked a few people the pertinent question: is it easier to move while pregnant, or with a newborn? (Neither of us really wanted to let more than a year or two go by before we did it, lest the opportunity be lost.) The answer was pretty much unanimous: while pregnant. Okay then, now we've got a time frame for the move, and a really good incentive to meet it.

We had our initial appointment with Westside Women's Care (recommended to us by our primary-care doctor, who we had learned to trust as having a healthy respect for naturopathy and midwifery), at which we were suitably overwhelmed with both all the normal information, plus the cherry-on-top tidbit that our due date calculated out to be...Christmas. Now how about that!

There were discussions of plans to observe half-birthdays to avoid holiday confusion, and there were early discussions of names (Noel and Jesús, for example, were right out). Mostly, we were just excited, and of course cautious. We were a little hesitant to announce the baby to everyone until we'd got a comfortable way along. (It really is kinda scary how common early miscarriages are. Having been through this once now, I realize a little better that referring to any healthy birth as a miracle is no platitude!) For parents, we immediately sent Christmas cards announcing their present of grandparenthood, and as the weeks went along we added others to the announcement list, finally getting to everyone around 20 weeks or so.

And out of it all came The Plan. Put simply, The Plan was to have moved to Alaska by the time the baby was born. This started out with the idea that we might take the second of our two big planned summer trips, to the Seattle area in August, and simply arrange to finish that trip by stepping on one of the Blue Canoes (Alaska Marine Highway ferries) from Bellingham, bound for Whittier south of Anchorage.

And you've all read “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu, right? “The first casualty of any war is the battle plan.” Dang, that guy was smart.

April 2008 -- Wee Wilmachek news

It's sure a good thing that I love my wife so much, because she can sure be a pain in the ass sometimes. I came home from work one day, fairly exhausted, and she asked me to check the oven for her. She appeared to be working on dinner, so I didn't think anything of it. I peeked in the oven and saw one of Taste of Denmark's absolutely mouthwatering cardamom buns sitting bare on the rack.

Just one? That didn't seem right. I know how much Cathy loves those blasted things (even more than I do, and I'd down just as many as you put in front of me, anywhere, anytime), and she wouldn't have gone out of her way to get just one. (I didn't notice until later that she had, in fact, got a small bag full.) Well, maybe she got two and already ate hers, leaving mine in the oven for heating... On second thought, I shouldn't assume that, in case she hadn't had hers... so, I turned the oven on and said with a tired smile, “Thanks, babe. I'll heat it up for us.”

She rolled her eyes at me with the oddest grin on her face, and turned the oven back off. Huh? Okay, well, it did seem unusual that she'd need my help for that, but I didn't have the energy for a lot of second-guessing. It became clear then, though, that I had missed something. I wasn't getting the joke. What joke?

“Kevin, what did you find in the oven?” Lovingly patronizing, complete with knuckles on hip and goofy grin.

I stated the obvious. “A cardamom bu-” ... And the terrible, awful joke finally sank home--instantly replaced by the marvelous realization behind it. “Really?”

And that is how I found out we were pregnant.

I hugged her, of course, but I also called her a punk.

December 2007 -- the “real” honeymoon

Cathy and I had decided that right after the wedding, we would take a small break somewhere close by, but plan a bigger event for some time later. With everyone that made it to Colorado from all around the country, we wanted to take every opportunity we had to visit with people while they were there, and in retrospect we both are absurdly happy to have done it that way.

When the time finally came to sort out what, exactly, we did want to do for that “real” honeymoon, the exchange happened something like this:

Kevin: “So, whatcha wanna do for a 'real' honeymoon, then?”

Cathy: “Go to Alaska and see the Northern Lights for New Years, of course!”

Kevin: “I love you.”

Cathy: “Huh?”

Kevin: “Exactly. Sure, let's go.”

So, a few days after the Christmas holiday, we packed up some warm clothes, made the connection through Seattle, and landed in Anchorage at something like midnight-thirty. Apparently, during the wintertime, there are far fewer flights-per-day to and from Alaska than during summer, go figure. It was pretty weird to see so many families with small children milling about the airport at midnight, but that's when flights both arrive and depart. After a small fiasco with the rental car in which we decided not to actually rent it, we cabbed ourselves to the B&B and crashed for the night.

(Incidentally, the B&B is a whole separate story worth telling on its own. At some point we'll drop in on Allen & Larry again, now that we're here permanently, and I'll do the backfill there. But suffice it to say that if you're in Anchorage and have need of accommodation downtown, look no further than A Wildflower Inn. Highly recommended!)

We spent most of the first two days walking around downtown Anchorage, based out of the B&B and entirely on foot. This gave us a chance to be outside in winter, experiencing the dark and the cold up front, and of course gave us a pretty good flavor of the vibe of the town.

For personalities like ours, this place pretty much sells itself, and the winter experience just confirmed it the more. We found the cold to be absolutely no problem if we were properly attired, and it ranged from about -5 up to 20 while we were there. I experimented on the trip by bringing only my one pair of tennis shoes and the Wiggy overboots for walking outside. This was a fantastically workable arrangement. (Methinks Alaska will only reinforce my love of Wiggy stuff--and what do you know, there is a Wiggy's Alaska store in midtown Anchorage. Shucks!) As for the dark, what we found was that it really wasn't nearly as dark as we were thinking it would be. It's certainly true that there is far less “sun-up to sun-down” time at the winter solstice than in Denver, but add in the usable twilight and it's only an hour or two shorter than what we already know. That was a pleasant surprise.

And then there is the quality of that light...it is simply breathtaking; I have never seen anything like it. The best comparison I can make is to those few fleeting moments at dawn and dusk, at elevations over 10,000' in the central Rocky Mountains, when the alpenglow just seems to dance. But this is better, and lasts much longer.

Within three minutes of our first sortie from the B&B that first morning, we were treated to a cow and calf moose crossing the road; keep in mind this is in downtown Anchorage. The saying goes, “the beauty of Anchorage is that it is only ten minutes away from Alaska”, but it's still all relative, innit? :-)

Passing on the rental car proved to be a wise move. Cousin Keith and his wife Meaghan graciously lent us one of their vehicles for the remainder of our visit (they live about half an hour north of Anchorage, in Eagle River), and we were quite happy to have a 4Runner instead of what would have been, at best, a front-wheel-drive rental car. For New Year's Day, they took us along with a couple of friends from a Land Cruiser group, on an offroad trip up to the foot of the Knik glacier, a route that is far more practical (if not impossible) in winter than in summer. Now there's something I'd have never thought of--and I will remember that attitude for the future! The three Land Cruisers were of completely different periods and were modified to varying degrees, but in short it was a marvelous 25-mile offroad drive, with three clearly talented drivers, and the most unique New Year's experience I've ever had. It was Cathy's first time to see a glacier up close, and she marveled at just how blue it really looks in person. We saw a small plane make a landing and takeoff on its skis (this was on the moraine in the same general area we were) and what stunned me was that, on takeoff, that plane traveled not fifty feet before it was off the ground--wow!

We visited several places, as far north as Talkeetna, as far east as the Matanuska glacier upvalley from Palmer, and as far south as Portage. We were not specifically looking for a place to live, but we were looking around in the same spirit that we did when we took our Thanksgiving trip to Kamas, Utah a year before: “would this be a good place to settle and raise a family?” What we found was that there is a distinct “Alaska vibe”, present everywhere that we looked, that we like and that could indeed be happy with.

Then there was Palmer, which stole the show. This place has not only the Alaska vibe but also a cow-town vibe, and the two together just plain work for us. As we considered everything, it was the clear front-runner. The location, for starters, is perfect: it's about an hour's drive north and east of Anchorage--far enough away to be distinctly out of the city but still accessible to it. It is a small town of about 5000 that doesn't quite feel that big; Palmer is to its sister city Wasilla rather like Saint Paul is to Minneapolis on a smaller scale: more agricultural, more laid-back and home-cookin' in style; more importantly, it seems that people like it that way and are not (yet) in a hurry to change it.

The geography is compelling. It lies along the Matanuska river as it turns south to join the Knik and drain into Cook Inlet. Just to the north are the Talkeetna mountains and Hatcher Pass; to the east is the Matanuska valley and the Matanuska sub-range of the Chugach mountains; to the southeast is the Knik valley; to the south is the towering hulk of Pioneer Peak and the main bulk of the Chugach range; and to the southwest is Chugach State Park and ultimately Anchorage and the Kenai Peninsula. There is a ridiculously majestic vista from 0 to 270 degrees on the compass, and the remaining arc is usually available for pretty spectacular skies early and late in the day. Yeah, that'll work for me.

The time came, as always sooner than we wanted it, to go home, but we learned that this was definitely a candidate for the “raise a family” project.

The Wilmachek Bride

The following was originally written in PDF form, with a few pictures, to be distributed at our wedding, on August 12, 2007. I thought the blog was an appropriate place to put a text-only version. Enjoy!

The Wilmachek Bride

F. Mumfordstern's Classic Tale of Twoo Wuv and High Jinks

The "Twitterpating Bits" version abridged by Kevin Wilmeth

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Ah, if only I'd have written it myself. This story was originally authored by the renowned F. Mumfordstern, the famous Aptenodytes forsteri known best for his exhaustive historical tomes The Beautifulest Rockhopper and Seven Brides For Seven Chinstraps. I have adapted it here by excising the most flowery of the prose so that it can be digested in a single sitting. (Mumfordstern, high and artistic as he is, is a bit given over to bombast.)

1. The Seeds

Once upon a time, there was a smashingly agreeable dining venue famous not only for its tasty comestibles but also for its flavored vodka and charming staff. (Actually, let's get real: the place still exists; Mumfordstern is a bit disingenuous in suggesting that it is no more with that whole "Once upon a time, there was..." bit... Okay, so there was a name change and a minor updating to protect the innocent, but that whole "witness protection" rumor never did really fool anyone. The same charming people are still there, the food is still terriffic, and the vodka is still responsible for a shocking number of stories featuring the line "oh dear, did I do that?")

One fine evening, The Little Russian Cafe was the scene of a birthday celebration for a local debutante, and various characters were in attendance. Among the company was one David Sweeney, who was accompanied by his great friend and our intrepid heroine, Catherine Hudachek. (You will forgive me for excising here some 148-odd pages of extraordinary but probably superfluous background that Mumfordstern gives on both Sweeney and Hudachek, their respective childhoods, countries and planets of origin, and obvious connections to societies so secret that Mumfordstern was paid that little visit you may have read about some years ago.) Mr. Sweeney at the time was working at Boston Chicken with the birthday girl, and this was his and Hudachek's first opportunity to meet The Shlub, the birthday girl's husband, who from the stories seemed to be about as uninteresting and droll a personality as could be found with a pulse. Perhaps curiosity got the better of them, as their initial contact with The Shlub was not quite the experience they had been expecting. Then again, some people--especially the sort of characters that achieve single-syllable names with only one vowel--are highly adept at subterfuge...

(At this point Mumfordstern goes on for 351 pages--in italics, no less--about the possible scenarios and conjectures that may have been made by one character about the other, and the possible suspense that may have been generated by this sort of meeting, and all the things that were not known by the various members of the party, and the possible motivations for so doing, and...oh for the love of Pete, it goes on forever. Frankly, between you and me, I think Mumfordstern's visit from the Sri Lankan secret service probably had more to do with telling him to get on with it than anything actually incriminating. At any rate, I'll distill it down for you, out of respect for your time. It's a good thing Mumfordstern's language is so beautiful, or even the academics would never suffer it.)

The birthday girl decided to leave The Shlub. She did. Time passed.

(See? You got everything you needed from that version. There was contemplation! Action! Passage of time!)

The Shlub, who was known in other circles as Kevin Wilmeth, emerged from his chrysalis quite a bit happier (somewhat to his own surprise), and sooner, than anyone had expected. By this time, Miss Hudachek, remembering the disconnect between the stories and her own first meeting with The Shlub, remembered that they seemed to share an interest in hiking. So, in the year 2000 (being a nice round number for such things) she took a chance and contacted Mr. Wilmeth--who definitely remembered Miss Hudachek.

2. The Stage

Admit it: you probably never thought to contemplate what goes on in the mind of a Shlub. (Excise here 125 pages of Mumfordstern's beautiful but painfully exhaustive history of Shlubs, from the earliest hieroglyphic records--it seems the impulsive Egyptians often fed them to the cats for being too difficult to deal with--right up through what makes a proper modern Shlub, including the famous Moon Pie Incident of 1988. Smashing stuff, to be sure, but just a bit much for a single sitting.) Miss Hudachek, in a series of hikes with Mr. Wilmeth, got an earful of it, which she suffered with grace and aplomb--and a little wonder. She got the impression that Mr. Wilmeth may not even have known that he appeared to be a proper Shlub during this entire time, and also that his behavior struck her as, well, quite normal--enough so that it led her to suspect he may not even really be a Shlub after all. He seemed to be much more full of enthusiasm than one might have expected (given all the wind-up), and in fact would hold court for hours on the wonders of his family, and friends, and the outdoors, and of course all sort and manner of Sphenisciformes. (It seems to me that Mumfordstern really got a bit opportunistic here, as he took that opportunity to expound on the "noble penguin" for...I don't even know how many pages, I've blacked it out. It's as though the book became a vehicle for his family history. Great stuff, don't get me wrong, but sheesh.) Miss Hudachek must not have found it too stifling as she continued the contact deliberately, and eventually invited Mr. Wilmeth to her birthday soiree in April of 2001.

3. The Besmittening

It had gradually dawned on Mr. Wilmeth, during this time he spent with Miss Hudachek, that he quite liked her. Here was someone who would not only agree to accompany him on the outdoor outings, but would even suggest such herself. Here was someone who would both chat and talk with him (and with excellent quip and banter skills, no less), and even sit back and let him go on about pretty much whatever he wanted to talk about--and he had never been accused of not having something to say. (Mumfordstern put that final point a bit more bluntly; I have a bit of a soft spot for the not-quite-a-Shlub, and so rounded it out a bit. Hope ya don't mind.) And add this unlikely bonus into the mix: she was a looker. He even had a bit of a crisis of conscience at this juncture, as he had not expected to find someone he liked--seriously liked--quite so soon after his "change in status". He was expecting to go through the traditional series of meaningless recovery relationships and eventually right himself at some later time (isn't that great language for a tabloid topic?). He'd pontificate all noble and such, with things like he didn't want to mess up what was blossoming into a very nice friendship if he had it wrong about her. Quite possibly he should have been much less concerned about such things, but he actually lost a bit of sleep over this, and by the time Miss Hudachek's birthday soiree arrived, he was fully and completely discombobulotwitterpated. (Classic Mumfordstern there. Now that's a word.)

Mr. Wilmeth could not have known how significantly the cast arrayed at this birthday event would figure into the next years of his life. It was pretty much all he could do just to speak intelligently that day, so he tried to. A lot. And then some more. (Just what are you saying here, Mumfordstern?) This scene played both very similarly and very differently from the one at the Little Russian before: although three of the four principals again were in attendance for a birthday girl, fancy vodka was replaced by greasy spoon (the steaks were renowned far and wide), and Shlub was replaced by a lovestruck babble-box. Mr. Wilmeth would later learn that among the attendees, who all knew Cathy, there was a considerable interest in protecting her from the attentions of...well...undesirables, and that he (being the only outsider) was under evaluation the whole time. It may have been for the best that the Shlub history never surfaced here--and Mr. Wilmeth probably owes Mr. Sweeney a debt of gratitude for that. At any rate, everyone was cordial (we are, after all, talking about high-quality people here...even the most rigorous scrutiny and babbling can be done with panache...), and left with smiles. As it happened, Mr. Wilmeth, screwing up every ounce of courage he could muster, probablymanagedtotellMissHudachekjusthowhefeltabouther- withallthedetailofaDickensnovelbutinthetimespanofaNewYorkminute. (Nice, Wilmeth...nice. Find the girl of your dreams and then just blast her to the wall with words. Very Don Juan.)

And, ladies and gentlemen, Miss Hudachek did not run screaming from the room. To this day (believe me, I've asked him), Mr. Wilmeth does not quite understand how that managed to happen that way.

But that's not the punchline. The punchline is that Mr. Wilmeth, pretty much the next day, had to climb on a plane to go back to Boston for two weeks. (Find the girl of your dreams, then immediately leave her alone for two weeks at a time for several months...what, are you trying to screw this up?)

4. Introductions

After Mr. Wilmeth got over his abject terror of messing up a good thing and actually said something to Miss Hudachek (and then quite nearly fell off his chair--do you know how hard it is to just up and fall off a chair?--when she didn't smack him), things moved pretty quickly, and with a natural grace to which Mr. Wilmeth was decidedly un-accustomed (at the time, when asked why he would look nervously up to the sky, he'd simply reply, "waiting for the thunderbolt."). The two found that they were on the same page a good bit of the time: "get out of my head" became a common term of endearment. Mr. Wilmeth also took a bit of time to get used to the serious openness and honesty that Miss Hudachek brought to him, and welcomed from him in return: it was around this time that he was known to start referring to "my previous life" as such.

At this time, Miss Hudachek introduced Mr. Wilmeth to her inner circle of friends more officially (as many of them had been present for the birthday soiree). Mr. Wilmeth to this day continually marvels at Miss Hudachek's ability to surround herself with the finest people around; the group took in the not-quite-up-to-being-a-true-Shlub as one of their own and made him feel at home from the beginning.

(It is with regret that I was compelled to remove here some 733 pages of background and history of this circle of friends, which included several hundred pages of interview with Mr. Wilmeth himself as he heaped fairly impressive laurels upon the whole bunch. This was truly inspired work by Mumfordstern, who writes compliments with wonderful clarity and image, but it does not really help us with the story of Wilmachek. Trust me: if you want to learn some nice things about some nice people, just ask a former Shlub. When your ear finally gets talked off, I can personally recommend Dr. Erskine J. Seiwat, of Bowling Green, Kentucky, about a transplant that won't break the bank... Oh, you think I'm kidding? Do you think that glass jar in the corner is for show?)

The two became comfortable with each other so quickly, in fact, that Mr. Wilmeth thought he should introduce Miss Hudachek to his family. And, in fine fashion, he found a perfect vehicle for that to happen, just about a month after they started dating: his sister's wedding. (Nope, I'm not kidding here, either.) Any doubts about Cathy evaporated immediately; she had Mr. Wilmeth's entire family eating out of her hand within a few minutes of meeting them.

Also during June 2001, Miss Hudachek did the one thing that probably cemented her more tightly with Mr. Wilmeth than any other single thing possibly could: she accompanied him to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, and conspicuously enjoyed it. (I tried to interview Mr. Wilmeth about this, expecting a few pretty choice nuggets, but Mr.-Diarrhea-of-the-spoken-word was absolutely speechless about it. You know the incredibly cheesy commercials where the guy is talking about the perfect woman who not only goes to the hockey game but ends up starting the bench-clearing brawl? Totally that kind of vibe.)

When introducing Miss Hudachek to Kevin's great friend and mountaineering partner Hunter Goosmann and his family, Hunter's wife Julie pulled Mr. Wilmeth aside at one point and said, with deer-like eyes, "Kev, it's freaky...it's like I'm seeing two of you." (Mumfordstern here makes a wisecrack about that which I've chosen to omit.)

Cathy returned the favor in the fall by bringing Mr. Wilmeth along to meet her family at her parents' 25th wedding anniversary surprise party. He returned from the trip not only alive but smiling, and talking about meeting yet more outstanding people--so he must have done okay. You know, for a former Shlub and all.

5. Involvement

By the time 2002 rolled around, Mr. Wilmeth and Miss Hudachek were a pretty solid couple. 2001 had seen the meeting of both families and circles of friends, multiple weddings, Telluride Bluegrass, 24 Hours of Moab, trips to Minnesota and Montana, and a heinous Halloween incident involving a diaphonous red belly-dancer outfit with chest hair. (Mumfordstern's 25 pages on that event can be distilled down to Dave Tank's singular comment, "Dude, I could have gone my whole life without having to see that.")

In the summer of 2002, the Avon Breast Cancer 3-Day event came to Denver, and Mr. Wilmeth jumped on board the burgeoning Red Hot Chili Striders team for the fundraising and training--despite still being largely absent on his work travails. (He told me privately, "you know, it'd make a much better story if I was actually carousing around the world living la vida loca like a proper playboy, but I'm such a geek that I was actually working." Then, as if eager to bolster his Card-Carrying-Guy bona fides, he added with a grin, "So Cathy came to me and described the 3-Day, and I thought, 'Wait a minute...my efforts might save boobies? Hellyeah I'm on board!' Of course, I softened this a bit for public consumption, saying--and this is quite obviously also true--that I'd walk 'because I just love women'. Pick the story you like." Mumfordstern adopted the latter description in high style--for 49 pages, no less. Being more of a scrapper myself, I'll go with boobies on general principles.)

So the Chili Striders were born (the original roster--say it out loud for full effect--was Cathy, Cathy, Kate, Kye, [Victoria] Cohen, Kevin, and...Bob.), money was raised, bodies were trained, and the walk was a success. There is even a story about Mr. Wilmeth's dedication to training himself while on the road, which involves Mexico, Sesame Street, an abandoned ironworks masquerading as museum, umbrellas carried in armpits, ambient temperatures more suitable for reheating casserole than sustaining human life, sweating "like a soaker hose", and what I have personally heard referred to as "that unfortunate Bert and Ernie incident which resulted in Cookie Monster eating only celery and hiding out with Oscar for six episodes". (Apparently the internal mischief on the show would make a sailor blush...) Mr. Wilmeth was so moved and taken by the experience that he wrote the event up himself--and as it turns out he really does love women.

Cathy was of course enriched by the experience as well. She turned out to be a much more adept fundraiser than Mr. Wilmeth (well, duh, c'mon...lovely heroine of her very own adventure story vs. former Shlub...who would you rather give to? I figured as much...), and her enthusiasm for training and preparation would lead her significantly to further volunteer involvement. With Cathy operating at full capacity, the world's reserves of high-SPF sunscreen dipped measurably...area shoe stores both loved and feared her (the newspapers have only recently stopped running the psychological retrospectives)...and of course there was the now-famous Quizno's "how can I manage to completely evade the one thing you are trying to accomplish" episode, after which the sub-sandwich chain famously came up with the overtly plagiaristic and full-time-creepy "We Like De Suubs" ad-campaign. (All official sources quoted at the time denied any connection between the two scandals, but come on--we all understand the art of deliberate diversion. Miss Hudachek should be quite proud of herself that an outfit of such size would fall on a sword that big just to give her an audible raspberry. Pyrrhic victory indeed!)

Such is the measure of our dauntless couple. Made for each other!

Another remarkable accomplishment of 2002 was the purchase of La Casa de Wilmachek (CDW), which was largely accomplished while Mr. Wilmeth was in Mexico. (At this point he was trying to verify, in person, if Grover was truly indeed the monster at the end of the book. Kevin still visibly shudders a bit at the memory of the things he found out, and swears he'll take the coveted secret to his grave.) Cathy, meanwhile, was doing the legwork and research back in Colorado. There were several weekends when Kevin would fly home, weep for a few hours in Cathy's arms saying, "people just don't know...what would they do if they knew?", and then they would dash off to look at this house and that, according to Miss Hudachek's meticulous orchestrations. There was even a false-start in which a deal on what they felt was the perfect Kevin & Cathy house fell through (although in subsequent years they both confessed the persistent niggling of the Elevated Toilet Scenario may in fact have been a benevolent sign). In the end, they settled on a highly fitting place in Lakewood Forest (the trees are actually quite lovely, and the rodents only attain usual size), and held the housewarming soiree a scant month later. Miss Hudachek insists that no closets burst during the making of the housewarming, nor were they even unduly distressed. This sort of accomplishment is fairly remarkable, and showcases both the organizational skills of the lovelier partner, and the team-play of the combined couple in the face of, well, monstrous odds. (Editor's Note: Grover threatened to sue over that one; Mumfordstern, in a moment of poignant sympathy for Mr. Wilmeth, suggested--over the course of a gross of pages in high eloquence--that Grover should first attempt mediation with his lawyer friend, located approximately at 87 degrees south latitude, who was at the moment out of the office for an extended benefit walk.)

It was around this time, and probably due to the need to name the house, that the mellifluous term "Wilmachek" first appeared. Account details vary, however, and the term may have been just a happy accident. At any rate, it stuck, and began to entrench itself in common usage.

Privately, Mr. Wilmeth admits that even before the term arose, the thought of proposing to Miss Hudachek had occurred to him--but he wanted to wait until the time was right. "She's probably the perfect life-partner for me," he told Mumfordstern. "Of course I don't want to rush anything, especially since it wouldn't be my first time around the block. She deserves ample time to come to her senses and head for the hills." It occurred to me, personally, that he may have been a little too cautious in his desire to be proper and "not mess anything up", and I told him as much. He just smiled and said, "I know. But when the time is right, I'll know that too."

6. Making The Name Stick (Without Utensils)

The years 2003 and 2004 served to solidify what everyone seemed to know anyway: that Wilmachek was here to stay. The bona fides of Twoo Wuv and High Jinks had already been established, but our dauntless couple decided to, er, pad the resume, so to speak. For example: in the spring of 2003, CDW was inundated with about five feet of snow in three days, and our heroes quite enjoyed the distraction. It was fortunate that Mr. Wilmeth happened to be home at the time; getting to the front door would have quite literally required either treads or skis, if not both. As an illustration of how our home-team handled the situation, they thought it would be quite romantic to ski to the grocery store...so they did...arriving five minutes after it had closed up (some thing about "inclement weather" or other such obvious rot).

This period had growth. During this time, the seeds of Cathy's volunteer involvement sprouted like alien sightings at National Enquirer after the Leonid meteor shower. She taught kids about the outdoors in a school-sponsored project called Project WILD (ask her some day about Elk Duds--a smile with every pile!--and the Crazy Woman Play), she became actively involved in the General Federation of Women's Clubs, she took up the other side of the "walk for charity" banner by working for the MS-Challenge Walk, and in general never passed up an opportunity to do something nice for someone else. Kevin, for his part, managed to get seriously involved with a circle of uber-geeks that want to play strangely tuned guitars to make music that you can't dance to. He even went so far as to attend two courses on this subject, one in Spain no less. (Mumfordstern treats this geekery with far more respect than most of us can stomach, so I've removed his touching but Iliad-length ode to musical minutiae.) He started using phrases like "life-changing experience", "capital-M moments", "begin again", and other such gibberish. (Hey, would you take a week-long course from a guy named Fripp? Seriously!) But the boy did manage to learn a lot, I'll give him that. He even recorded a document of his playing that the couple gave as Christmas gifts.

This period had action. Cathy walked away from a rollover accident that totalled the Jeep Cherokee; Mr. Wilmeth's relief was palpable when, as his beloved was relating the incident to him over the phone, personally, under her own power with her own voice, sounded really, really pissed off that she hadn't been able to avoid the accident. "Don't know what she was on about there," Wilmeth said in an interview. "Now if it had been someone else telling me about the accident, I'd have been pretty freaked out...but she was not just alive, but okay enough to actually be irritated about the whole thing. When I got home a week later--she was on the way home from dropping me at the airport when the accident happened--and saw the Jeep, my first thought was, 'that old Jeep performed perfectly, and Cathy walked away as a result. The rest is just minor details.'" As a result of the accident, a new vehicle joined the Wilmachek stable, a '96 Subaru Outback that was christened Penny after the Greek heroine Penelope.

This period had spousal support. Although Cathy is neither a hunter nor a "gunnie", she has always supported Mr. Wilmeth with absolute selflessness in his efforts to chase after large, tasty quadrupeds. When he came out of his fourteen-year hunting drought with a successful shot on a mule deer in Montana, Cathy was there. Mr. Wilmeth is a bit fawning on her attitude: "she walks all day with us, without a rifle, but more quietly than either Dad or myself, and with far better eyes than me. It's an honor to have her along." For her part, Miss Hudachek sees this outlook as a bit more logically self-interested: "What, are you kidding? The critters taste fabulous. I spot 'em, he kills 'em, we both eat 'em, and when there's extra we share 'em with our friends, who seem to like 'em as much as we do. What's not to like?"

Mr. Wilmeth happily returned the favor ("It doesn't seem like this is nearly enough payback for a gal that will hunt with you, but I'm happy to do it!") by showing his support for Cathy's GFWC involvement. He accompanied her to Western States conventions in Seattle and Portland, organized his guitar circle to perform at a state meeting, and joined the Boosters organization.

This period had team play. Team Wilmachek was seen trekking to Arizona to support friends in the running of a marathon (the rumors of the mandolin-thrashing hippies with pool-floaties on their heads, as well as the "wait...come back here...we've got ice cream!" incident, were actually eclipsed by the success of the Smiles For The Miles project.), and again galavanting off to both Minnesota and Montana on missions of holiday cheer and conspicuous comestible consumption (that's Thanksgiving, to regular folks). There was also an appearance across the pond in which Mr. Wilmeth's business was measurably improved by the accompaniment of Miss Hudachek; the two managed to learn some valuable lessons about Amsterdam ("coffee shops don't serve coffee, pink elephants mean 'red-light district', and XXX means Amsterdam...these are useful things to know"), and the upper Thames Valley, whilst having a Jolly Oulde Tyme. And of course there was the highlight of the grand Sweeney Wedding, to which the Wilmachek partnership contributed such memorable roles as "extended musical entertainment" (trust us on this one...during a sub-ten-minute ceremony, a four-minute musical interlude, however beautiful it may be, takes an eternity), "groomsmaid" (Mumfordstern had a field day with that one, folks. I saved you the trouble), photojournalist, deception artist, abductor, schuetzensafetyfuhrer, and cowbell circulation architect.

7. Wilmachek: Ready For Prime-Time

Similarly, the years 2005 and 2006 not only just flew by in a devilish flurry, but they served to polish our subjects and their partnership into the state Mr. Wilmeth had been looking for. If the early years had been spent revealing character to each other, these more recent ones reinforced it. In 2001 and 2002, for example, Kevin and Cathy were assigned to the same SEARCH Colorado team, and in addition to having a bonny time in general on these magnificent clue hunts, they learned a great deal about one another on the fly. Example #1: apparently Cathy is perfectly fine with the concept and practice of canoeing, but only outside of certain exceptional situations. Precisely one of those situations was discovered at a placed buoy in the middle of Boulder Reservoir, in the middle of a competitive retrieval operation involving a sunken lockbox whose combination was dependent on the other half of the team, accessible only by radio. Which segues nicely into Example #2: Kevin has a penchant for silliness at somewhat impractical times; in an attempt to keep Cathy's mind from preoccupying while they waited (rocking) for the combination to be radioed in, his ineffective lame jokes turned to abject physical comedy: at the top of his voice he started singing the Jeopardy! theme into the radio--at the exact moment that, on the other end of the radio, Mr. Sweeney (of the other half of the team) had just torqued his knee trying to recover the clue for the combination and was in fact writhing in pain. Mr. Wilmeth, who had no idea, kept right on belting it out--which made for some amusing conversation later. (The serenade was even picked up by the event monitors on the open channel, and there were rumors of an honorable mention award for tackiness.)

Ah, l'amour.

The clue hunts also revealed Cathy's considerable cryptography skills, Kevin's sometimes razor-sharp and sometimes painfully incompetent deductions, and of course everyone's willingness to use a random piece of clear plastic, marked with seemingly arbitrary lines, to sight the location of a lockbox several miles away, based only on information other people have when you need it. "You learn a lot about a person from jointly trying to figure out the hidden message in a junk organ." (Mumfordstern included a full treatise here, not quite the full length of the Mahabarata but close, as an appendix and homage; if you want to read some great yarns about everyone's experiences with SEARCH Colorado, make sure to check out When Too Much Brain Is Channeled: Beware The Clues Of Our Friend The Ice Weasel. "I have no idea how to describe it, really," was one contestant's comment. "We're all afraid that the masterminds will actually hit their full stride some day, and send us to the thirteenth dimension to pick up the next clue by having us accidentally start a cold-fusion reaction with pipe cleaners and Gummi Bears. All we know is that--junkies that we are--we want to be there when it happens!")

By contrast, 2005 featured the sordid incident that marked Kevin as a hit-and-run driver, occupying eight months of his physical life, and considerably more than that in anxiety. In this case, Cathy was there for him...gallantly and gracefully changing out the piece of wood he continually gnawed on when he considered how in the world he could actually be hit and chased by an obscenity-screaming young punk (already known to the law for multiple moving violations involving intoxication and injury, no less), and then charged with three counts of hit-and-run himself, on hearsay testimony from same punk (which testimony was self-contradictory unto itself), all just because said YP returned to the scene of his own crime and invented a story (I'm talkin' Night-Court-In-Its-Fifth-Season-Laaame! Chaaah!), while Mr. Wilmeth and Miss Hudachek, after YP broke off the chase about five miles down the road, simply counted themselves lucky to be in one piece, went home and had a stiff drink. It never occurred to our heroes that YP would have the unmitigated audacity to accuse them, but Colorado law only cared that one party returned to the scene of an accident and another did not. (Mr. Wilmeth, not exactly known even before the incident to be a staunch advocate of governmental organizations of any stripe, did not manage to improve his opinion of Denver's Police, District Attorney's office, or presiding judge based on their performance in his case.) The ultimate outcome, of course, was no real surprise: the whole thing could be best made to (mostly) go away simply by paying the extortionist. (Here, Cathy was wonderful in helping Mr. Wilmeth to remember to do things like breathe, and stop clenching. The things we do for love.)

During this time, too, Cathy worked for the Town of Superior to help control the spread of noxious weeds within its borders. As she put it, "Well, I haven't managed to find work growing things [which is her horticultural training], so I figured I might as well accept work killing things." She made a couple of friends along the way, proved herself in a position that could only be survived (let alone grown and expanded) by a real go-getter, and along the way even taught Mr. Wilmeth a few things about weeds. "She's amazing, what she knows," Kevin said in an interview. "Today I learned one that has the hilarious name of Dalmatian Toadflax. I heard that and immediately thought, 'Holy cow, it's a Douglas Adams character.' I mean, you can't make a serious case that that is not in fact the name of Zaphod Beeblebrox' long-lost brother. I'm just sayin.")

2005 was also Mr. Wilmeth's tenth consecutive year at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival (and Miss Hudachek's fourth); the two had a devil of a time trying to recruit the yearly "new virgin" for the event, so instead decided to "just make it a date."

CDW even garnered its first long-term boarder in Cathy's brother Tom, who lived onsite for some six months as he evaluated where he wanted to end up next. Now boarding family can sometimes be a painful event (Mr. Wilmeth recalls a less than ideal situation in his previous life, and he is quick to remind people that Homer and Marge managed to attract quite a bit of federal attention after harboring--er, housing--Homer's long-lost mother for just a short time. "Only positive thing to come out of that sordid tale is that we found out that the J. in Homer J. Simpson stands for Jay."), but Tom was a great guest, and everyone seemed to feel that all made out well in the bargain.

The cause of Wilmachek was also reinforced in 2006 during the annual GFWC International Convention, at which Cathy in her multiple official capacities and Kevin as host/organizer of the Booster lounge kept a difficult event moving along as smoothly as possible, and even provided a little relief and refreshment (the rumors of fresh fruit in the Booster lounge spread like wildfire, and "guest visitation" was continually high as a result.).

In short, all things considered, Wilmachek was baked and ready. It was time.

8. The Proposal

Everything was in place. Wilmachek was an established force and recognized as such. Mr. Wilmeth's employer Bowstreet had been absorbed by the Big But Stable Blue Man (that's IBM, just to keep the acronyms straight) and things looked promising for the future. The couple had even gone so far as to take a deliberate holiday trip to scout out the ideal place to raise a family. All that was needed was an official wedding ceremony, which needed a proposal to get kicked off. "Of course I had been mulling the idea for some time, by that point," Wilmeth relates. "I was in that dangerous place where we could quite easily have gone on far too long without accomplishing that little act of completion that both of us had wanted for some time--and I didn't want to let that happen. Yes, everyone knew we were a pretty permanent thing, but if a formal wedding is something you both want, it has to actually happen sometime, right? I wanted things to be just right--this is, after all, the woman of my dreams--but you can wait forever for the perfect time, and when I thought about it, all the important pieces had been in alignment for a while already. No reason not to get on with it--so it was decided: I would propose."

(Mumfordstern again. I swear, sometimes I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this fella...but in an incredible demonstration of lyrical brevity, the old coot managed to distill the entire history of proposals--from the first questioning grunts through anatomically suggestive cave-paintings, right up to the most modern incarnation of proposing through text-messaging on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride--in sixteen pages. I couldn't believe it. Is this the selfsame bird who gleefully recounts the most minute (if interesting) details of penguin psychology and social ritual, and its correlation and influence on the history of western human society--which, he makes an iron case, is utterly indebted to the early antics of the Gentoos--and occupying enough paper to plant the Sonoran Desert? How is that possible? And yet here he is, every word serving double or triple purpose--every line an extended metaphor or double-entendre looping back upon itself in poetic glory. Sixteen pages. I've never seen its like before. Which is why it is so traumatic to have to excise it, because it just doesn't matter.)

Then, of course, there was the important matter of style for the proposal. "I wanted to do something that would be most meaningful to Cathy," Wilmeth said, "and that part was relatively easy--her friends mean more to her than pretty much anything else. It seemed obvious that I should engineer things so that her best friends would be close at hand, but still have the actual proposing part be done in private." So, he began to connive with Miss Hudachek's two closest confidantes, and jointly they came up with an excellent scenario--or, it would have been excellent, had the required parts all been available at the right time. Either all parties were not available, or Mr. Wilmeth really did have to be out of town when he was only supposed to be out of town, or an otherwise suitable ruse had an unprotected vulnerability, or--in the end--his ring guy had simply appeared to vanish off the face of the galaxy. (Mumfordstern here makes quite an interesting supposition, quite stark in its directness as he is known for being dispassionately objective about his subjects...he suggests that the ring guy was in fact released from the Matrix at just the moment that Mr. Wilmeth attempted to engage him--quite possibly it was in fact Mr. Wilmeth's very contact message that provided the release itself--and is even now chasing the Nebuchadnezzar down with a penlight and an offer of "real" lederhosen, in preference to that synthetic stuff that just doesn't breathe. Now I'm not always given to wild flights of fancy, but that is just possible enough to warrant some attention.)

Eventually, Mr. Wilmeth got frustrated waiting for his initial "ring guy" to plug back in (so to speak), and took Mr. Sweeney's suggestion of a suitable replacement. This gentleman may have been a bit of a strange bird--hey, we expect no less of our beloved artists--but he was definitely in the same dimension and on the same planet in the same place as all the other principals, and he turned out to be pretty easy to deal with, too. (Apparently, his ability to flood our heroes with too much information has been duly noted by Mr. Wilmeth, who chalks it up to "the same sort of enthusiasm that allows me to lose an entire classroom in seconds.") In heroically short order, Mr. Wilmeth had a ring, which arrived just in time to go with The Idea.

The Idea, as with most acts of sheer brilliance, happened by sheer chance. "The piece de resistance was getting her to plan her own proposal party, without knowing it," Wilmeth beamed when he recalled the epiphany. After a successful deer hunt in October of 2006, CDW was blessed with an overabundance of venison, including a goodly portion of ribs that didn't want to fit nicely in the freezer. Cathy herself suggested the idea of having an intimate get together with the "inner circle", featuring slow-cooked venison ribs and steaks, as a way of sharing Wilmachek's appreciation and love of their friends. Kevin recalls: "She said, 'We should invite these guys, and these guys, and...' and it occurred to me that she had just rattled off the exact same list of people that I had decided should be at the surprise ruse--the very same people who have managed to all be in the same place at the same time, oh, what, three times in six years? If I didn't act on that opportunity, handed to me like that, I am quite sure I would have got myself such a divine smackdown as to warrant its own Homeric epithet for all time. Something along the lines of 'Kevinus Wilmethicus, chief among the dumb-asses / Did miss the candy-apple-red sign of neon-obvious glory'...You know how Homer was--he'd ream you if you showed such a weakness...so I took my chance."

So Kevin enlisted his helpers once again, to ensure that everyone could make the one-shot attempt, and distributed the inside word. In the meantime, Cathy labored to create an air of semi-mystery among the attendees (complete with invitations deliberately incomplete in their scope), thinking they had no idea either what was being planned, or who else would be in attendance. "She was brilliant, actually," Wilmeth beams. "It almost took the fun out of the counter-deception." He tries to suppress a grin, but can't quite manage it. "Almost."

Here's how it finally went down: The guests arrived, began socializing, and preparations for dinner went almost to completion. At the precise time that the home telephone rang, Kevin noted that his hands were full (he actually had to contrive this a bit; the prearranged timing was only almost perfect.), and would Cathy please pick it up? Only the very most perceptive would have noticed that at this exact moment, all the parents had managed to retrieve their kids from downstairs, so that everyone was upstairs. (One of the funniest moments, recalled later, was that, although everyone was expecting to maintain voice levels to aid in deception at a later time, when the phone rang--to kick the whole process off--for a brief second, everyone stopped talking and you could hear a pin drop...and then, immediately, as if everyone recognized the error at the same time, picked up where they left off (but just a little louder than before). If the hostess had not been preoccupied with her own agenda, this may have tipped her off, but as it happened she just picked up the phone and the plan was set in motion.

The caller was Kevin's father, and he needed to tell Kevin something privately right away, regarding something pretty important. Cathy then handed the phone to Kevin, who went downstairs to take the call. "The one part of the plan I didn't like was that Dad's necessary verbiage might risk suggesting to Cathy that something was specifically wrong with my grandmother, who had been out of pocket lately. I didn't particularly like suggesting that, but it's a risk we decided to take, because we needed her to be curious about the nature of the call, without specifically being worried--but if she happened to completely invent the worry herself, that would play into our hands nicely. Later I found out that Dad, in his enthusiasm to make sure that we didn't suggest that, was explicit in telling Cathy right away that nothing was wrong with Grandma--which I didn't know. Ah, the intrigue."

Dad's purpose in calling, of course, was to give Kevin the excuse to go downstairs and prepare the ring, which had been carefully hidden in the guest bedroom. "The nicest room in the house, for sure," said Kevin. "There was a part of me that thought that proposing in your own house seemed kinda cheesy, but I thought the 'involving-friends' piece made up for it, and so I simply resolved to do it in the nicest room in the house. What Dad 'needed to tell me', privately, of course was, 'good luck, son', and he did that perfectly." The ring thus prepared, Kevin made his way back upstairs, and asked Cathy if he could talk to her for a minute downstairs. She looked just a bit concerned, and for a moment appeared to forget all about the call to dinner, from which she was seconds away. Perfect.

They went downstairs, and he led her into the guest bedroom. "What's wrong?" she asked. Mr. Wilmeth fumbled a bit, tried to calm things (read: himself) down. "Nothing is wrong. Hi, babe. How are you?" He smiled. As she made to inquire again, he said, "Have a seat--I just want to talk to you for a minute." She sat on the lower bunk of the guest bed, directly underneath the waiting ring, which Mr. Wilmeth fumbled with as he tried to say something like, "I have something I need to ask you" (although what actually did get said may have not quite been those words, or they may have been uttered in a half-decibel falsetto...nobody is really quite sure.) An eternity later, ring in hand, Mr. Wilmeth managed to start his kneel, and he saw Cathy's expression turn from almost-irritated bewilderment to full realization.

(Mumfordstern at this point treats the actual proposal with a touching 37-page annotated libretto, with a credited character list including Ring Box and a link to his website for Dolby-mastered transcriptions in five languages, as read by Dan Castellaneta and Julie Kavner. I'll do my best to condense it with justice.)

He said, "Well?" She said, "Sure." And it was done.

(There. Compact stuff. From me to you.)

During the time downstairs, the conspirators upstairs had carefully maintained their voice levels to sustain the ruse, and unfurled the carefully preplanned HPG (Hidden Party Goodies). On the newly-engaged couple's trip upstairs, it began to occur to Cathy that the whole thing had been well-timed by Mr. Wilmeth--too well-timed. (Miss Hudachek is renowned for her ability to sense plotting against her.) She confessed that she did figure then that everyone was probably in on the deal--and in hindsight it even made sense that Dad Wilmeth's call was a part of the plot. So, when the two emerged at the top of the stairs, she was only half-surprised to see the hats, kazoos, and other party paraphernalia that had been smuggled inside. (Mumfordstern apparently was a bit unnerved when he found out that, due to constraints of time and opportunity, the primary theme of the HPG was in fact SpongeBob SquarePants. "Guy gives me the creeps," he said--well, that's the gist of his 21-page diatribe, at least.)

And there was (wait for it) much rejoicing. (yaay.)

Epi-wogue: The Future

So Wilmachek is now going legit and the clock is ticking. The unlikely meeting led to a less likely friendship that turned out to be Twoo Wuv, and now the stage is set for our besmittened couple to begin the next stage of their lives with the official stamp they have long wanted. (That would be, of course, by name, MAWAGE.) Bystanders' reactions have ranged from the soppy ("Oooh, we're soo happy for you both, you'll be wonderful together") to the Chidingly Obvious ("S'about damn time, dontcha think?") to the not-quite-sure-how-to-take-it ("Who the hell are you? Get that camera outta my face!"), and that pretty much tells us what we already knew: sometimes things work out just fine.

"In the end," Wilmeth observed, "the thing that got me the most is that we managed to put one over on her. She really had no idea the proposal was coming. It's hard to explain how difficult that is to do--she's really perceptive and quite suspicious of things like this. I'm fairly certain I'm going to be paid back for that one, and it's probably not going to be pretty." He doesn't seem that concerned, though--the grin on his face only gets bigger as he says this.

I think he likes the gal.