August 15, 2016: New York City
The next day, we are up early…our bodies are still on
Eastern Time. We wait for the office to
open at 6:00 am for coffee, fruit, and bagels.
I am not well rested. My toe hurt
all night, and Aspercreme did nothing to touch the pain. The toe is visibly
swollen as well as fluorescently colored.
Bruising is seeping down my foot: along the edges of the adjacent toes,
and along the side of my foot. The top
of my foot and ankle are also swollen. Every
step hurts. I can only wear the water
shoes I was wearing during the accident.
At least they’re pink and won’t look completely ridiculous with the pink
and peach dress I am wearing to the wedding.
We are anxious about getting to the top of the mountain on
time, so after a short, hobbling foray around town to buy a replacement for
the hat sacrificed to the river gods, I purchase a bright peach
solar hat. When I hobbled into the sporting
goods store and told the smirking sales clerk I wanted a lightweight,
crushable, waterproof, fully brimmed hat, he is taken aback. He takes me over to the rack of Indiana Jones
inspired hats, where all but one hat is tan or beige. When I grab the only
brightly colored one in the lot, I can see his stereotype of me is confirmed. “Well,
that certainly is a fun color,” the
unspoken (for a fat tourist like you) unsaid, but clearly heard. I smile sweetly, and tell him, “All the
better to stand out in a crowd.” He visibly blanches, knowing that I got the
sub-text in his snide remark.
We are dressing by 10 am for a 1:00 pm. wedding. We make our way to the bottom of the gondola by 11am. For reasons we can’t explain, we are
unusually anxious about the wedding, and snipe at each other as we make our way
through the winding confusion of empty trophy homes and globs of flashy trash
Western styled condominiums.
When we get there, my mother is already there with my nephew
and his family. He is dressed very formally, in a black suit, dress shirt, and
polished black shoes. They are on edge
and concerned because my younger sister, my nephew’s mother, has not yet left
for the wedding and she is three and half hours away. He and she are texting back and forth. He is upset with her, and it is clear she is
also frustrated and angry. Something wrong at her end has delayed her
departure. My nephew is trying to keep
my mother out of it. No luck. She joins the anxious and unhappy circle.
My younger brother arrives, wearing a Hawaiian shirt. His mate and her daughter, both rather shy, are
dressed in summer frocks and stand to the side.
Always ready with a joke and hug, he tries to raise the positivity quotient,
and somewhat succeeds.
My eldest brother arrives, giant camera in hand and starts
taking photos. No one
wants the snappishness of the previous moments to show up on the official
record, so everyone gives their best fake toothy smiles.
A college friend of my 2nd brother (the father of
the groom) arrives. He greets my mother
effusively and announces, apropos de nothing, “I have become a Democrat!”. My
mother, still sharply political at the age of 87, immediately takes the
bait. “Why?” He replies, “We moved to
Utah and I just couldn’t stand be a Republican anymore.” My mother, “What, you
couldn’t take any more of Jason Chaffetz?” And then they are off to the races,
doing a micro analysis of various Utah politicians. They spar, and enjoy sparring; spouses,
children, and grandchildren lost from view.
My younger brother whispers to me, sotto voce, that
the party conversion was a big
deal. The big blonde man dressed in
chinos, dockers, and blue linen sport coat, is the son of the former Republican
Speaker of the House in the Wyoming legislature. My mother and recently deceased step-father
had served as representatives during his tenure. The son (and father) were solid businessman
Republicans, who didn’t really care what people did in their private lives, as
long it didn’t interfere with their right to make a profit. Like my step-father, and now this former
scion of the Republican party, they find it hard to stay in a party so
pre-occupied with divisive social issues.
When a group of about 20 wedding goers have arrived, we go
to board the gondola to the top of the mountain, where the wedding will take
place. At first, the attendant won’t let
us board, saying they are not ready for us, and to come back in an hour. The group begins to disperse, and the same
attendant calls us back…”Oh you CAN go up…just wait in the bar on the top while
they get the wedding site set up.” We
call about for the now scattered group to come, but they have left the hot and
breathless courtyard, where there are no benches and the only entertainment is
watching pre-adolescents attempt bungee assisted flips on rented trampolines.
As we go to board the gondola, I misread the red warning
stripe and smack my injured toe on the edge of a stair I took to be a ramp. I grab Wes with one hand, and, to keep from
screaming, stuff my other fist in my mouth.
With tears rolling down my cheek, I board the 6’x6’ glass-encased
gondola.
We ride up with my mother and nephew’s family. My grandniece is excited and offers her four
year old commentary on the scenery as we are pulled up to 10,000 feet. “We're high.
Don’t jump out! Can we see our
car? Don’t be scared!”. The gondola is
hot and airless; Wes and my nephew are red-faced sweating in their formal jackets.
On top, we are surrounded by an alpine wonderland where we
can see for many miles. The sun is
piercing in the thin air, and those people who have foolishly forgotten their
sunglasses are squinting in the bright light.
Both my mother and I stare balefully at the task at hand: climbing three
flights of stairs to the restaurant deck, adjacent to the mountain meadow where
the wedding will take place. Suddenly a
middle aged man in a jaunty straw boater materializes by our side and offers us
a ride in the elevator.
We snake alongside him, through numerous twists and turns,
barely able to keep up with his hurried stride.
He opens two greasy doors and we slip into a service elevator. He says, “Don’t be alarmed when you get out
in the kitchen, just turn to the right and go through to the bar.”
We step out into a wreck of a kitchen in the midst of a huge
rush: mostly Latino cooks and tall, tan, Anglo male waiters rushing in and
out. Abashed, we apologize and scoot out
as quickly as possible; right into a big hangar of a bar blasting out 80’s John
Bon Jovi My mother, for reasons unknown,
sits at a long empty table at the far end of the cacophonous empty hall. The rest of us, including my puffing husband
and nephew who just made it up the stairs, go out to the large deck to stare at
the mountains and blink at the sun.
We find a table under an umbrella, see the nervous groom
swarmed by his groomsmen, and try to pack as many family members as possible at
the tiny table. I ask my nephew about my
mother. He grimaces, “She says she is
fine where she is.” She isn’t. She is sitting alone in a dark, rock-racked
hall. I know better than to take her at her word. I send a rescue party and soon she is sitting
with the family at the table, relieved not be left to her own self-destructive devices.
We drink overpriced frozen drinks and complain about brain freezes. Every so often someone goes to the edge of
the deck to report on preparations on the wedding grounds below. When at last we are released, there is an
audible sigh, and 200 people in frocks, t-shirts, formal suits, spike heels and
sandals make their way to the white seats sitting on the fragile high altitude
grass.
 |
| The Wedding Party W. Nethercott photo |
The traditionalists ask “Which is the grooms’ side?” There is no answer, but when the groom’s
maternal grandfather, a tiny athletic 80 year old man with a New Wife, sits in
the second row on the left, we all follow suit. My mother joins the row. We sit behind them. My brothers, nephews, nieces and attendant
family move to the back rows.
The ceremony begins with cello and violin playing sweetly,
but the sound is soon lost in the immensity of air and mountain. The attendants arrive; first- nine youngish
men in dark pants and light shirts, followed by four female attendants wearing
sage or tan dresses. My brother and his
wife, clutching my nephew on either arm, bring him to the front. Soon, the bride, in a long formal sleeveless
white gown arrives with her father.
 |
| Love on the mountain C.Frankovic photograph |
The service is short, but beautiful, personal, and
heartfelt. I start crying when my nephew
began his vows, throwing his hands in the air and shouting “I love this woman!”
I sense Wes crying next to me. As the simple statements of “I promise to…” continue, I
hear sniffles throughout the crowd. Right
before the exchange of rings, there was a bit of silence, into which Wes sent a
wracking sob, much to his great embarrassment.
The whole ceremony ends with the new spouses tying their climbing ropes
together, the belaying knot both a metaphor and nod to the start of the
relationship and shared passion for technical climbing. Their honeymoon, if an 8-months of living in
a van to climb in South America counts as such, is dedicated to this shared
love of high places and hard physical and mental challenges.
The bride and groom soon disappear for pictures, which
include them climbing a small cliff in their tuxedo and gown, and the rest of
the party makes their way back down to mountain. In a few hours, we will meet again in a small
hall at the base of the ski-jumps, where the food is plentiful (including a
whole dark brown roast pig split from stem to stern laying on plank), the
drinks flowing and the music loud. There’s
no room at the long tables where my family is sitting, so we sit against a far
wall and visit with the brides’ cousin from Iowa. After a while, we rescue my mother again, who
has somehow found herself sitting amongst strangers in the loud room.
After dancing one painful (oh my toe!) dance with the cousin's tiny blonde daughters,
Wes and I excuse ourselves from the noisy, hot, and increasingly drunken festivities. We join the throngs of tourists
and locals packed at the free concert adjacent to the hall. The smell of legal marijuana hangs in the air
as the Robbie Robertson band rolls through rambling Grateful Dead-esque
jams. We don’t last long, but hear the
next day from my exhausted brother that the party lasted well into the early
morning and that the bride and groom were called onstage at one point.
The next morning, we make our way to a final family gathering celebrating numerous
birthdays and anniversaries. We're surprised
to discover most of my siblings have already left. We better get ourselves down the road as
well.
We are pensive as we make our way back to Glenwood Springs,
sad that we couldn’t have had more time to just be with family in an environment
where conversation was possible, but also glad that we witnessed the joy of a true
love match glowing and shining in the brilliant blues and delicate greens of a
high mountain meadow.
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