The Pirates of Bridal Veil

What I'm about to tell you probably will sound like a work of fiction. But it's not.
I've hesitated writing about this before, because every time I try to tell this story by myself, I come off sounding like a lunatic.

Everyone has their wedding disaster story. Everyone has the drunk relative who made things awkward, or the last minute catering disaster or whatever.
I don't have any sort of story like that to tell you. On the whole our guests, the ones that showed up, were great, and it was a beautiful evening.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here, so let me back this up and explain where this story starts.

It was June during a summer some lifetime ago. I had met this incredible woman just a couple of weeks before in a bookstore, and I decided I wanted to propose to her.

I didn't want to do it by buying a ring and getting down on one knee like a normal person. Part of this was because I was between jobs and didn't have money for a ring. But mostly, I really am crazy and just wanted to do something spectacular.

So I waited for the next full moon and invited her to hike to this beautiful natural hot spring a few miles from where I was living at the time.

Pretty sure this is a picture of the place, it's been a few years though

The hike was uneventful, we talked a lot. But saying we talked a lot is like saying water is wet. My wife, @ghostwriter, had put some years under her belt in the psychology department and had chosen me as her study subject. Like Harley Quinn and the Joker though, I think prolonged exposure to me eventually made her a little nuts too.

I say this because honestly, who goes on a late night hike with someone they've only known a couple of weeks?

To be fair, in the time since we met, we had scarcely been apart, but that's a story for a different day.

Our hike eventually took us to a natural hot spring and we went skinny dipping. Then I asked to borrow this ring she was wearing.
If I recall correctly, it was a nice ring she got as a souvenir from a vacation she had took a few weeks before we met. Anyways, she humored me and slipped it off her finger.

I held it in my hand and looked at it, wishing in my heart that I had the money to buy her a nice ring like that.

Fingering it through my hand, I resolved I would just do it, right then and there I would propose!

As I stammered something, the ring slipped out of my hand and plopped unceremoniously into the water.
I freaked out and started searching for it.

I dove in and swam and dug in the mud.
By the time I found it, I had splashed so much mud around that she was coated head to toe in the mud.

She looked beautiful though and I tried to drop to one knee to pop the question only to suddenly realize the water was deep enough that when I knelt, my head was underwater and of course I nearly drowned myself.

Finally catching my breath, I climbed out of the spring and helped her out of it... Or at least I tried.
We both tumbled back into the pond.

It was a great time!
She kept her good humor and was laughing so hard she could barely contain herself.

Near the end of the night, she was the one that proposed to me, probably just to get me to stop embarrassing myself.
As she did this, a large purple meteor exploded in the distance.
I accepted, grateful to be free of the burden of asking and assuming that the meteor was the universe telling me that this was a thing I ought to be doing.

We found out years later that this particular hot spring was very close to a military weapons testing ground, so it's possible this perfectly timed shooting star was actually military ordinance.
We've always been happy with the meteor story though.

Over the next few weeks, as we we were getting our stuff packed and ready for our life together, we decided that it would be lovely to get married at this place called "Bridal Veil."

Bridal Veil is a natural waterfall, one that is prone to periodic disasters.
There used to be a restaurant and tram and somehow I thought that those things were still there. My wife knew nothing about it, but the name sounded nice anyways.

@ghostwriter has cousins and siblings and such, but my family is rather lacking anymore. Most of my family had been "downwinders," so for my part invitations involved making 2 phone calls.

But her family? They had certain expectations.
Expectations we couldn't really meet. Things like printed invitations, proper planning, all that good stuff.
We couldn't afford any of that and had to get creative.

Food? Not a problem, I'm actually a decent chef when I try. (come to think of it this might actually be the reason she decided to marry me).
Photographs and invitations? We borrowed a digital camera (this was back when those were a new thing), and had her sister snap some photos of us in our finest clothes, in front of a bathroom, at a park that had some nice stonework.
Then @ghostwriter got really, really good with photoshop, really fast, because, well, I'm not exactly photogenic.

I used my rather considerable skills as a developer and together we built a really nice website.
Then we posted the address and emailed it out as an invitation.
Unfortunately, that sort of went viral. Suddenly it seemed like people I hadn't seen since kindergarten were RSVPing!

We had to pull it all down and apologize, because there was no way we could afford that many guests.

We decided to make it a smaller, more intimate affair.

Finally about a week before the wedding we realized two very important facts...

Firstly, for my part I hadn't checked to see if Bridal Veil was still in operation.
As it turns out it wasn't. In fact it had been destroyed by a landslide the previous winter or thereabouts.
This means that while the falls were still there, nothing else was.
I would be a mile long hike for our guests to get to the first cataract, which is where we wanted to do this.

Secondly, she had no wedding dress!!!

Her problem turned out to be the easiest one to solve.
She had a friend who had gone to fashion school and volunteered to be our seamstress as a wedding present. I rented my tux inexpensively; there wouldn’t have been time for the friend to design and sew something for me.
In short order, the wedding dress was made by this woman from scratch.
I will never forget seeing how fast and how well she worked. It was amazing!

While Mandy was making the wedding dress, I realized we had a bigger problem.
In addition to the miles long hike, there was no way for our guests to hear us.
The first cataract was too small and wet and slick to accommodate more than 3 people. The noise of the waterfall was just incredible.
When we did the rehearsal. I couldn't hear her standing even a foot a away.

I was upset about this, because the whole point was to have our friends and family hear what we were saying.
Fortunately my soon to be father in law was an old school HAM radio operator and he said...

“Bill, why not just use a radio transmitter? That way most of the guests can just stay down in the parking lot and hear from their cars.
If you're quick about it, the FCC won't be able to catch you."

So in the space of 3 days I had designed a noise canceling broadcast transmitter with 3 mic inputs and a theoretical output of 5 watts.
I set to work immediately scavenging parts from anything I could find, including tearing apart the 1,500 watt PSU in my gaming rig and tearing up all my DJ equipment.
Yeah I was that serious about this idea.

Then I locked myself in my newly built man cave and set to work building, "the beast.”

About halfway through the build, I realized that the lighting sucked and I couldn't see the color codes on the resistors.

Fortunately my fiance saved the day by grabbing all the resistors, some 150 of them, and running them out of the apartment into daylight. She knew the color bands, having been the daughter of an electrical engineer, and just being generally the most brilliant woman I’ve ever met. She sorted and labeled them in quick order. I dealt with the rest of the parts.

In a few hours each resistor had a piece of masking tape with the correct value.
About an hour later my future father in law dropped by and said to me...
"Ya know, it's great you had her read them all, but in the future you might just want to use the multi-meter to check those, it tends to be faster and more accurate that way."

I finally finished the build about 2 am the day of the wedding, but the circuit was badly detuned. I had decided to use the bigger caps from the PSU directly in the transmitter in order to give it a little extra kick and of course that had tossed all of my calculations out the window.
This thing was now pushing out 50 watts, but it was broadcasting on the police bands and that's a bad thing, so I gave up and went to bed for a few hours.

Noon the day of the wedding I woke up to the phone ringing. I answered it. It was our pastor.
He wasn't going to be able to make it to the wedding!!!

This presented a problem. Obviously there is no way to have a wedding without a pastor and some of her family had driven or flown hundreds of miles to attend.

There was no rescheduling this thing. I tried to be calm, but inside I was freaking out.

We wanted this specific date, it was a harvest moon or possibly a hunter's moon and if I recall correctly it was also a lunar eclipse.
Something had felt magical about all of these events occurring on the same day and I'm not certain that all of those would be happening in our lifetime again.

I cracked open the yellow pages.
90 phone calls later, there was no one willing to perform the ceremony, either because of time constraints or because they didn't want to make the hike.

I received religious ordination in the military for reasons I won't go into here, but no I was never in the Chaplain corps.

I had used this ordination in the past to officiate a wedding for a friend who had wanted a non-denominational wedding.
So I had possibly the most insane idea of all the insane ideas I'd had in my life leading up that point. (I've since topped this level of crazy many times, but that’s just me.)

I tried to convince my future father in law to let me to ordain him. But he wasn’t having it.

Eventually we settled on just getting our butts to the base of the falls and we would sort it out when we got there.

@ghostwriter rode with Mandy and got into her dress while zipping through the canyon at 65 miles per hour.
Meanwhile, my best man had picked me up and I hopped in the back and got dressed.

Eventually it struck me. We needed a preacher but we could do without a best man.
So I confessed the problem to him.
"Look, Jeremy, when you were a kid, you wanted to grow up to be a missionary, right?"
He screeched to a halt in the middle of the road and I think I may have hurt the front windshield with my spine.

"No, Bill seriously, not me! What the hell is wrong with you?"
"No man, I'm serious about this, I'll just ordain you right there at the base of the falls and you can lead the whole procession! You'll do great!"

We argued back and forth like this the whole way to the parking lot. Finally my stubbornness won out over his.

I handed the transmitter to my father in law and explained the problem with it. I dunno what he did to it to fix it, but the man was always a lot smarter than me. He fiddled with it a bit and before the rest of the guests arrived he had managed to peg the transmitter.

This particular channel was a heavy metal station, but the canyon walls limited reception so we figured it would be ok as long as we were quick about it.

While my bride to be waited on guests, Jeremy, along with my soon to be father in law and myself walked to the base of the falls carrying the transmitter and a 12 volt car battery.
At the base of the falls we broadcast live, "The ordination of Jeremy.”

Then we walked back to the parking lot and we knew that EVERYONE with a radio had heard it whether they meant to or not.
So that was good, finally something in our favor.

I took a moment to fire up the barbecue grills while my fiance and my best man greeted the guests.

The meat had unthawed nicely on the drive and for a couple of hours I'd become fully engrossed in my role as grill master. I'm not sure everyone that ate the steaks, hot dogs and hamburgers that day were actually invited to the wedding, but what the heck!

Soon the moment arrived. @ghostwriter in her gorgeous white dress and me in a tux. We recruited my soon to be nieces and nephews to carry the transmitter and the car battery.

About 10 people went up on the hike, mostly kids. The path was too narrow for side by side walking, so we all followed Jeremy, who lead the procession.

Perhaps the most unbelievable part of this whole story is that Ghostwriter hiked a mile over loose gravel in a wedding dress and white flimsy sandals? That takes grace and agility and my fiance had it in spades! She even kept the dress mostly clean!

My tux was already a lost cause by that point, though. Pro tip guys, never grill in a tux without a proper apron, you won't get the deposit back.

Our destination was about a mile up, and it took longer than we expected.
By the time we arrived at the place where all of this was to occur, the sun was starting to get low in the sky.

We did manage to say our vows under the waterfall as planned and as I kissed my glowing bride, I noticed that the full moon had risen and was directly above us.

The joys of pirate radio, we're pretty sure that everyone else heard us too: Traffic was backed up for miles in that canyon like usual and I'm reasonably certain we knocked a heavy metal station off the air for a solid 15 minutes or so. All our guests heard us on their radios anyway. Not too sure my mom liked having her music knocked out like that though.

By the time the ceremony was over, it was getting quite dark. We were planning to have cake at a park near the base of the falls, but my bride’s brother in law decided it would be unsafe to light a fire or candles. No one had thought of bringing flashlights, and cellphones barely had cameras forget about lights. So no one could see where the wedding presents had been placed. We recovered about five of them, the rest are lost to the squirrels.

From there we drove straight through to the Grand Canyon and then Lake Mead, where I managed to grill us some steaks over sage brush and driftwood...?
Well I guess that's a different story...

I love you hunny! Happy Anniversary!!!

All SBD from this post will be used to purchase an anniversary gift for my wife @ghostwriter