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friendosphere
Saturday, April 4 2009
setting: Cacapon Resort State Park, south of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia
I'd spent the night by myself in a room in my cabin, #18. My cabin mates had been strangers, but all I knew about them so far was that at least one of them didn't understand American bathroom protocol, and by that I don't mean "if it's brown, flush it down." Someone had left the bathroom door closed with the light and fan on. It felt rude to knock, but I really needed to use that bathroom. Eventually I did and found it empty. Who would leave a bathroom like that?
I'd realized I didn't have a toothbrush and that, while it had a coffee maker and filters, the cabin wasn't stocked with coffee. So I drove into Berkeley Springs, nine miles to the north up US-522. Dominated by a huge dollar store dug into the side of a cliff, the commercial strip on the south side of town is so dismal that I despaired of finding much other than a travel toothbrush and a bag of coffee. The idea of possibly buying a gift for the bride and groom seemed hopelessly dashed. I ventured further north to what initially seemed to be the town's main crossroads, dominated by a gas station selling laughably-horrendous "antiques" and fifty cent coffee that wasn't worth a dime. But something made me go a little further north and I found the actual heart of Berkeley Springs, which is centered around a set of antique therapeutic baths. This part of town had authentic cafés and a fabulous used book store called Recycling Works. There I bought a book about fossils, a beautiful illustrated hardcover handbook of avian systematics, and a softcover book about underground houses (copyright 1980, near the end of the golden age of alternative architecture).
On the drive back into Cacapon, I stopped to read the sign about the underlying sandstone, which I'd seen being mined, crushed, and sifted by various abrasive companies further north. The sign made the claim that the sandstone is Oriskany Sandstone and that it is rich in natural gas, presumably stored in voids between the sand grains in the rock, which are otherwise glued together by calcium carbonate. [This last fact was not on the sign and had to be researched later.]
Eventually I returned to my cabin, where my various cabin-mates, all of them strangers, were milling about in preparation for this afternoon's wedding. The most flamboyant of these was Azer, a gentleman with crazy eyes, a long shaggy heavy metal hair, and a matching blue jean jacket. Azer had immigrated from Bosnia back during the war and ended up on Charlottesville's Downtown Mall in 1996. I should have remembered him as a fixture then, but I don't. At the time, he says, he spoke no English and drank continously from a small flask of liquor. These days, he's stopped drinking and spends most of his working hours at the Mudhouse playing chess. I gradually came to realize that he basically lives off his girlfriend, a computer programmer with a cheerful face and light reddish hair. I hit it off with this couple immediately, starting with my admission that I was forty one years old, about ten years older than most of the people at this wedding. Azer was delighted to find he wasn't the only other 41 year old in attendance. And then we talked about heavy metal music, which was another of his big interests. He talked about the Scorpions and Sepultura, but later when I rode to the wedding with him and his girlfriend, AC/DC was on the stereo (she turned it down).
Before we left for the wedding, Azer insisted on making a fire in the fireplace. So we gathered dry sticks and leaves in the back and quickly built up an impressive fire that we then had to abandon. It should be noted that Azer was the only person in our cabin who had not brought nice clothes appropriate for attending a wedding. His blue jean jacket, corny teeshirt, and blue jean trousers were going to have to do.
The wedding itself was held at 4pm at "the Bathhouse," a seemingly-unheated building overlooking Cacapon's manmade lake. I rolled in with Azer and his girlfriend and took a seat. Since most of my friends were official participants in the wedding, they all sat elsewhere. Except for Deya. She'd send me a Facebook message asking for a ride from Brooklyn, but I'd received it too late to help her. But she'd gone ahead and rented a car and so there she was.
There were about seventy people present for the wedding itself, which centered around an unusual ritual: the casting of paper ballots. The ballot posed the question: did we approve of the marriage of Shonin to Sabrina. The options were yes and no. We were also given pencils so we could check off our choice. As I pointed out to Azer's girlfriend, today's audience was a self-selected crowd and it was unlikely there would be many "no" votes. But Azer, forever the contrarian, found himself fighting his inner-demons to cast a vote of "yes." "I know you're a bomb thrower," I told him, "but now is not the time."
As the voting proceeded, a guy played the theme for "Peanuts" on an electronic piano. And when they'd all been collected, an efficient assembly line of "poll workers" inspected and tallied each vote, stamping them all with a rubber stamp. There were no hanging chads or other controversies. No Brooks Brothers riots broke out. In the end the vote was a Stalinist landslide, with all but one of the ballots cast going for the "yes" option. The lone hold out was an abstention.
From there, the ceremony proceeded quickly. The mood suddenly changed when Sabrina's brother performed the role of wedding officiant on Shonin, asking him somberly if he took Sabrina to be his wife. Indeed, it was a moment of radical emotional dynamics when the hilarity of the theatric vote suddenly changed into the serious business of welding one person to another for better or for worse, for rich or for poor, in sickness and in health.
Technically, this wasn't a legal wedding, as it had two officiants who weren't technically qualified to perform weddings. The actual wedding would take place on monday in some governmental place in the District of Columbia, but this was the multidimensional wedding as it was projected into the dimensions of Shonin and Sabrina's friendosphere. In addition to the ballots, there were other odd trappings, such as the wearing of strange little triangular hats by all of the wedding's numerous officials (including people I'd written about in 1998: Wacky Jen, Jessika, Leah, and Shonin's sister Natalie, among others).
After the ceremony, most of us walked back to the Old Lodge for the reception. As we did so, we made noise with little plastic containers filled with corn. In my container, I added several Brazil-nut-sized stones to also see if this might be a suitable method for grinding grain. (The corn remained intact, though the stones shed enough dust from their surfaces to turn all the grains filthy.) It was a beautiful day for processions. The sun was bright and the air chilly enough to make modest formal attire perfectly comfortable.
It's important to note that most people at the wedding (particularly me) had a terrible hangover at this point, but all of that would soon be in the past. The bar at the Old Lodge was stocked and ready to go. A popular drink today was the Dark and Stormy; it consisted of rum, Goya-brand ginger beer, ice, and a slice of lemon. At some point when photos were being taken, I was given the job of bartender and I successfully made a few Dark and Stormies, but for the most part nobody came to the bar when I was running it. The lovely ladies running it both before and after my stint drew many more customers. I hammed it up as much as I could with the few customers I did have, although the joke I told about how Shonin and Sabrina had to go to a red state to get "straight married" fell flat with his half-sister Mary, who would later give voice to sentiments normally associated with the family values crowd. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
At some point I grew tired of standing in a doorway, so I went and sat by the fire with Shonin's half-sister Mary, the one who hadn't appreciated my red state joke. Mary was curled up like a housecat in front of the fire with her two teenage sons. They were soft-spoken, thoughtful, and nerdy in the way that only became cool a decade ago. Mary was mostly interested in continuing a conversation we'd had last night about solar energy and geothermal, though only the latter mattered in her life since she lives in a community densely-shaded by evergreens that are strongly protected by community protocol. Later we were joined by a pregnant woman who was some sort of biologist who was performing somewhat sadistic experiments on chickens as part of a collegial thesis. Her true passion, though, was cephlapods. She related the story of an octopus who had learned to turn on the lights in the laboratory where he lived, an amazing feat that involved climbing out of his aquarium, slithering across the room, climbing a wall, flipping a switch, and then returning to his aquarium, the only place where he wouldn't die within minutes. Until I heard this story, I had no idea that octopi could do anything whatsoever outside the water. It made me realize that land life might be completely different had vertebrates been a little slow in evolving their limbs. Of course, the way we're going, octopi might get a second chance colonizing the continents.
The fireside conversation was so interesting that I came to dinner late, and by then the tables occupied by my friends (A-listers at this wedding) were all fully occupied, so I had to sit with my cabinmates. That was fine, since they were perfectly good company. But at some point Leah came over and jokingly asked me, "Why are you sitting with these losers?" So I joined my old friends, and we had a good old time as we always have as a series of increasingly-poignant toasts were made. Wacky Jen, remember, has a tattoo on her upper arm that reads "Shonin Rocks," and one of the toasts involved her showing it to the assembled.
At some point Azer saw me walking by and guilt-tripped me about abandoning him for the cool people, but what was there to say? I'd just met him this afternoon, and I've known Jessika, Deya, Leah, and Wacky Jen since 1995. Azer, you do the math!
The tables were cleared and dancing began. This time, though, even this crowd was in a mood to get down. It was crazy out there for awhile, with much hiking of skirts and other behavior that hungover versions of ourselves regret.
I saw Shonin's half-sister Mary dancing with the few geriatrics on the floor, and I felt like she was seriously underselling herself. Sure she has two teenage kids and lives a drab married existence somewhere in Upstate New York. But she's an attractive woman, why must she select her dancing partners exclusively from amongst the octogenarians? So I was all up in her personal space dancing with her, and in so doing I lured her away from the oldster part of the dance floor. It also seemed to encourage her to drink more, which, in the end, proved to be a bad thing.
The music was supposed to be a collection of songs submitted by guests (though I'd never received the paperwork telling me to submit song titles). In the end, though, it was your usual collection of 80s dance tunes. There were a few nuggets of gold strewn throughout, particularly The Who's "The Kids are Alright," which, I told Leah at the time, provided the best intergenerational moment of the evening. It finally gave the oldsters in attendance the permission they needed to boogie.
At some point the music turned to Shonin's favorite musical genre: tinny recordings of ancient calypso music. A limbo bar was set up, and people limboed. Though it seems like a dull activity in the abstract, limbo is always a hoot when you've got a lot of booze in your system.
Later on, after the music was shut down, there was a bit of an after party on that same dance floor featuring music Jessika had selected. It was all ancient pre-rock music from the 50s and early 60s, the kind that makes you swear you can smell mothballs in the room. It was her music, so Jessika was actually dancing, something one almost never sees her doing.
And then, over by the fire, Shonin's half-sister Mary the housecat (sans teenage kids) was holding forth on how the mother she shared with Shonin had improperly raised her. She blamed the 1960s, free love, and generalized hippie dysfunction for a life of premature drug use and lost virginity. But she concluded her otherwise grim tale on an upbeat note, congratulating Shonin and Sabrina for actually getting married and not, well, doing what people did back in the 1960s. Though all of us were incredibly drunk at this point, it was a terribly awkward moment for all concerned. Mary had obviously had a wee bit too much to drink and was now subjecting us all to an epic overshare. I made a few contributions, stating that my own family hadn't been perfect, but that we have the power to transcend our circumstances. But eventually I felt the need to get away. I went out back and sat with Jessika's boyfriend Aaron as he smoked a cigarette. It wasn't difficult to find other matters to talk about.
On the walk back to my cabin, a Hispanic man with poor English skills drove up and asked if this was the way to Martinsburg. It wasn't; this was a little road that only served Cacapon Resort State Park. I told him so, but he asked again. Eventually he also handed me a bottle of Miller High Life and I realized he was either looking for a party or hitting on me. He wouldn't let me refuse it, so I took it, bid him goodnight, and returned to my cabin. All the other residents were fast asleep.
Deya (foreground) immediately after the ceremony.(Click to enlarge.)
Immediately after the ceremony. Foreground from left: Sabrina, Shonin, Jessika, and Ana. (Click to enlarge.)
Jessika and Ana. (Click to enlarge.)
Wacky Jen (in blue) and Nemo (with a camera). (Click to enlarge.)
Wacky Jen (in blue) about to show her "Shonin Rocks" tattoo as part of her toast.
Sabrina and Aaron. (Click to enlarge.)
From behind the bar as I tended it. (Click to enlarge.)
Jessika and Shonin. (Click to enlarge.)
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