Book of Love

Call me a cynic, but I’m no believer in love at first sight, or of marriage for its own sake on some predetermined life timetable.

As a little girl I imagined myself wearing a space suit, not a wedding dress. I dreamed of adventure, and I believed that becoming someone’s wife precluded the kind of far-flung escapades I envisioned for myself. I even had a visceral distaste for the word “wife;” it sounded small, like the shrunken world I’d be settling for if I sacrificed my freedom for a relationship.

I was, to a certain extent, misguided.

I’m still not sure about love at first sight as an idea; trusted friends have assured me that it exists. But for me at least, there was no cinematic flash of insight, illuminated by a dramatic soundtrack. It was a quiet moment, understood properly only in retrospect: a man sidled up to me on the airport ramp to introduce himself as a potential new client. But this being Hal, he of course needed to preface the meeting with a joke. “Parasite drag,” he said conspiratorially. “Great name for a rock band.” (This is pilot humor, folks. Judge it gently, as you might a joke about mathematics. Or “Star Trek.”)

I laughed, and immediately felt … well, relief is the best way to describe it. I felt the need for pretense fall away. I felt comfortable. And I have felt that way around Hal ever since.
We settled into an easy client-flight instructor rapport that gradually evolved into a warm friendship. I loved his wildly irreverent wit (suspiciously like my dad’s) and his booming, easy laugh that made roomfuls of strangers want in on the joke.

Even then, we could have fun in a rock fight, as Hal likes to say. It’s one of his many oft-repeated “Hal-isms,” and one that quickly revealed itself to be true as I accompanied him as instructor-pilot on business trips around the Southeast and Midwest.

No matter the God-forsaken desolation of our destination hamlet, we always managed to locate the best restaurant or find ourselves in a memorable conversation with a cab driver or waitress. If nothing else, we made an adventure of the flight itself: picking our way around Gulf Coast cumulonimbus pillars in an aerial storm dance, tracing the Mississippi’s winding course a few feet above the muddy water, or practicing touch-and-gos on some tortuously short rural grass airstrip.

Those shared adventures began imperceptibly to erode my youthful convictions about relationships, water on stone. There I was, having exactly the kind of escapades I’d always wanted, and Hal wasn’t preventing them. He was making them better.
Which is not to say that I actually had the wisdom to notice this process at the time. No, it took my far wiser life-long friend, Carrie, to clarify for me the nature of my affection for Hal. One summer morning as Carrie and I commiserated about our relationship troubles on Bongo Java’s porch, I heard myself say blithely, “I wish I could feel as comfortable around a guy as I feel around Hal.” One Carrie eyebrow rose pointedly, and a knowing smile spread across her face. Duhhhhh! said the universe, the metaphorical sound of palms smacking foreheads ricocheting skyward.

Falling into a romance with my treasured friend Hal was as easy as sliding into a beautiful old pair of leather boots molded perfectly to your feet. There was all the wonder of stomach butterflies and unfurling desire and little or none of the terror, desperate longing, or overthinking of new romance, just a growing, calm certainty that Hal would always be there.

Still, we didn’t talk about marriage, except to poke fun at the idea. My convictions held, doubly so because Hal had already been there, done that once before, ice carvings and all. I made all the predictable arguments:  “Why do we need a piece of paper,” “Official sanction doesn’t bring happiness,” blah, blah, blah. The stereotypical single-girl movie heroine pining for a big diamond ring? That was so not me.

The real turning point was our first vacation in Belize in winter of 2000, a 30th birthday present to me from Hal. If I was still wondering whether being Hal’s partner somehow precluded excitement and intrigue, that trip obliterated any doubt whatsoever.

Over the course of 10 days, we found ourselves in the following situations: stranded in a broken-down bus on a lonely dirt road 30 miles from nowhere; stranded at sea with a snaggle-toothed Rasta sailor and no wind lifting the sail; stranded, shoeless, in a remote village during an all-night West African-style wake with a panicking Swiss couple who’d gotten in over their heads, culturally speaking.

If all that doesn’t sound like fun to you, then you have never traveled with Hal. He taught me how a combination of laughter and resourcefulness can turn an inconvenience into a quest: when all else failed, we hitchhiked, paddled, and hiked (barefoot) our way out of difficulty, then went home and launched our lives as writers by selling our first ever travel story about those accidental adventures.

More importantly (to this tale), we met and befriended a wonderful woman named Chena — matriarch of “Clarissa Falls,” a rustic resort comprised of a few huts and an open-air, thatched-roof restaurant. I remember standing there in the restaurant with her, looking out over a waterfall in the Mopan River. She made a gesture to indicate the resort, the river, and the surrounding landscape, and said, laughing, “Next year you’ll come back to Clarissa Falls, and you’ll get married here.”

How we laughed at that idea. But apparently, Chena had somehow planted a time-release drug in my brain; the following summer, I found my ideas slowly morphing from “Why should we?” to “Why shouldn’t we?” Why not be attached to Hal for the rest of my life, legally and otherwise? It wasn’t that I had completely changed. I was still no believer in marriage just because that’s what you’re supposed to do. What I realized was, I did believe in the grand lifetime adventure that is marriage to Hal.

And so it was that on a sultry mid-summer day a few months later, as Hal and I sunned ourselves in a remote suburban backyard, I resolved my feelings on the matter. The yard was completely surrounded by woods and was therefore completely private. So we naturally decided to create a rudimentary Slip ‘N Slide out of a blue tarp, a hose, and some dish detergent. Little or no clothing factored into the equation. Settling in next to Hal on a blanket between soapy slide-fests, I was inspired: let’s do Chena’s plan.

“Hey, Hal!” I said brightly. “Why don’t we get married?”

“OK!” he said. It really was that simple. No pomp, no circumstance.

So I wound up wearing a wedding dress after all. But like my proposal, not much else surrounding our wedding story adhered to tradition. We ran off to Belize and exchanged vows under a thatched roof, just as Chena predicted. She stood beside me at the ceremony. Hal’s best man was our friend Bubba, shoeless as always. Wedding-album perfection? Hardly. But faced with a relentless downpour and an extremely tardy priest (we’re talking hours late!), we just laughed and ordered more rum. For us, it was a perfect night.

A lot of books and movies end there, with the proposal or the wedding ceremony, wrapped up all neat and tidy and fairy tale. But in real life, that’s not the end of the story; it’s the beginning. I think that’s why I’ve struggled for the past two weeks with how to finish this essay. Finally, just last night, it occurred to me that this story has no ending. Each day is a word, the weeks sentences, and the months paragraphs in this ever-unfolding tale, The Adventures of Hal and Kim.

We’re on chapter eight now, and I can’t seem to put this book down.

Kim Green freelances for public radio outlets such as WPLN and Marketplace, occasionally teaches people to fly airplanes, and, most bizarrely of all, co-translated an airwoman’s war memoir from Russian to English. Nine years ago this month, she ran away to Belize to marry Hal Humphreys.