Rings and the River

Since 1986, my wife, Patricia and I have worn our wedding rings, angular gold bands, subtly divided into two ridges and then brought together with a small round precious stone on the lower left face – a red ruby for her, a blue sapphire for me.

The year we got the rings, El Nino hit the Bay Area particularly hard. The Russian River in Sonoma County flooded its banks on Valentine's Day that spring, with cresting water reaching almost 50 feet. Winds blew roofs off barns and houses, leaving piles of debris once the water receded. For weeks, people fished mud caked couches, twisted lounge chairs, and water logged mattresses (the contents of Guerneville gay resorts,) from the meandering mellow river where nude sunbathers happily hung out.

When it finally stopped raining, one hot weekend, Patricia and I evacuated our Glen Park house and headed up to the Russian River.  Into the trunk of my red Honda Civic hatchback, we stuffed the silver and blue inflatable kayak that I had gotten from an advertiser in the Lifestyle magazine that employed me as a features writer. 

I’d choose an adventure or an adventure would choose me, and then I’d document the experience in an amusing way for the monthly magazine. I wrote about Hot Air Ballooning, Sky Diving, and immersed myself in a sensory-deprivation Samadi tank.  This last escapade was by far the most frightening, as I was enclosed and floating in a claustrophobic womb tomb, with only my breath and heartbeat to keep me company for what seemed like eternity.  When asked to try kayaking, I accepted the offered inflatable vessel and enthusiastically tested it out on Bay Area waterways. I didn’t think twice about taking it and Patricia to the Russian River for a paddle.

We parked the car at a canoe rental place on the outskirts of Guerneville, and used an electric air pump to blow up the boat.  “It’s so light and easy to get into the water,” I assured Pat as I handed her a paddle.  We put our backpacks into the kayak, and climbed in. I pushed off with my paddle, and we started down the river.

The brown water moved us along quickly, too quickly. Within a few minutes, we were headed straight towards cement pilings from a bridge that had long since been removed.  “Paddle harder,” I yelled to Pat, but we didn’t stand a chance and hit the grey barriers broadside. 

The kayak flipped and we were swept downstream, each going her own way.  I managed to hold onto my paddle, and when I bobbed up in the water, I didn’t see Patricia.   I did see the kayak, looking pathetically bent in the middle, but somehow afloat.  I swam towards it and held onto the side, still traveling rapidly downstream.  

Patricia meanwhile was in the middle of a scene from Deliverance.  She flailed and grasped onto tree branches on the far side of the river, desperately trying to pull herself up onto the riverbank.   Exhausted, she finally clawed her way to safety, just in time to hear my voice.

“We are so fucked,” I yelled. 

“Sue, where are you?  Are you okay?” she shouted back.

“We are so fucked,” I repeated.  “We are so fucked.”  I just kept saying this over and over, as I rounded the river bend.  “We are sooooooooooooooooo fucked.”  

I somehow got myself into the kayak, and paddled towards her.  “Get in,” I instructed. She looked doubtful.  “Our backpacks are gone, we have no car keys, no wallets, NOTHING!” I noted.  “We have to get to town, where maybe someone can help us.   We are so fucked,” I began my lament again.   Probably just to shut me up, Patricia got in the kayak and I paddled half-heartedly as the current, thankfully, slowed down.

About 100 yards ahead, we spotted a woman standing in about a foot of water, bending over and pulling something from the river.  The grey backpack.  She unzippered the front and pulled out a soggy Ms. Magazine. Behind her on the riverbank, a group of three women reclined on lawn chairs, looking up at us from their picnic.  Near their brightly colored blankets and sleek wooden canoes (containing life jackets -- who would have thought those were necessary) rested my soaking wet blue backpack with the car keys and my wallet.

We emerged from the kayak like defeated drowned rats, dripping relief.  As we recounted our accident, we started laughing, and didn’t stop laughing for the next few hours, as the kind lesbians offered us oreo cookies, sandwiches, and cold drinks from their coolers. One of the women, Linda Fisher, told us she owned a jewelry shore in the East Bay.  Later that afternoon, they loaded us into their canoes, and paddled us to town, towing the semi-deflated kayak. They even drove us the 15 miles back up the road to the parked Honda.

When Pat and I decided to get wedding rings – gay marriage was not yet legal but we had been together long enough to want to symbolically affirm our partnership – we headed over the Bay Bridge to Linda’s store.  The ring glinted gleefully in the glass case, and we both fell instantly in love with its design.

Cut to Austin, Texas, my sister’s Buddhist wedding a few years later, where a group of my parents' Jewish friends and family members sat uncomfortably whispering among themselves throughout the rituals.  If they could have chanted “Oy Vey,” they would have.

My dad’s longtime childhood friend, Al Weiss, a Holocaust survivor from Hungary and his wife Joan, had flown in from San Diego, for the event.  Joan, an elegant and strikingly beautiful woman, impeccably attired in a white linen suit and beige silk blouse, sat next to me at dinner, and she kept staring at my left hand.  She finally reached for my hand, gently holding my ring finger between her perfectly manicured thumb and index finger, and examined the ring.  

“Can you take that off”” she asked.  “Does it have an artist’s mark inside?”

“I think so,” I said, twisting the gold band from my finger.  “We got our rings at a jewelry store in Albany.”

Joan examined the inside of my ring, which had been engraved with the letters “PAT,” and then recognized another mark.  “You’re not going to believe this, but Al’s daughter, made your rings,” Joan told me. “See here, there’s her initials – LW.”  

Turns out that Al’s daughter, another Linda, worked as a jeweler in Petaluma and sold her creations at Fisher’s Jewelry.  And of all the rings in the world, we had chosen ones made by my dad’s oldest friend’s child.

When the Supreme Court recently ruled that the Colorado baker could refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, Pat posted a picture on her Facebook page from our Prop Gun Wedding, held at the last minute in 2003, right before California passed Prop Hate (8) banning gay marriage.  The photo was of the cupcakes we fed our friends and family that day.  She aptly noted that “Masterpiece Bakery can keep their cakes and hate. We prefer cake baked with love.”   On that day our dog Picasso was our ring bearer, delivering our gold bands to us in a tied up handkerchief.  Our daughter, Sophie, played us an Irish jig on her violin.

I like to remember this story of our rings and all of the calamity and serendipity that culminated in a ceremony of connectedness that is our vicissitudinal love. This love still flows 33 years later, like the Russian River.  Over the years, Patricia has lost her ring two times -- when Sophie was a toddler, Pat retrieved it from a leaf pile in our backyard after hours of searching, and the other time, just months ago, she found it on the floor of our garage after looking for it to no avail for two weeks.  I admire the fact that Patricia never gives up, not on rings, and not on what matters in life.