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We’re trying to get some sleep, as we have a long drive ahead of us the next day. It’s mid-October of 2021, and we’re in the back of a van we had rented in a suburb outside of Seattle earlier that day. The van is outfitted with a bed in the back, a mini fridge, a small camping stove, a sink, and a variety of other features to make one reasonably comfortable sleeping out in the woods. It’s a little brisk outside, but we’re snuggled together and warm. A noisy rustling moving around the van keeps bothering me, but perhaps it’s just in my head, Lauren suggests in a slow, sleepy voice. I was a bit of a nervous sleeper. We are, after all, many miles out into the desolate, autumnal forests of the pacific northwest – too late for summer hikers, too early for skiers, just in time for a lot of rain and quietude.
But the rustling continues, and I was sure it was something just outside, or perhaps inside, the van. So I wake Lauren up (she’s always been the sounder sleeper, particularly in the wilderness), and the car clock tells our bleary eyes it’s around 2 or 3 in the morning. We drive the van to a less scenic but less isolated spot, get back to sleep, and rest well – there’s no more noise. Perhaps it was a bear outside the van?
We wake the next morning to find that Lauren’s handbag, which had had a bagel in it, has been fully chewed through by a large rodent. Evidently, there’s a pipe in the van connected to the sink I mentioned earlier that allows water to drain out of the bottom of the van that we knew nothing about – makes sense in retrospect. Some critter had climbed into the van, run wild over our pillows to and fro looking for food, and then made its escape after doing a bit of damage. Lauren was a bit bummed about her bag, but otherwise unbothered (which I found both attractive and puzzling). I made the gentlemanly gesture characteristic of the early days of a relationship of braving the morning cold to put the coffee on and cook up some egg sandwiches, letting Lauren enjoy a bit more time under the blankets.
It was a funny moment – night one of our very first proper vacation together, and we’re spending most of the trip on the road in an old Ford E350 with 350k miles only to be terrorized by vermin in the night – and yet, the next morning is so full of love, beauty, and simplicity. Which takes me to what I see as the central theme of our story so far (queue up Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” a song I’ve always thought of as our song). Our story is woven together by the many days we’ve spent on the road, moving from place to place (NYC -> Red Hook -> Cambridge -> Los Angeles -> Cambridge -> Los Angeles -> Brooklyn, and that’s in less than 5 years!). We’ve had a tough time convincing life to allow us to stay put (or perhaps it’s just in our nature), but this nomadic time of ours has enforced a central belief that our primary constant is each other.
So – more concretely: Lauren and I met in the latter days of the COVID-19 pandemic. We met on a dating app and, after some talk about skiing and surfing, we found ourselves together at a gin / jazz bar (neither of us likes gin, and I think jazz is also a stretch, but you do what you must to look sophisticated in the big city). Lauren recounted tales of backcountry skiing and sleeping in ice-holes (Quinzhee) as a wee Canadian, and I was blown away. I was going to have my work cut out for me trying to embellish my own stories to interest her – evidently, things worked out!
A few dates later, I’m running late to an evening date with Lauren, and I’m riding a bike down the West Side Highway bike path along the Hudson River. Overhead, a bird defecates midflight – directly onto me. Apparently this is good luck, but it didn’t feel that way at the time. I wound up about an hour late to the date, but Lauren was waiting on the corner outside Fanelli Cafe, and I feel this deep gratitude in my gut that she didn’t give up on me in that moment.
It's August of 2021, and we’re wrapping up a weekend of backpacking in the Slide Mountain Wilderness out in the Catskills. If you’ve never backpacked – you wrap up one of these weekends with your feet pretty worn out and shriveled from wearing wool hiking socks day after day, all of your clothes stink, etc. When the trail signs tick down to low single digits in miles until the road, it becomes acceptable (and more or less an inevitability) to start talking about the non-freeze-dried food you hope to eat shortly after passing back by the trailhead (cheeseburgers, milkshakes, etc.). This, of course, is kind of a torturous exercise, but it often feels right nonetheless. On this occasion, I don’t recall having this conversation – instead, I recall having this dreamlike feeling as we’re listening to the birdsong harmonize with the rustling of the morning breeze through the leaves. We’re not really in a rush.
We make it out of the foliage, and the sun is suddenly beating down on us. We drop our packs in my old Passat, the black interior of which is scorching. We’re driving down the road, when we decide to stop and smell the roses – there’s a river off to the side of the road that’s caught our eye, and I’m in no rush to get back to Hell’s Kitchen. We peel our shoes off and make our way down to the river, where we shed our sweaty clothes for a dip in a small, cold pool in the river. We lie out on a hot, flat rock in the middle of the river and let the sun dry us – in my mind’s eye, I swear the rock is shaped like a heart. It was the type of intuitive existential gratitude that eviscerated any Sunday Scaries, and made me certain we had known each other in a past life.
I have a photo I’ll look at from time to time of Lauren just before we headed down to the river for our swim – her hair is completely crazy, and she’s got a big, honest smile on her face. Perhaps the single greatest factor of our compatibility, I think, is our shared love for these unplanned, impractical moments of comfort and simple beauty. We had quite a bit of transit ahead of us, but time wasn’t on our minds – the wind had died down, and the contrast of the hot rock against the cool river was perfect. I don’t recall another car passing for maybe an hour while we were there. As I reflect on the last several years together, I think that’s right around the time I realized I wanted to spend this life with her (and ideally every moment of it). Perhaps we’d even reincarnate in the next life as two forest creatures and call that place our home (I’m keeping my fingers crossed). For the time being, we needed to get back to the hustle and bustle. When we weren’t getting outdoors, we were pretty enthusiastic regulars on the dance floor at the Red Lion, among a few other Manhattan spots.
Many late nights later (for some reason, these were often nights early in the week – I think we were aiming to just maximize the pain at work the next day for some reason), we found ourselves sitting in a pub at Solitude Mountain in Utah, and we decided that we’d take the dive and move to Cambridge together while I pursued my MBA. Lauren worked endlessly to find a new role that would allow her to work remotely, and she found herself at Ralph Lauren. After some amazing time in Whistler (after we ran the Vancouver Marathon, where Lauren beat me by about an hour and completely crushed my “I’m an ex-D1 college athlete” ego) and Muskoka (where we lived for quite some time in the spring / summer of ’22), we moved in to a cozy apartment in Cambridgeport with beautiful bay windows and a less beautiful 4 story walkup, and started anew.
My parents were just a short drive away in Sudbury, MA, but otherwise, we geared up to socially restart and engage a totally new group of folks while I was in business school. We met some awesome friends there, but despite our best efforts, we often skipped large social gatherings in favor of opportunities to move the bed into the living room (where the TV was) and saddle up for a movie marathon. We just wanted to spend virtually all our time with one another – as those who saw our Cambridge apartment can attest, our bathroom window oddly looked straight into Lauren’s office (bedroom #2), so we could even chat while I was on the john (or “in the washroom,” as Lauren says – a polite touch that I’ve always appreciated). Too much info – but I did think the window situation was so bizarre it was worthy of mention.
Fast forward two years – business school wraps up, and we’re off to Los Angeles. We had just purchased a Toyota Tacoma and while we both had some sadness to say goodbye from our friends on the east coast, we were ready to once again take to the road and spend some quality time listening to Willie Nelson and the like. The drive brought its own challenges. We had decided we wanted to camp our way across the country (ie no hotels allowed), but found very quickly that middle America actually has surprisingly few spots to pitch a tent on short notice (farmers outdoors all day in Kansas don’t perhaps need park services, etc.) – so we made due sleeping on a kind gentleman’s lawn in a town called “Possum Hill” (shortly after he showed us his pistol and proceeded to discharge a few rounds indoors to take care of an unusually large possum). The rodent problem had seemed to follow us along the road.
Our stay in Los Angeles was a short, but very sweet, year with many drives to Malibu, short walks to the local coffee shop, trail runs in Griffith Park, camping trips (Channel Islands and Silver Lake – a different one up north from LA were perhaps the winners), and meals out in our backyard (including hosting my family for Thanksgiving, our first we had ever had outdoors on a 70 degree November day!). As I recount the time, I’m inclined to tell so many anecdotes of an early morning departure for a weekend adventure, gone slightly awry, only to be bookended by an overwhelming sigh of relief and a big hug.
And now, we’re back in New York (although in a quieter neighborhood in Brooklyn, which is a bit more our pace these days). Life moves faster and becomes busier, and yet the solution to our stresses and misfortunes continues to be much the same as it was nearly five years ago when we first met – a slow morning (or perhaps a full blown “bed day,” which is more a vestige of the past when we were a bit more hard-partying) or, better yet, an extremely early departure to spend most of the weekend on the road to go sleep in the woods (or terrify Lauren in the ocean).
To our families – I would be remiss to not mention how important you have been to our story. At the core of Lauren’s and my emotional attachment is our love for the parents who have shown us ceaseless support (but rarely mercy in a card game), and our siblings, who have encouraged us to not stray from what makes us who we are (which is, ultimately, two oddball creatures of habit with a penchant for getting ourselves into trouble). We’ll keep our best family anecdotes reserved for the wedding, but suffice to say, we love each other primarily because of the values you’ve inspired us to appreciate in people. I can’t thank you all enough for equipping us both with the right compass to find one another.
We can’t wait to celebrate with you all soon.
Love,
Nick and Lauren