The Beth & Russ Story
By the end of 2019 I had moved back to my hometown, Hamilton, after living for 15 years in Toronto then spending three years traveling around the world on sailboats and trains. I’d taken a job with Meridian and, like everyone else, was trying to figure out how the hell I was ever going to afford a house.
After living in Toronto, the dating scene in Hamilton was, uh, a bit tough. Someone told me I was going to have to expand the geographic range on my dating app, which I had kept to 5km because <city spoiled>. I did so. The next day I matched with Beth, in St Catharines. Life immediately looked up.
During an early text exchange, she shit-tested me by asking if I would consider packing up everything I owned, converting a schoolbus into a camper, and heading south to live like bohemians. I one-upped her by asking if she’d consider doing the same thing on a sailboat. We were pretty much clinched at that point.
Now, before I could go meet her, I had booked a solo trip to Lisbon and Tokyo for two weeks. Ya, I dunno, it’s a long story that I’ll put into a book or something. So Beth and I spent the first two weeks of knowing each other flirting from the other side of the planet with a twelve-hour time difference. That did not seem to slow us down at all, ha.
Very early in our dating life, Beth had a series of heart attacks related to condition called SCAD. It was surreal; she was young and healthy, didn’t smoke or overdo it on booze, and had been a swimmer and athlete for half her life. Despite that, she had more than a dozen heart attacks over the span of two days, with the hospital not even recognizing what was affecting her until about 30 hours into her ordeal. Then they started taking things seriously, of course.
I remember standing beside her hospital bed holding her hand. We had been dating for a month or so. Her parents, whom I had only met once, showed up and smiled at me.
“You’re never going to be able to give birth safely,” a doctor said, bluntly, reading from a clipboard.
Beth and I looked at each other and high fived. Beth’s sweet mother cried.
Beth (and our relationship) survived that period, and then COVID struck and the world shut down. I was living in a walk up apartment at Wellington and King in Hamilton, while Beth lived on a few acres of green space adjacent to the beach in Port Weller (the north end of St Catharines). We spent most of that first year in lockdown together, sitting on her lawn or wandering the empty beach with her (now our) dog Moe. Merdian was effectively paying me to do nothing, so I wrote a book, and Beth, whose photobooth business got shut down with the rest of the events industry, was forced into limbo. She took it in stride and learned to cook over the fire, taught herself videography, and produced a series of music videos. It was, for us, an incredible year.
COVID pushed some people apart and forged others together. We are lucky to have fallen into the latter category. We often joke that we spent ten years together in the first two years of our relationship, thanks in part to the forced isolation of COVID lockdowns. I built a shed in her (now our) yard, and when we were done painting it, I sat her on my lap and cracked a Labatt 50 for her and asked her to marry me. She agreed. That was in April 2022.
I don’t like having my picture taken, so being in a relationship with a photographer is sometimes tough. Beth understands as much and tries to limit how much lens torture time she afflicts me with. She loves photography and, understandably, wanted to memorialize our engagement with a photoshoot. Appreciating that bribery goes a long way, she said we should try to find a sailboat to do our engagement shoot on. Smart girl. I spoke to some friends at QCYC, where I had learned to sail, and they agreed to host us for an afternoon of sailing and photography in August that year.
COVID restrictions had loosened up by that point, and Beth’s businesses – the photobooth and her photography in general – had picked back up. She came home from a particularly demanding wedding one day (the bride had been delivered by helicopter) and said to me,
“Fuck the big wedding, let’s elope.”
I naturally agreed.
She made the mistake of telling her sweet mother that plan, though, and her mother cried (again). So we decided to have a small wedding, sooner rather than later, with our closest friends and family. We bounced around a few ideas, including city hall, and decided to inquire about getting married on the lawn at QCYC the day that we were scheduled to be in Toronto for our engagement shoot. We’d already be dressed up!
QCYC was very accommodating, and we (Beth) crammed together a wedding plan for the afternoon of Tuesday August 30th on the lawn, on the islands in Toronto. We started the day out with our engagement photoshoot and got some moody, grey, magazine-cover weather, then changed into our wedding attire and set up the lawn to wait for our friends to arrive. The sun came out and we were married on the Rapids Queen, a water-break barge overlooking downtown Toronto, in a quick and beautiful ceremony officiated by a family friend.
The joy and comfort and tranquility and simplicity of that day was a huge part of our inspiration for starting Niagara Nautico.
