I just liked this inclusive wedding photo. Congrats to Mark and Mia!The New York Times story about their wedding:
Mark McGoldrick rocketed through his adolescence in Scottsdale, Ariz., on the highly combustible fuel of alcohol, drugs and trouble, he and his friends making impulsive trips in speeding cars. One ride ended in a car crash, leaving him a paralyzed in his senior year in high school. Wiser but no less adventurous, he traveled extensively and graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School.
“Son of a gun, you name it and he’s done it in spades,” said his mother, Joan McGoldrick. “I aged many years, but he did fine.”
It was in August 2001, on an 800-mile canoe trip through Canada’s Yukon Territory, that he met Mia Feldbaum, who had just graduated from Rice University and was leading the trip for Wilderness Inquiry, which organizes excursions.
The attraction was immediate and their flirtations grew as the excursion became more grueling.
“The month out there was an amazing way to spend time in each other’s presence,” said Mr. McGoldrick, now 44, who has regained the use of his arms and upper body. “You really see somebody.”
A tight schedule and difficult conditions forced the group to paddle up to 16 hours a day as they made their way into Alaska.
“Some couples, they say, meet cute. Mark and Mia met tough,” said Carl Feldbaum, Mia’s father. “They had grizzlies, floods, mud, big snags in the river.”
The couple stole moments together while washing dishes or cooking over fires, said Ms. Feldbaum, now 30.
“There was a very obvious romantic connection, which was a tricky thing to manage on a trip like that,” she said.
When the canoe trip ended, the group boarded a van headed to Edmonton, Alberta, where Mr. McGoldrick would depart.
“She’s driving through the night and everyone else behind us is sleeping,” he recalled. “I was reciting poetry to her, very softly.”
Ms. Feldbaum led several more expeditions that summer before going to Berkeley, Calif., to see Mr. McGoldrick, an Alameda County deputy public defender.
“We had a lovely time,” said Ms. Feldbaum, who left a few months later. “It was just hard to make that life work yet.”
Mr. McGoldrick knew better than to beg her to stay. “She needed to go out and forge her own way in the world,” he said.
She earned a master’s at Syracuse and kept in occasional contact with Mr. McGoldrick, with a weekend rendezvous here and there. Both dated others. She moved to Austin, Tex., and took a job with the school district there.
In early 2007, Ms. Feldbaum began making frequent trips to San Francisco, where her mother, Laura Feldbaum, was being treated for a brain tumor. The couple spent more time together, and Mr. McGoldrick became acquainted with Ms. Feldbaum’s parents and her brother, Harley.
“To be able to fit in as a new person in that, and to not only fit in but to be funny and fun and share in the dark humor and the love and all the difficulties, was just miraculous,” Harley Feldbaum said.
Ms. Feldbaum moved to Berkeley in October 2007, in time to see Mr. McGoldrick in a play that he had written about his life. By August 2008, her mother had passed away.
The couple became engaged in October 2008 and were married this past Oct. 24 in Scottsdale in back of the Reata Pass Steakhouse, built on the site of a stagecoach stop. There, on a plank stage framed by wagon wheels, dried saguaro and yucca, they were joined in a nondenominational ceremony.
Afterward the couple exited down the ramp to James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good)” and their next adventure.
