Along those lines, this has been the best summer of my life, and it had nothing to do with poker. I did play a pretty full schedule at the 2013 WSOP after scrapping my foolish plans to stretch myself between online poker in Mexico, bracelet events in Vegas, and sanity in Santa Monica.
In Vegas, I made half a run at the $3k 6-max event but didn't put up any other results. I did, however, get married to my longtime love, Sheila McCormack.
So this happened tonight! I married my longtime girlfriend, the love of my life, @SheilaMcCormack! Pic by @OwenCrowe pic.twitter.com/0HjK20npdH
— Shane Schleger (@ShaneSchleger) June 4, 2013
We met in December of 2004 at Blue Ribbon Brooklyn, where I was wrapping up my tenure as a waiter while transitioning into a full time poker player.
Then on June 3rd, 2013, around sunset, we had a quickie wedding ceremony in front of the Bellagio fountain with a three person guest-list consisting of my oldest childhood friend Matt and two of my close poker friends, Owen (who wasn't playing a tournament that day) and Jesse (who busted his 5PM tournament in time to join us).
With Matt flying in from New Mexico at the last minute, we only had time for a "three-minute bachelor party" consisting of [no] hookers and [only a little] blow.
With Matt flying in from New Mexico at the last minute, we only had time for a "three-minute bachelor party" consisting of [no] hookers and [only a little] blow.
We gathered with the wedding efficient and the photographer in front of the hotel (I searched "scenic Las Vegas wedding" around 3PM that day and found these great people to help us get married on a few hours notice) and 20 minutes later, we had the paperwork and instructions to make everything legal and official.
After the ceremony, the five of us went to dinner at Jaleo, where Owen picked up the tab on a delicious meal with a couple of outlandishly-priced bottles of Spanish wine.
After the ceremony, the five of us went to dinner at Jaleo, where Owen picked up the tab on a delicious meal with a couple of outlandishly-priced bottles of Spanish wine.
Two nights before the ceremony, on Sunday around 11PM, we were in downtown Las Vegas getting our marriage license. And although we were semi-formally engaged (its own long story), we were nonplussed by the prospect of planning a wedding (or even choosing what type of wedding to plan), and had only decided two nights before that--on Friday, when I picked Sheila up from McCarran Airport--to pull the trigger.
***
The trajectory of our relationship has been somewhat intense and complicated--layers of conflict and madness coating the underlying foundation of love, respect and understanding that formed our bond from the night we met (and I might add, there is only the subtlest difference between a "one-night stand" and "love at first sight").
People who know us know that there were at least a few times over last 8+ years when our future together seemed dubious. My friends also know that throughout the hard times Sheila and I experienced, my determination to work through our problems and make it last never wavered, only grew stronger year after year.
As the line from "Southern Cross" goes, "So we cheated and we lied and we tested. And we never failed to fail, it was the easiest thing to do." That song played in heavy rotation towards the end of our month-long honeymoon road trip that began in late July and concluded yesterday.
***
When Black Friday went down, Sheila and I were definitively broken up. From November '10 through April '11--the time span during which I got a deal with PokerStars and was then presented with the necessity to move out of the US to continue playing on PokerStars--we didn't talk to each other.
When Sheila and I started communicating again in May, we arrived at a good emotional space fairly quickly, but it wouldn't have been appropriate or practical for her to tell me to stay in Los Angeles, and the option of her giving up an LA-based career was doubly impractical.
So I left California with an aching in my heart, went to Vancouver to play WCOOP, and although I had a good month in poker, I was in a state of constant agitation, trying to manage all the aspects of my new life, particularly the relationship that was re-emerging over a distance of thousands of miles.
When I left Vancouver and figured out that Mexico existed a mere 3-hour drive away from my erstwhile home with Sheila, it eased my angst with the hope that a new setup would allow us to function in a more fluid relationship. It didn't.
The struggles and swings of our shared life continued. But we also continued to slowly and clumsily work through our individual emotional baggage and bullshit, to hash out the possibility of a harmonious future. That dynamic unfolded for the next year-plus until we eventually reached a place of confidence and ease over the prospect of creating a lasting commitment.
When Sheila and I met in 2004, we were both basically still kids, and we had to grow up significantly before we could get to the altar. Put another, maybe more accurate, way--Sheila made me fight for her love; at every turn she challenged me to become a better man.
Or maybe it was the wine talking, maybe it was Vegas and the fucking Mirage.
***
When it came time to plan a honeymoon, Black Friday proved its role as both blessing and curse. I've said it before that BF did cause one distinctly positive change--got me out of my comfort zone, forced me to see the world from a broader perspective and face the challenges of living a slightly unfamiliar life in a foreign country,
For the eventual honeymoon destination, BF inadvertently allowed us to find one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited, an island not far from Vancouver called Salt Spring Island. The sort of place I never imagined existed, rather more like a place you hear about in the Bob Marley song "Dreamland."
But more on Salt Spring Island soon.
First, I had to pitch the scheme to my new bride: Let's find someplace in Canada to chill: Let's take that long overdue road trip up the California coast, let's stop at the hotels in Big Sur, Mendocino, and Seattle that have special meaning to us. Let's ride, let's ride, let's ride, let's ride, get high.
And then, let's set up in Canada, where I can put in the hours on PokerStars that I had been forsaking, a place we can live together for a little while and hang out while I play some poker, just like the good old days. After all, what new bride doesn't want to spend her honeymoon cooking and cleaning (also reading and gazing at an incredible view, of course) while her husband spends 8+ hour days in front of the computer, working?
Sheila acquiesced to my vision, which I was confident could be a recipe for a special trip. Confident but not completely certain. While I finished out the WSOP, she researched the Gulf Islands and various other desirable destinations in Canada, and, through luck and destiny, found an insanely beautiful vacation rental property in Salt Spring Island. It turned out to be a better honeymoon than I could have ever dreamed.
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| There are deer everywhere on Salt Spring Island. |
***
We arrived in Salt Spring Island, exhausted, around midnight on a Friday night, narrowly catching the last ferry off the mainland. The ferry ride itself was pretty cool--there was decent food, an outdoor smoking section, and a couple of fun-loving Canadians heading to another, smaller Gulf Island--Pender Island--who gave us some of the lay of the land.
It was dark when we arrived, and I wasn't prepared to be blown away as thoroughly as I was the next morning when I woke up and experienced the view from our temporary home. I had wanted to find a place that resembled Baltar's home on Caprica (I remember IMDB'ing the location as soon as I realized those scenes from Battlestar Galactica were actually filmed on this planet), and Sheila more or less found it:
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| Baltar's house in Caprica |
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| Our spot on Salt Spring Island. |
It got better from there: Black Sheep Books down the way, where I found a copy of Henry Miller's Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch that I had planned on ordering online. A man on the next corner making fresh hot donuts. Down the street, Salt Spring Coffee, Denman Island Chocolate everywhere.
Horses, deer, cattle, goats--all over the island. Everywhere we drove, walked, hiked, swam, kayaked--views and sights that can't be properly described in words. People along the roadside picking blackberries, farm stands dotting every major and minor road, selling freshly laid eggs and whatever else the resident farm is producing. Take the eggs, drop $5 in the bucket, be on your way.
***
During the three weeks we spent there, I think I played 10 sessions of online poker, finishing a slight loser but enjoying the grind in a more relaxed, integrated way than I had since March, 2011. Most sessions finished around 5-6PM, when Sheila and I would take a ride down to St. Mary's Lake for a swim. Then we found the rope swing, tied to a tree along the road. Then some local kids at the rope swing showed me "Jumping Tree," a hundred yards away, with densely tiered branches and water underneath deep enough for safe jumps, anywhere from 15-60 feet up the tree.
It's an island of 10,000 people, not vaguely the boondocks. As I understand, it's basically a hub for all the other local islands--children from nearby islands like Galiano and Mayne take a water taxi to Salt Spring for school. There are at least three major grocery stores and any other kind of store you might need. There is essentially zero cause to leave the island for anything unless the clamor of city life is calling you.
Yet, you have to want to get to Salt Spring Island--the ferry ride is long and kind of expensive--which (I think) is why you don't find any corporate chains on the island. No Starbucks, no Holiday Inn Expresses, and you will not be seeing any golden arches around here.
People come to Salt Spring for a variety of reasons--to retire, to relax, some to live "off the grid" and subsist without electricity and other conveniences of the developed world. One seemingly typical arrangement involves exchanging farm or household work for lodging during the summertime. Hitchhiking is common and safe. There was one guy we gave a ride to--a recovering addict on his way to an AA meeting--who told us, plausibly, that we "will always carry a piece of Salt Spring in our hearts."
***
When it came time to plan the trip home, we knew we had to stop again at Big Sur, but instead of taking a leisurely 6-day jaunt back down the coast as we did on the way up (we had also stopped at Cambria, Pt. Reyes and Eugene, OR), we wanted to get back to Ventana quickly, then get back to the city. The trip from Salt Spring back to Big Sur consisted of two long stretches down the 5 (a route equally beautiful in stretches as the Redwood Highway) with a stop for dinner in Seattle, a motel in Roseburg, OR and then a night in San Francisco.
We shacked up in SF at the pied-a-terr of an old employer of mine, the former owner of a messenger company where I worked as a youth in NYC, also one of my favorite people in this world. We slept in the back room of the basement of a two-story apartment he owns. The top floor he rents out to college students, the basement he makes available for friends passing through.
The front room of the basement was occupied by another friend of his, who was in the middle of his own epic voyage from Austin, TX to who-knows-where, geared up with mountain bikes and kayaks (plural) and a guitar. This was the only night on the trip we didn't pay for.
On that note, and in the spirit of gratitude that characterized much of our odyssey, I have to state how incomprehensibly lucky I am that Sheila had a good year at work in 2012, because with my abysmal poker results in 2013, there is no way I could have afforded this trip.
(Or, as the joke goes,
"What do you call a poker player without a girlfriend?"
"Homeless.")
***
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| Entering Big Sur from the north. |
Room service ends early, but the pools are open all night.
The local restaurants are excellent; the hotel rooms are seamlessly built into the woods, brilliantly conceived by local architect-turned-furniture-designer Kipp Stewart who figured out a way to optimize solitude and connectedness in a single hotel room.
The pathways are lined with vibrant purple lavender and green rosemary stalk, calming and vivid, meanwhile deer and wild turkey randomly roam the property. The massage room overlooks the vast expanse of rugged mountainside to the impenetrable expanse of the Pacific Ocean. And, well, it's just...Big Sur. God's Country, I've heard.
We planned on staying one night, then stayed two.
Most importantly, there is no dollar amount you could assign to the experience of witnessing your partner the happiest she's ever been.
I love you forever Sheila.
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