Rainier was going with Lia, a young woman who lived in the same apartment that they rented together with several other young women in San Francisco. At just the right time, Rainier and Lia started dating each other – and that was it. They were a couple. It was 2012.
Rainier had lived with us in Oakland for the first few years of his studies at San Francisco State University, before he’d moved out to live in the City during his last year of school. He’d come to live with us almost from the day he’d graduated from High School on Oahu, calling to ask us whether the offer of a home with us we’d made some years before was for real. It was for real, and we were glad to have him in our family. He lived in a small porch-like area with windows on two sides in a second story duplex before we moved into the beautiful Craftsman Style home we’ve owned and lived in since. In our home, he had a small room down several steps to a small room with a low ceiling and outside access through sliding doors to the garden. During the move to our new house, he’d offered a strong helping hand and he’d joined us as we gathered a few friends to our new home for a house blessing. That was all new to him.
While he was in college, Rainier had taken up bicycling, first using a second hand bike he’d found in the basement of the duplex on Sunnyslope Avenue, and graduating to another bike and into a group of cyclists in San Francisco, eventually competing for Mike’s Bikes by traveling to ride in races. Now he’s got a stash of bicycles and parts in his workshop in the yard of his home in Seattle.
We knew from the start that Lia was Rainier’s true partner, and we have enjoyed their company together ever since. Jeff officiated at their wedding. During COVID, we’d made the trip from our place in Oakland to their home in Seattle several times to spend time with them and their baby girl Celeste, born on the first day of COVID sheltering in place – March 17, 2020. Rainier and Lia and Celeste became the children of our own we did not have.
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After they became a couple, we invited Rainier and Lia to join us at our friends’ Paul and Lana’s place in the Warner Valley, 5 hours north of the Bay Area, for a few days. The four of us had fun together, and it was fun to watch the growing romance of the young couple. When our visit was over, we packed up Jeff’s Forester and headed down to the Bay Area. We stopped in Chester, at the southern end of the Valley, to drop off a few days’ worth of garbage in a big garbage can in a driveway, and started West out of Chester to drive to Highway 5. As we left the town limits of Chester, Jeff noticed first. He didn’t say anything to us, but he could see a police vehicle driving along behind us. Jeff is not one to speed, but he watched his speed carefully anyway.
Just as we left the town limits, the red lights of the squad car went on and we pulled over. The four of us sat silent in the car as the officer came to the window and asked to see Jeff’s license. I’m sure the officer could read the faces of anyone he pulled over, because that day, he took his time to explain that we’d been seen dumping garbage in town. “I’ll give you a choice,” he said. “You can go back and get that bag of garbage, or I can take you jail.”
Ha! Quite a choice he’d given us.
“We’ll go back to pick the garbage up,” Jeff said.
We were silent as Jeff turned the car around and made sure he didn’t go a bit over the speed limit as we returned to Chester, as we spotted the garbage container where we’d deposited our garbage less than an hour before, and as we stopped to let Rainier out to get the bag of garbage. We were silent, but I’ll bet we were watched by the neighbors who’d watched us stop before to deposit the garbage.
And we were mostly silent on the long ride back to San Francisco.
When we drove into San Francisco, I’d taken the wheel, and we were almost at Rainier and Lia’s place. At the same moment, we all burst into laughter, unable to contain it any longer. We all burst into the laughter that followed our entanglement with the Law in Chester.
And you can bet we’ve told that story to one another many times since that fateful day…
A view of Warner Valley now, Mt. Shasta in the distance. After fires several years ago, damaged trees stand amid trees that had escaped the fire. Paul and Lana’s first cabin was destroyed in the fire; the homes on either side of the cabin that burned still stand. Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 6/9/26.
