One in a series of True Love Stories of the North Olympic Peninsula.
Over here, said the gown. Look at me.
Crickett Heassler came, saw and bought the wedding dress, never mind that she didn’t have a fiance on the horizon.
This might fit my daughter if and when she gets married, Crickett thought at the time.
Besides, it was only $20 at the Pasco Goodwill store.
The dress purchase is just one facet in a courtship that did not follow the typical order of such things.
To begin with, Crickett had met the man who would become her husband — 30 years ago.
He was the youth pastor at Independent Bible Church: Johnny Rickenbacher, a man who’d come to Port Angeles first with the U.S. Coast Guard, then left to go to Multnomah Bible College in Portland, Ore., then returned to work on the Olympic Peninsula.
As IBC’s youth pastor, Johnny knew Crickett’s children. She knew his kids, too; she was their Sunday school teacher.
Both were married to other people, and both were to see their marriages come to a sad end.
Crickett lost her husband, Dan, to cancer in 2009.
Johnny and his wife divorced after decades together.
More than a year passed, and Crickett began to date, but with no intention of getting into anything serious. Johnny did the same, and is not embarrassed to say that he tapped the Internet.
“I’d been through eHarmony and all that,” said Johnny, who dated several women in relatively rapid succession.
He credits each one with teaching him something about his shortcomings.
Johnny also used Facebook to keep in touch with friends and regain contact with people from his past.
Crickett was one, though their exchanges stayed on Facebook for quite a while. Crickett, he learned, loves to write.
Then came Christmas 2010. Johnny told Crickett he had a gift for her.
Oh, no you don’t, she replied. We’re not the kind of friends who exchange Christmas presents.
Well, OK, “just think of it as a random act of kindness,” Johnny said.
The gift was Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott’s guidebook about writing, life and how the act of writing can be more rewarding than publication.
Then came “40 first dates,” as Johnny puts it, on which he and Crickett didn’t kiss. At that time, he said, he was fully engaged in his art, having just begun to paint a few years before.
“I just wanted a pal,” he said.
Which is what he found.
The two went on hikes together, and one time Crickett ditched Johnny for half an hour. They were hiking along the Elwha River in the rain; she went off on her own and, upon her return, thought she’d have to apologize.
But Johnny was just fine, under his umbrella. They talked for hours.
Then: the first kiss.
“He leaned forward, and it startled me,” Crickett recalled.
“It was really awkward.
“Then I reached over and grabbed him and kissed him back.”
“It was an epic kiss,” said Johnny.
Which gave way to an epic romance.
Crickett and Johnny asked each other:
What do you want to do, at this stage of middle age? Now that our children are all grown up, what is our hearts’ desire?
To travel. Johnny wanted to see France, especially the places that inspired Vincent Van Gogh. He wanted to walk the streets and paths where great artists walked, to paint his own canvases with them looking over his shoulder.
Crickett had her own dream: spending a month in a cottage in Ireland, writing her book.
The process began with copious research. The pair studied the art of traveling cheaply in Europe, and started planning.
By fall 2011, they had bought airline tickets. But somehow, it was very hard to leave.
“I needed a booster rocket to get me out of here,” Johnny said.
But if not now, when?
The couple arrived in Paris in time for Halloween. They explored the city, walked along the Seine and visited the great museums, including one where Crickett met one of her girlhood fascinations face to face.
The Mona Lisa, gazing out of her own room at the Louvre, brought Crickett to tears — tears of joy.
The couple’s time in France was charmed. They met an artist who had painted in the Montmartre district for 40 years, and who helped them find an apartment, replete with French doors, of course, shutters and a balcony, where they lived for a few weeks.
Then it was on to Ireland: Dublin, and counties Galway and Clare, where they went to the touristy town of Doolin.
This was December, though, so the only people around were locals, including family members home for the holidays.
They stayed at a place heated with peat, which “keeps it a toasty 50 degrees,” Johnny deadpanned.
The weather wasn’t great, but the live music was.
“Everybody who’s anybody was home, and playing in the pubs,” Crickett said.
As they do in Port Angeles, she and Johnny danced until the rest of the crowd got up to do the same.
From Doolin they rented a car, which drove them to some disagreement. Driving on the left side of the road was not easy, not for Johnny at the wheel nor for Crickett beside him.
“It was hell,” Johnny said.
But they did make it to Kinvara, the seaside village where they found a townhouse to rent for next to nothing. There, Crickett wrote for hours each day, working on her book. Johnny painted till the paint froze on his brush.
They spent Christmas in Ireland, and then took off for Italy. New Year’s Eve found them in Rome, exploring the Colosseum and watching Romans dance in the streets.
Returning to Port Angeles wasn’t easy. So Crickett and Johnny paused, for three nights, at a hotel in Port Townsend.
They filled a wall with their thoughts, written on Post It notes, about what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives.
The notes boiled down to a few main points. Make art. Travel. Write. Together.
The couple spent spring 2012 going to art festivals and selling Johnny’s paintings in six Western states from Montana to Arizona, while Crickett documented it all on their “Crickenbacher” blog (www.JohnRickenbacher.com).
But “after 27 shows, we weren’t ready to go home yet,” Crickett recalled.
So off they went to check out yet another art market and to see friends in Hilo, Hawaii.
First, though, a quick trip back to Washington.
Crickett had to pick up her dress.
She wore the snow-white gown while standing on a black lava field at Kalapana, with Johnny’s longtime friend and Multnomah Bible College classmate Les Pedersen officiating.
The Rickenbachers chose this place, Crickett said, because lava means new beginnings.
Johnny is 58 and Crickett 51, but sitting together at Oven Spoonful cafe in Port Angeles — surrounded by Johnny’s May display of paintings — they look more like teenagers, beaming, laughing, holding hands.
And when asked why they chose to marry at this stage rather than merely live together, Crickett’s response was all-out romantic.
“Shakespeare said it best,” she noted, in Two Gentlemen of Verona:
“Love is like a child, that longs for everything it can come by.”
“We didn’t want to miss anything,” Crickett said.
This spring, back home in Port Angeles, the newlyweds are dealing with reality: paying off two maxed-out credit cards, working day jobs, losing the 20 pounds each gained while traveling from one art fair to the next.
It’s not all drudgery, though.
The Rickenbachers set up a booth full of Johnny’s vivid paintings at the Juan de Fuca Festival of the Arts over Memorial Day weekend, greeted a few hundred people there, and then went out dancing during the festival’s After Hours sets at Bar N9ne.
This summer, destinations include the Sixth Street Art Fair in downtown Bellevue the weekend of July 26 and the Fusion Summer Art Event at Federal Way’s Dumas Bay Centre on Aug. 7.
Foreign travel may be off the table for now.
“We ate dessert first,” Johnny said, wrapping his wife in an embrace.
But if the way he and Crickett look at each other is any indication, life is still sweet.
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
