I always love a great “feel good story” and this one is great. This is the story about Erik King and Carla Crawford who met in Bocas del Torowho ended up tying the knot at at the Kings’ family farm in Unity, Maine on July 12, 2014.
When Erik King was 26, he outfitted an old school bus with bunk beds and surfboards, transforming it into a roving surf hostel, which he drove along the coast of Mexico and Central America for two years.
Mr. King, now 42, remembered his father telling him at the time: “Son, if you don’t get a good job, you’ll never get a wife. Who would want to marry you?”
But Mr. King, who was influenced at an early age by the writing of Henry David Thoreau, had a different perspective: “If you follow the prescription of other people, it’s not going to turn out as well as if you trust yourself.”
That may explain why Mr. King has a résumé that includes hiking the high passes of Kings Canyon National Park in Northern Calfornia for the National Park Service and teaching physics at an Orthodox Jewish high school in San Francisco. Charles Swanson, a college friend of Mr. King’s, described him as “fearless,” recalling how they often rock-climbed up campus buildings at the University of Arizona, where Mr. King received two degrees, one in creative writing and the other in ecology and evolutionary biology.
In 2011, Mr. King joined the Peace Corps as an environmental health worker, building aqueducts and providing AIDS education in a rural coastal region of Panama. It would seem an unlikely place to meet an Ivy-educated, corporate lawyer from Manhattan, but that is what happened when he and Carla Crawford crossed paths in February 2012.
Ms. Crawford, along with two of her high school girlfriends, were getting away from the New York winter. After a long day of hiking, they were eager to check out Carnival in Bocas del Toro, the capital city of the archipelago province where they were staying.
She energetically flagged down a water taxi. Except it wasn’t a water taxi. It was a private boat on which Mr. King happened to be traveling while on a brief leave for Carnival.
The amused boat driver pointed toward the three confused tourists. Because they were attractive female tourists, he swung the boat round, and they boarded.
They quickly realized their error when the boat roared off in the wrong direction. But by then, Mr. King’s sea-green eyes and stoic gaze had caught Ms. Crawford’s attention.
Mr. King found her “stunningly beautiful,” he said, but with his stained T-shirt and scruffy beard, he doubted she would be attracted. So he didn’t show any sign of interest, not even a smile, yet Ms. Crawford, normally a take-charge kind of person, decided to follow where the evening led her. “That’s very rare for me,” said Ms. Crawford, now 34 and an associate general counsel at Sotheby’s in Manhattan.
The evening, or more specifically, Mr. King, led her and her friends to a bar called the Pickled Parrot, where Tom Petty music was playing on a jukebox and a pig was roasting on a spit. It was there Mr. King learned that Ms. Crawford was a graduate of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
“I have a valedictorian fetish,” he told her, and his interest spiked even more when he found out she spoke fluent Spanish. “Here’s this absolutely beautiful woman, and she’s super-smart and speaks Spanish better than I do.”
They were inseparable the rest of the evening, dancing close together to reggae music once they finally made it to Bocas del Toro. And they talked until the wee hours of the morning on the dock of Ms. Crawford’s hotel on the island of Carenero.
“I never connected with someone upon meeting them the way I did with Erik,” she said. “I’m usually reserved and cautious when it comes to talking about myself. But he seemed like he was really interested in hearing about me, which made it easier for me to open up to him.”
The next day, Ms. Crawford and her friends flew to Panama City. But she couldn’t stop thinking about Mr. King.
“She was gushing,” said her older sister, Candace Crawford, who talked to her sister after her return to New York. “My sister doesn’t gush.”
But Mr. King lived 2,000 miles away in a village with no Internet access and very limited phone reception. So Ms. Crawford started writing letters. Before Mr. King received a letter, however, she received a phone call. The first of many. It turned out that if he climbed to the top of a steep hill, he could get a weak cell signal, as long as he was willing to risk being hit by lightning or “being annihilated by no-see-ums,” he said.
“There were no games,” she said. “If he texted me, I texted right back.” And three months after they met, on Memorial Day weekend, she returned to Panama.
But she wasn’t returning to her resort hotel. Mr. King lived without electricity or running water among the Ngöbe, an indigenous people, on the Kusapin Peninsula, which was reached by a four-hour boat ride from Bocas del Toro in a 30-foot dugout canoe.
“That was the first time I was nervous,” she said. “I was nervous to see if the same chemistry we had at the first meeting would still be there.”
It was, despite the lack of creature comforts.
A bat urinated on her face, her sister said, “and she was completely fine with it. That’s when I knew she was really in love.”
Ms. Crawford luxuriated in daily swims at a nearby secluded beach and lavished T-shirts and tenderness on the members of the Ngöbe community. They reciprocated with gifts of coconut oil, and one couple named their child after her after she had left.
“She showed a true humanity,” Mr. King said, praising her compassion during her stay of several days. “That’s the kind of thing you can’t assess in somebody in one night of hanging out.”
The couple continued exchanging long, heartfelt letters that arrived out of sequential order, weeks or even months after being sent. Mr. King, who received a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from San Francisco State College, wrote love poems that Ms. Crawford would read over and over. And that September, on a trip to New York, he offered a more concrete expression of his feelings when he proposed at a park near her Brooklyn apartment with an heirloom ring, which belonged to his maternal grandmother.
Even though they had only spent 17 days together in person, he wanted her to know the depth of his commitment, and he wanted her to wait for him while he finished his work in Panama. “You don’t get to feel that connection many times in your life,” said Mr. King, who, like Ms. Crawford, had never married. “You have to treasure it.”
She was surprised by the timing but not by the long-term plan. “I would have waited years to be with Erik,” she said.
Twenty-two months later, on July 12, Ms. Crawford, wearing a silk slip gown by Palazzo, stood beside Mr. King on an expansive lawn outside the farmhouse owned by Mr. King’s father and stepmother in Unity, Me.
Steven Williamson, a minister of the Universal Life Church and a friend of the couple, officiated at a ceremony in which they promised each other love and devotion, and Ms. Crawford vowed to plan their vacations in places Mr. King could surf.
“He’s very much a yin to her yang,” Candace Crawford said after the wedding. “I think Carla will make him think a little more about planning things. And he’ll make her be a little more carefree. Instead of going right, it will be ‘Let’s go left and see what the world has to offer.
