Some connections take a decade to reveal themselves. About ten or eleven years before Anna and Cameron’s wedding, before we were even married ourselves, we went on a kayaking tour near the Apostle Islands, guided through the sea caves by a woman whose name we’d long since forgotten. It wasn’t until partway through the wedding day, trading stories with Anna’s family, that we put it together: that guide was Anna’s older sister. Small world, but that’s the Northwoods for you.
Anna grew up in a small town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; Cameron’s from Dallas. They met on a missions trip in New Orleans when Anna was thirteen, a friendship that outlasted years of distance, a slow drift into losing touch, and then, somehow, finding its way back: a Facebook message, a text, a weekly phone call, a trip to meet in the middle in Denver. Cameron came up to visit for a summer not long after. He ended up building log cabins and staying. The Northwoods just became home.
Anna describes herself as a coffee-powered extrovert who needs regular reminders to slow down, no surprise coming from a family of strong-willed women with one very patient dad. She trained in dance through high school, chased a career as a hairstylist, went back for a dance degree at UW-Stevens Point, and eventually came home to help a close friend open a salon, which she now manages. Cameron is the quieter counterweight, an artist by nature, drawn to music, drawing, deep thinking, and long hikes, the kind of person whose whole presence puts people at ease. Anna says it best: he’s a dreamer, and he makes her want to be better just by being around him.
Anna’s vision was outdoors, vintage, a little bit of 20s glam, and Little Girls Point Park delivered on all three. It’s a rustic old lodge on Lake Superior with fish mounts on the walls and antique lures under glass, pure Northwoods character down to the winding driveway that opens into a clearing full of tents. Cameron had the idea to walk the cliff line for the first look, and what they found was, genuinely, one of the best first-look spots we’ve ever shot: a narrow path along a sand cliff forty feet above Lake Superior, birch trees leaning out over the water below.
For the ceremony, Anna didn’t want flat grass, she wanted the trees. So she and Cameron cleared the brush themselves, in a natural curve in the woods with their backs to the lake, and lined the aisle with moss they’d gathered by hand. It was as much their own handiwork as it was the day itself.
Little Girls Point Park is awesome, you guys!! You should stop there sometime.
