Hitched

After surviving a grueling bout with breast cancer that ate up nearly two years of her life, Susanne Hutchinson wanted to get active again. And so, six months after her treatments ended, she hit the slopes.

"I was still weak, scrawny and had really short hair," the 45-year-old nurse practitioner recalls. "But I really wanted to go skiing."

In January '99, Susanne signed up for a weekly ski bus headed to Mount Hood. Her
husband at that time wasn't into the sport, and so every Wednesday, for eight weeks, Susanne made the trek with the 25 ski-bus regulars instead.

What Susanne didn't know when she signed up was that the bus had a reputation for making love connections beyond the slopes (to date, it has spawned three weddings).

Jeff Davies, a 46-year-old self-described "tree-hugging tour guide," didn't know, either. Even though both were involved with other
people, that didn't stop them from striking up conversations on the ride up to the mountain. Over the next two seasons, they skied as friends, even though Susanne admits her athletic skills don't quite match up to Jeff's.

"I follow him most places," she says of the couple's downhill adventures, "but I don't look as pretty."

Jeff laughs off such praise. "I've been skiing since I was 7 years old," he says. "It's always more fun to ski in a group."

When the season ended, the two swapped phone numbers. They insist the move was purely innocent--they'd occasionally go up to the mountain after the bus stopped running. But as the season ended in the spring of 2000, Susanne's intentions shifted. "I realized I was going to miss more than skiing," she remembers.

After going through so much, she decided she wanted the next phase of her life to be different. "[Having breast cancer] changed everything," Susanne says. "I came out of it saying, 'Life is sweet.'"

She separated from her husband in June and soon began seeing Jeff. Both admit the early days were difficult. Once they began dating, Susanne thought her medical history might frighten Jeff, who scoffed at such a notion. "I asked him, 'Aren't you nervous about choosing me? I might be a bad investment,'" Susanne remembers. "But he said to me, 'You don't choose who you fall in love with.'"

Once they'd jumped that hurdle, the couple moved on to Susanne's family. Susanne admits the relatives were skeptical of the relationship at first, and she says her mother made a special journey to Portland from the East Coast just to check out Jeff. They took Mom on a ski trip to break the ice. On the way to Mount Bachelor, Jeff won her over.

So accepting was Susanne's mom that she suggested the couple move in together in April 2001. The pair made good housemates, and that summer, Jeff popped the question.

When it came time to make wedding plans, there was no chance they'd have a summer wedding. No--the couple arranged to be married in the middle of ski season, in the cozy confines of the historic Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood.

For Susanne, who'll pass the five-year, clean-bill-of-health mark this summer, life is sweet indeed.

WWeek 2015