HAYWARD — With quiet vows and an eye toward November’s Proposition 8 referendum, Stephanie Sue Spencer and the Rev. Arlene Nehring made their 16-year union a legal California marriage in Hayward’s Eden United Church of Christ, where Nehring presides as pastor.

This “much-awaited day” wasn’t quite the wedding they’d hoped for, but with voters going to the polls in a month in an election that could make their union unconstitutional, the couple felt it was better now than never.

“People are hedging their bets,” said Todd Bove, a member of the church who married his partner of 10 years just a month ago.

Proposition 8 would cement the definition of marriage in California’s constitution as a union between one man and one woman, overturning a state Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex unions earlier this year.

There is reason for gay and lesbian couples to be nervous here: Polls have remained close since Proposition 8 earned its spot on the ballot, and a SurveyUSA poll released last week showed the measure supported by 47 percent of respondents, compared with 42 percent opposing. The ceremony and its participants made no effort to duck the political questions that surround the union.

“Stephanie and Arlene have lived a 16-year loving relationship, a relationship tested by fires many could not survive,” Ann Feaver, a longtime friend of the couple, said from the pulpit.

“Sixteen years ago, Stephanie and Arlene had only pockets of tolerance where their love could flourish. They could share their growing friendship, their growing affection, their love, their devotion with some, but not with others. And yet they prevailed.”

The Rev. Wendy Taylor, who presided over the ceremony, added in her opening homily: “This marriage is being entered into neither as a beginning or an end. It is rather an expression of commitment already begun and will continue into the future.”

In her reception toast, Kate Spencer, Stephanie’s younger sister, recalled sitting in a bar 16 years ago, hearing about her sister’s partner.

“Does this mean I have to become an activist now?” she asked at the time. “Sixteen years later, I am proud to be an activist against Prop. 8.”

Spencer and Nehring met two decades ago while studying in Boston, and four years later made a personal commitment to each other.

“Even though I had married many, many couples, we were not part of a church where I could get married to Stephanie,” Nehring said. “And I don’t know that any of our families would have been there.

“Sixteen years ago there were just the two of us. No family, no church. Just us — and Jesus.”

Saturday, a packed sanctuary welcomed the couple into legal marriage.

Taylor read the final pronouncement of marriage, “By the power vested in me,” pausing, she continued, “and by the state of California,” and a cheer went through the sanctuary as she pronounced the women “spouses for life.”

This is only a drill, but an important one.

Across Alameda County, tactical teams from 25 law enforcement agencies are going through 48 hours of simulated disasters, terrorist attacks, riots and jail breaks, from 6 a.m. Saturday to 6 a.m. Monday. In all, 1,700 people are involved in making look real a long list of answers to the question: What’s the worst that could happen?

Urban Shield, as the training exercise is known, is in its second year. It builds off law enforcement experience from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and 1991 Oakland hills fire.

“It’s been 17 years since those,” Sgt. JD Nelson of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office said. “We have people in our department who were in kindergarten when that happened.”

He added: “Unless you operate all your gear and test all your people, you don’t know how they’ll perform when the real thing happens.”

At Cal State East Bay, deputies from the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office are running the dignitary protection scenario. Every agency team will do this, with the same threats, and each team is scored. The overall operation aims to find the best practices, and to make sure every agency knows what worked and what didn’t.

The Santa Clara team has been briefed and is prepared to secure the speaker’s location, but a gas leak forces a last minute venue change. Now, Dr. X, as the stand-in dignitary is known, will speak in the open plaza outside Meiklejohn Hall.

There’s no standard solution to this puzzle. Every agency handles it in a different manner, some better than others. In the first five run-throughs, Dr. X was shot once, in the back. A bystander took another hit by accident. Everything is a lesson here.

When the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office team comes in, there is a smattering of applause and chants of “USA! USA!” A Doobie Brothers’ song is playing. Deputies sweep the area and the speaker approaches the podium.

A flash-bang grenade detonates. Students flatten themselves on the pavement, and members of the tactical team push Dr. X — the pill, as they call her — to the ground. Other deputies branch out as shots erupt from two sides of the plaza.

The flash-bang pulled everyone’s attention away from the two shooters. “Every team is turning around and looking at the bang,” Sgt. Chris Hummel, a tactical evaluator from the Fremont Police Department, will say later in debriefing.

The Santa Clara deputies neutralize the shooter to their left, then the one on the right. Later, the Alameda deputy acting as a would-be assassin will show off the bright-pink splash of paint on his helmet front, where a deputy’s simulated bullet hit him.

As the team backs out of the plaza, with two shooters down and Dr. X still standing, a safety officer ends the exercise. Just before he does so, the right-side shooter flinches and a deputy shouts at him: “Stay down or I’ll put another one in your head.”

“I’ll play the blues for you,” he sings, and he delivers on the promise.

The sound comes from the Mississippi Delta, translated and augmented on its way to the West Coast, to Russell City, where a new blues emerged.

Playing in front of Hayward City Hall on Saturday, Williams captures the endpoints of a musical journey espoused by the annual Hayward/Russell City Blues Festival.

“West Coast music is mutt music,” Ronnie Stewart, founder of the Bay Area Blues Society, explains. “It’s a mixture of everything.”

That bloodline includes Mississippi — along with Arkansas and Texas, and Chicago and Los Angeles.

“The rawness of Russell City music…that’s definitely Mississippi,” Stewart says. The rawness is “that real down-home, that real strong rhythm, that real simplicity, 1-4-5 every single song.”

Russell City was a gathering point. It was not a city, but an unincorporated district of Alameda County, now part of Hayward, where music and venues were unrestrained.

“Russell City was a mixture, because the African Americans came from Mississippi, came from Arkansas, came from Texas…and they all got together on the West Coast before they went on to their maritime jobs,” Stewart says. “This was during the ’40s, when West Coast blues was still getting its shape.”

Clubs in that era were basic: “Dirt floors and broken electricity. Amps buzzing, so if you touched the wrong thing, maybe you get grounded,” Stewart says. “No health inspectors, no city inspectors, no nothin’. Just the good, raw blues.”

Williams came out from Mississippi to play in Hayward. The blues are everywhere, he said. The music brings people together, and he sees more resemblance in the sounds of Russell City than the stylistic differences Stewart describes.

“I’ve heard blues in China. I’ve heard blues in Australia. Everybody’s trying to keep it as traditional as possible,” he says. “The blues is bringing us together all the time.”

Russell Kidd, selling T-shirts on Saturday, also feels that connection.

Watching Williams wail on stage, he muses on the music: “It reminds me of the suffering they went through in their early years,” Kidd says. “You can still hear that sound. It reminds me of the suffering I go through in my own life. When you put it to music, it makes you feel good. That means it gives you hope.”

The Hayward/Russell City Blues Festival will continue from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. today. The lineup includes Zac Harmon, Johnny Rawls, Vasti Johnson, Mississippi Bo, Harmonica Blues Explosion and Stars of Glory.

Production notes: I tried to keep this video simple: What is West Coast Blues? What does it sound like? Text could give more detail on the history, but I wanted sound to be part of this. I used the newspaper’s Canon camcorder (including a tripod and shotgun mic), and edited in iMovie. It’s still not as polished as I’d like, but I’m more comfortable with the medium now, and editing is getting faster.

(click the image to see a three-part slide show)

Alameda hosted its 14th Relay for Life on Saturday and Sunday, with 400 people on 26 teams walking the track at Encinal High School for 24 hours.

The Alameda Relay’s goal was to raise $130,000 in the event to go toward research, education and support of local services, such as driving cancer patients to therapy.

The relay included the first lap dedicated to survivors, and a luminaria ceremony, with candles in sand lining the track to light the way for walkers through the night to dedicated to loved ones who have had cancer.

This year’s theme was “Celebrate, Remember, Fight back.”

“Survivors celebrate that they made it through the treatment. And of course they remember the friends they’ve lost. And we encourage everyone to fight back,” said Emilia Stephens, the Relay’s team captain coordinator.

Production notes: I used the pre-built Soundslides stage for the first time on this project. In the past, I’ve coded a simple HTML page linking to multiple slide shows. This tool made connecting threads of a non-linear story simpler.

Most of the photos are mine, except in the last slide show, Requiem. For that one, I used photos gathered in a Flickr Group I set up for this event. Approval came at the last minute, so participation was low, but I think it’s an effective way to bring people into the story. Reactions to the idea were universally positive.

Biaggio Parma is “trying to hold a little bit of history that’s fast sliding away.” This jeep was a reconnaissance vehicle in Europe during the Second World War.

Parma served in the US Navy from 1957 to ’61, working as an electrician aboard an aircraft carrier.

Production notes: All photos were made with a Canon point & shoot. I gathered audio of Parma speaking with a Zoom H2 recorder. The slide show was produced in Soundslides after editing audio in GarageBand and photos in iPhoto. The whole thing took about an hour.

At the end of this very long ride, Gunn has learned that the rest of the world is not something to fear. In detailed accounts of his travels posted online, there is an unfettered joy and unrelenting optimism in what Gunn sees. The journey has made Gunn, a former Castro Valley resident, a devout pacifist and left him with an abiding love for humanity.

The most dangerous place, Gunn says, is here at home in America.

“I’ve had more aggressive things happen to me here and more threats physically…than I’ve had anywhere else in the world,” he said. “I believe that people have an idea that the world is a really dangerous place when in fact it’s extremely safe.”

Still, he recounts moments that almost ended his trip, such as a breakdown high on the Tibetan plateau, halfway between Kashgar and Lhasa, that left Gunn stranded for four hours.

“That was potentially life-threatening because the weather’s wicked up there,” he said. Other cyclists have died on that road. He paced as the temperature dropped, until he found a footlong strand of bailing wire strong enough to hold his bike together.

“That piece of wire saved my (expletive) in Tibet,” he said Saturday, pointing to a spot on his beat-up bike frame, where the wire is still attached. “I was stranded on the side of the road, and the only reason I was able to continue is that I found that piece of wire. In Tibet, there’s not a bicycle shop for 1,200 miles.”

Twenty years ago, Gunn’s mother, dying of cancer, tried to take a last trip to Europe. She never made it. Arriving in London, she immediately fell ill and had to return home. She passed away a short while later.

Even with that motivation, it took Gunn another two decades to set out. He’d traveled extensively, but not on the trip he wanted. He worked as a photojournalist for 14 years, most recently at the Nevada Appeal in Reno.

“The hardest part of the whole trip was just getting out of the driveway,” he said. “The realization took place on my 4,000th commute, during my 14th year as a small-town daily newspaper photographer,” Gunn wrote in his second blog entry. “For nearly a decade-and-a-half I was paid below-average wages to record history through the lens of camera, shooting nearly a million photographs. Following each day, my photographs appeared on the sheets of recycled paper that the better part of 15,000 souls complained about on a daily basis.”

The daily grind of tragedy and banality was getting to him.

“Something deep inside me was saying that there was something more to my photographic capabilities than the visual documentation of lackluster events that repeated themselves seasonally ad nauseum. Christmas bake sales, service club check passings, first babies of the year, senior volunteers of the week, groundbreakings, ribbon-cuttings, pets of the week, dimly lit high school sports events and local government meetings — the meat and potatoes of my job,” he wrote.

So he quit.

On July 1, 2005, he crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. It was cold and foggy. He and Matt Haverty, a friend of 25 years, rode through the city, took the ferry to Vallejo, then turned east toward Sacramento.

At the end of the journey, his back to the ocean, Gunn is still processing everything he saw. “I’m still unfolding the whole story in my mind,” he said. He is hesitant to pick a favorite place, though in conversation he drifts back to the Silk Road: Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Western China.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said, about to mount his bike and recross the Golden Gate. “This human family out there wants to see their brothers and sisters. They want to come and meet you.”

Photo by Ray Chavez, Bay Area News Group. This story originally ran in the Hayward Daily Review.