A Wildcat Romance: Jeremiah (J.R.) and Jessica Clark - NMU Blog

Jeremiah (J.R.) Clark and I met at Northern Michigan University in 1998, and were married at St. Peter Cathedral in 2004. Our marriage began as an adventure as I started teaching 6-12th grade social studies, elementary music and high school woodshop on Mackinac Island and J.R. taught K-12 band and music in Engadine. We bought a house halfway in between the two. During the winter I had to rent an apartment on the Island once the boats stopped running. That year there was a great ice bridge across the Straits of Mackinac to St. Ignace. After hearing from Islanders about the crossing, we bought a snowmobile for me to ride across to get home to my new husband more often. J.R. drove it over to the Island first to drop it off to me. When I would travel, I would wait for one of the workers from the Island to cross and ask them to make sure I made it across. Thankfully there were no close calls, even though when you are crossing it feels like you could be Indiana Jones with the world collapsing behind you.

Since getting married we have had 4 awesome kids who are always up for our wild adventures. In 2019, we took a trip out west that we referred to as ‘The Clark Expedition’. We, mostly J.R., built a wooden teardrop camper that we finished it the night before our last day of school in 2019. As soon as school dismissed, we departed from the school parking lot in our Yukon and camper and we camped our way through 13 states and 8 National Parks. We boondock camped most of our trip and that led us to camp with some of the most beautiful views in our country. Our adventures took us to Yellowstone, the Badlands, and to our favorite National Park, Canyonland National Park in Utah. Most of the time there were only 3 of us sleeping in the camper and J.R. and two of the boys slept in a tent. However, some nights it was too windy, or the ground was too rocky so two of the boys would sleep in our Yukon and there would be 4 of us in our tiny camper. One night, our 4-year-old daughter even slept on a shelf inside the camper where we made rails out of bungee cords. The kids all loved our trip and J.R. and I both felt that it was a good sign for our relationship that we were still married by the end of our 27 days traveling with 4 kids!

This year we have added to our family and we have a foreign exchange student from Finland. J.R. is making another teardrop camper this year but this one will have bunk beds so it will fit more of us inside. Our plan is to take our exchange student with us for as long as he can stay and we will hit the Mother Road and travel Route 66 all the way from Chicago, IL to Santa Monica, CA. We are planning a month and a half to do this trip. We will camp as much as possible and since there are 7 of us try to do as many things as possible that will cost us the least amount of money. We are thankful to be teachers who have the time off during the summer to go on these wild adventures with our children.

J.R. and I met in the NMU Marching Band and were in the tuba section together. We have worked together at a Van Riper State Park, we have worked in the same school districts together as well. Our love story has many adventures and a ton of togetherness but neither one of us can think of anyone else we would rather adventure with. Hopefully, our kids will go on to enjoy spending time with their children and take them on adventures in the future as well. The Clark Expedition 2 is waiting for us in June!