For the most part, Team Rubicon volunteers—or Greyshirts—have a passion for service. Sometimes, they fall in love with more than just the work. This Valentine’s Day TR celebrates with four new tiny volunteer love stories.
The Christmas Deployment That Brought True Love
Gary Potter and I met on Operation Amberjack, Team Rubicon’s response to Hurricane Michael, in December 2018, on the Christmas week wave. Being the only two there from North Carolina out of more than 100 Greyshirts, we became battle buddies once home. We began dating a year later.
Now, seven years later, we are life partners. He just drove me to the airport to deploy to Mississippi for a Winter Storm Fern response. —Shari Porterfield
From First Operation to Forever
My husband, Andrew Patton, and I met on Operation Two Rivers in Portland, MI, on June 26, 2015. It was an incredibly small operation and was actually my first op ever with TR. I was working the volunteer/donation table, and he came in from the field for something and we started talking. Apparently, we were the only two single people on the op. That night, we sat and talked for hours. I had to leave the next day for a family event, but we talked a few times and met up a couple of weeks later at Operation Crazy Train in Coal City, IL, and started talking every day.
One of the really cool things about Operation Two Rivers was that the town had “Portland Strong” beer mugs made, and we got them to put the TR logo opposite the Portland Strong logo. We used those glasses at our wedding. —Lindsay Patton
Romance in a Sprinkle of Sawdust
Caitlin Cahalan and Drew Hanna met in the most romantic of locations—a chainsaw class on a military base in northern Wisconsin. As volunteers based in Chicago, they kept deploying to the same locations: Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin.
They began dating, but continued to answer the call, even cancelling a vacation to deploy together to Texas after Hurricane Harvey.
When Drew was offered a full-time position with Team Rubicon in Michigan, Caitlin came with him and the rest is history. Since then, the two have supported Greyshirt development across the country, moving from Detroit to Dallas to Denver in pursuit of service and impact. Along the way, they had a Greyshirt wedding and have since had two little Greyshirts of their own—Teddy and Brendan.
They hope their children grow up to share their love of GSD and see the romance in a sprinkle of sawdust! —Drew Hanna
Sawyers in Love
I guess it starts with a chainsaw named Margaret and morphs into a love story filled with destiny, saw dust, and adventure.
I have been in TR since 2014 and Maggie since 2016. We met in 2018 at the Chainsaw Instructor 1 course that I was teaching and Maggie was taking.
At that time, Maggie was the TR State Admin for Rhode Island and Connecticut, and I was part of the Mobile Training Team, tasked with traveling the country and running training classes for Greyshirts. I was scheduled to run a series of events in her area, so we stayed in contact after the class, and then after the events in her area were done, we continued to talk.
Our first date was November 2, 2018. I flew out to Rhode Island two days early for a TR event to take her out on our first date. I was supposed to deploy immediately after the event, but I never got my flights for the operation, so I called her after the event and I said, “Hey, I don’t know if you were hoping to never see me again after this event, but I think our date went really well, and I could use a couch to crash on tonight.” We got engaged in early 2020, after the pandemic struck, and then married in 2021.
The first time we deployed as a married couple was in response to a tornado that hit near my hometown in Arkansas back in 2023.
It has been a wonderful and crazy whirlwind of deployments, classes, and biking adventures. —Jacob “Junior” Nilz
