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Thursday morning, somebody asked Matt Snyder, "Did you ever consider just renting a billboard?" Snyder only smiled. By now, he is very good at not giving anything away.
Saturday in Sun Prairie, Snyder, who works for Mercury Marine in Fond du Lac, will marry Tanya Hein, who works in the state Capitol on the staff of state Rep. Karl Van Roy.
The real story here, however, is Snyder's marriage proposal. It is almost certainly unique in the long history of people getting engaged.
Snyder and Hein had been dating since 2004, when they met on a UW Hoofers canoe outing on the Kickapoo River.
As often happens when a couple has been seriously dating for several years, the subject of marriage loomed, largely unspoken. Both Matt and Tanya felt they had found their partner for life, but were struggling inside about how to proceed to that next step.
"I didn't want to push him," Hein said. "But I was getting antsy."
Snyder, meanwhile, was considering how to pop the question. "I knew that she wanted something special," he said.
On May 16, an envelope was slipped under the door of Hein's office in the Capitol. It contained a message directing Hein to be at the Safe House restaurant in Milwaukee by 5 p.m.
She called Snyder, who said he knew nothing about it, other than he had been given a message to pick Tanya up and have her in Milwaukee by 5.
Hein knew better, of course, but wasn't sure what was up. When they got to Milwaukee and walked by the river holding hands, she thought, "Is he going to ask me to marry him?" But they had no special ties to Milwaukee, so why there?
The answer was at the spy-themed Safe House restaurant. When Hein opened her menu, there was an envelope inside with her initials and the words "top secret."
Inside, a note began: "You have been assigned a mission of extreme importance." There was a key and instructions for her to return to her condo in Sun Prairie.
Back at the condo, Hein discovered a large chest that didn't belong to her. It had several locked drawers. She fit the key from the restaurant envelope into the top drawer lock. Inside, there was a coded message, which when deciphered directed Hein to a location on the Kickapoo River.
It was 2 a.m. and it was dawning on Tanya that she was not going to be getting engaged that night.
What she was embarking on instead -- though she didn't know it at the time -- was a two-month adventure, played out every weekend, that would test her endurance, strength, math skills, map-reading ability, talent for solving puzzles -- and patience.
She would be accompanied by Snyder (still claiming he didn't know what was going on), who had spent the previous six months secretly criss-crossing the state of Wisconsin, planting keys at spots that signaled important moments in their relationship.
In one marathon 14-hour day in April, Snyder had hidden keys near the Kickapoo River; Governor Dodge State Park; Devil's Lake; and J.T. Whitney's restaurant in Madison. Another day he drove more than 200 miles to the Porcupine Mountains in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
Hein's first road trip -- the Saturday after the Friday night dinner at the Safe House -- was to the Kickapoo River south of Soldier's Grove, where under a bridge guard rail she found a key. It opened another drawer in the chest at Hein's condo, where a message to be deciphered would direct her to the next location and another key.
Each location had a reason -- the J.T. Whitney's parking lot was the site of their first kiss. Some of the encrypted messages, involving complex letter codes, linear algebra and trigonometry, were highly difficult to solve. A key near the Parnell Tower at the Kettle Moraine State Forest was lodged inside a 60-pound rock that Hein had to carry out of the forest.
Hein said that while it got frustrating at times, she was pretty sure that after all the travel and problem solving, there would be a proposal at the end.
She thought July 4 was the day. The last key had sent her to Devil's Lake. "I thought it was the end," Hein said. Instead, she found GPS coordinates directing her 236 miles north to the U.P. of Michigan.
"I did everything I could not to cry," Hein said.
On July 12, they drove to the Porcupine Mountains. Tanya employed maps and trigonometry to find a large ammunition can buried in the woods. Inside was a box. When she opened it, "their" song -- "Everything" by Michael Buble -- began to play. And there was, at last, a ring. Tanya turned and gave Matt a big hug.
He said, "Will you marry me?"
Tanya -- and this is my favorite part of the story -- handed Matt an envelope. Inside was a puzzle. "My answer is in there," she said.
But then she laughed, and told him how much she loved him, and they sat together on a swing and watched the sun set over Lake Superior.
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