David Vizarraga planned to pop the question at his girlfriend Jamie Smith’s house, before they headed to his birthday dinner. But things didn’t go according to plan, starting when Smith insisted on picking him up for the dinner. As a result, Vizarraga found himself parked in her truck in front of the restaurant — with the ring still in his pocket and a group of his friends eagerly waiting to celebrate inside.

“I was like, ‘OK, I’ve just got to do it now,’” he recalled, and so he pulled out the ring box, opened it up and asked Smith to marry him.

Smith was caught a bit off-guard by the impromptu proposal in her truck, but she was sure in answering “yes.”

“I’m beyond excited to marry my best friend,” she soon announced on Facebook.

From classmates to friends

Smith and Vizarraga graduated from Powell High School in 1998, but they were not high school sweethearts. They didn’t even hang out together.

“He was a jock,” Smith said of Vizarraga, who competed on the Panther football, basketball and track teams.

“She didn’t even know I existed,” Vizarraga countered.

Regardless of who snubbed who, the classmates went their separate ways after graduation. Vizarraga wound up in Wisconsin, where he worked as a machinist, while Smith stayed in Powell, becoming the pressman at the Powell Tribune. They both went through other relationships.

But Vizarraga never lost his love for Powell, finding it harder to leave each time he came to visit family. Around the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Vizarraga came home to assist his mother with some medical issues and “I just decided to stay,” he said.

He took a job at Big Horn Co-op and reconnected with Smith during her frequent trips to refuel the Tribune’s van. Vizarraga was interested in his former classmate and he got an opening when Smith suggested he could earn some extra money by chopping firewood for her mom.

Vizarraga seized the woodchopping offer and — following some prompting from Smith’s mother — asked Smith out to dinner in the fall of 2020.

Smith had recently left another relationship and “just wanted to do my own thing for awhile,” but she agreed to go to the Cody Steakhouse — as friends.

That was fine with Vizarraga. But in the months that followed, their relationship deepened. There were many more dinners, time they shared as they helped a sick friend tear down an old building and a Fourth of July celebration. The two realized they had many friends in common from their high school days and shared interests in camping, hiking and animals, among other things. 

In November 2021, Smith announced what had become fairly obvious to their friends: They were “a thing.”

Based on respect

Smith said she was won over by Vizarraga’s persistence — and the respect he showed for her space and time.

“There was never any pressure. It’s like, ‘We can be friends for as long as you want,’” she said.

Smith said she just had to get over her worries that the relationship was a mere “rebound” and realize “there was actually chemistry there.”

When Vizarraga and Smith walked into WYOld West Brewing Company last month as a newly engaged couple, their friends were elated. As it turned out, Vizarraga probably could have held off and proposed at another time and in another place: The group waited to see a ring on Smith’s finger before offering any cheers. But all’s well that ends well.

Smith and Vizarraga, who is again working as a machinist, at Gunwerks in Cody, have already been talking about wedding plans. However, befitting a relationship that’s been decades in the making, they’re taking their time: Their current plan is to wed in the summer of 2025.

“We’re comfortable with where we are,” Smith said.