The bride’s brother clanged the camp’s fire alarm and invited the guests to enter the temple.

It was farther away than we had imagined. Following the map that came with the invitation, we drove up Kanan Road, sharing the highway with motorcyclists and slow Sunday drivers.

The way led past million-dollar English Tudors and Swiss chalets whose handsome but disoriented architecture each year presses deeper into the parched chaparral of Santa Monica Mountains valleys.

At the crest, we turned onto Mulholland Highway and headed west toward a hazy horizon of ragged and tilting peaks.

Our instructions led us on, down Encinal Canyon Road where ranch-style houses and horse corrals were less frequent and more suitable than the make-believe baronies down the road.

Farther on, the bright green lawns of a golf course, looking tiny beside the mountain ridges around it, illustrated, in a perverse way, the vastness and fragility of this wilderness inside a city.

We took Lechusa Road, then Decker Canyon Road, then rejoined Mulholland Highway, which seemed to take us deep into the backcountry.

Camp Shalom was on a simple dirt road leading off the highway in the direction of the three unearthly dishes of AT&T;’s satellite communication station. Having a function that demands solitude and serves millions, the giant dishes were strangely less obtrusive there than a millionaire’s replica of Inverness would have been.

Anyway, they disappeared from sight as the road descended past a crowd of people around a swimming pool and ended at a sturdy wooden footbridge. Beyond the bridge, a wooden lodge and a cluster of rustic cabins stood under a canopy of oak trees.

We had arrived in plenty of time. The wedding was not in a hurry.

The bride, wearing shorts and a cotton shirt, was giving tours of the encampment. Overnight guests were arranging their things in the cabins, which had all been rented for the occasion.

Later, the bride put on a swimsuit and got in the pool.

About 5 p.m., half an hour past the advertised nuptial moment, a large, bald man in orange shorts sauntered down from the pool singing a Broadway tune in a Brooklyn accent. He went into a cabin and soon reappeared, in a trendy Italian jacket and slacks, the first sign that something was about to happen.

The groom’s brother then appeared in a tuxedo with an earth-tone sash for a cummerbund. He had one of those faces you knew you’d seen. It was the face of Jack Ruby in “Ruby and Oswald” and Pierre Salinger in “The Missiles of October.”

The groom was an actor too, though not yet as recognizable.

About 6, the bride’s brother, wearing a tuxedo with a red sash, clanged the camp’s fire alarm and invited the guests to enter the temple, an amphitheater of wooden benches across another footbridge.

The men picked up white satin yarmulkes from a pile on a chair.

Four attendants on a wooden stage made a canopy by stretching a cloth over four candy-stripe poles. The groom led his mother, in a plum dress, down the dirt aisle, around a fire pit made of stones and up the steps of the stage. She walked carefully on high heels, looking a little like she would have been more comfortable in a temple back home in Brooklyn.

The bride had changed into a beige lace gown and a silky train falling from a crown of satin flowers. She walked to the stage with her parents.

Then a child in a white shirt and bow tie was nudged gently across the bridge by his mother. He was carrying the rings on a blue pillow. Along the way he lost heart and began to drift, eyes skyward, toward the fire pit. His mother ran to rescue him. The young woman on stage who was playing a guitar and singing a Hebrew song couldn’t help but laugh.

The ceremony was brief and mostly inaudible. Several times the family laughed at jokes only they heard.

The rabbi raised a glass inside a napkin and gave it to the groom.

He said that Jews have been trying to explain this wedding ritual for 20 centuries. His favorite, he said, were the simple words that it symbolized the delicacy and fragility of life.

The audience cheered when the groom smashed the glass.

By then the sun was below the branches. It sent shafts of light across the improvised temple, reflecting the colors of the spectrum off women’s hair and spider webs hanging from branches. Babies cried.

At dusk the families received friends and guests on the footbridge.

A combo, set up on an outdoor dance floor, began to play the jazz of Jean-Pierre Rampal.

The guests drank champagne and talked shop, friends of the groom about drama, friends of the bride about news.

It was just about that time that a guy in Universal City, who was originally to be the subject of this piece, would have been setting a new world record for marathon dancing.

But I didn’t have any doubt that I had made the right decision to stick beside a formerly hard-bitten police reporter while she bought into the delicacy and fragility of life.

Mazel tov.