Nothing was going to stop David Jones from walking his daughter down the aisle, not even a Hurricane.
Jones trekked nearly 30 miles, by car and then by foot, through Hurricane Helene's storm debris to make it to the wedding on time.
“I did what any dad would do,” Jones, a 64-year-old business performance excellence coach, tells PEOPLE.
Jones began the journey to his daughter's wedding after getting his generator going on Friday, Sept 27. The trip to the wedding venue that would normally take just two hours by car, took seven hours just to get across the state line into Tennessee. Unfortunately, when Jones got to the interstate, it was shut down and officers told all the cars that they could not go any further.
“I went up to the incident commander and I said, 'Sir, I need to get to Johnson City.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m sorry. You can’t. The bridges are out. Nobody can get through,’ ” Jones recalls.
But Jones was determined and asked the officer about possible back roads. The officer told him those roads were all washed away and that he simply couldn't drive.
It was 2 a.m. at this point, and his daughter was getting married at 11 a.m. the following morning, so Jones decided to walk.
“I’m going to be there to walk her down the aisle,” he remembers telling the officer.
He left his Ford Explorer parked at the bottom of an exit ramp, taking only his backpack, shaving kit and a windbreaker with him. Then, in the dark of night, the marathon runner started walking.
“It was pitch black, no streetlights, no nothing. The devastation was beyond description, sections of roads washed out,” he says.
Along the way, he passed several state troopers, who all tried to stop him and told him to go back to his car. “I would explain, ‘My daughter’s getting married at 11 o’clock, and I’m going to be there to walk her down the aisle,’” he says. “There was debris everywhere on the road and beside the road."
Around 3 a.m., he saw a bulldozer and a backhoe clearing the road, surrounded by piles of debris that were about seven-feet high. It was “just a tangled mess,” he says.
“I thought I would try and go around it, and I stepped down into mud that was like quicksand and I was quickly up to my knees,” he says.
Fortunately, he was eventually able to get his right leg out, but then his shoe came off, so he had to dig in the mud to get it. “I knew I couldn’t make it without shoes,” he says.
After freeing his other leg, he started to crawl on his hands and knees under and over the debris and back to solid land.
“Hollywood could not have done a better description,” he says of the damage caused by the hurricane. “The devastation is beyond description.”
When he got south of Erwin, the roads were looking better — and word of his travels had spread.
“A state trooper pulled up alongside of me and rolled his window down and said, ‘Sir, are you the one that’s trying to get to your daughter’s wedding?’ I chuckled and said, 'Yes, sir, I am. How did you know?,' " Jones recalls. "He said, ‘We’re all talking about you – they all said you’re determined.’ ”
The officer gave him a ride into downtown, but after that, it was back to walking.
Luckily, at six miles down the road a truck pulled over, and the driver was a man Jones used to work with when he was an engineer at Texas Instruments.
The man drove him the last eight miles to his home. “In all, it was just shy of 27 miles — 10 miles by car and 17 by foot,” Jones says.
Jones was able to change into a spare suit at the man's Johnson City home, even though there was just water but no power and finally make it to St Mary’s Church to walk his daughter Elizabeth down the aisle on time.
“It meant the world,” he says. “Every dad wants to walk his daughters down the aisle.”
It was a candlelight ceremony at the church because there was still no power. At the wedding reception, he gave a toast — and presented the bride and groom, now Mr. and Mrs. Marquez, with the reflector he carried on his journey.
“I told the story of the 27 miles and how if there was any way, I was going to find it. Lots of tears were shed by me and others,” he says. “I said, ‘I want you to keep this reflector as a reminder to always protect each other, even in your darkest hours. That’s when it’s needed the most, as it did for me, and for you both to continue to be a reflection of God’s goodness, because you are such good people.’ ”
Source: People