In Darius Rucker's hit song "Wagon Wheel" he sings about travelling through the south.
But he's a-headin' west from the Cumberland Gap
To Johnson City, Tennessee.
Over the weekend David Jones was a-headin' west from Boiling Springs to Johnson City TN. He was on his way to his daughters wedding. Normally this is a little over 100 miles, 2 hour drive up I-26. The wedding was Saturday at 11AM. He left Friday morning expecting to have dinner with his daughter. But Helene hit much harder and further to the East than anticipated. Multiple detours popped up on I-26 Around midnight he finally hit the TN state line. There the troopers had blocked it off. He expected to be told another detour. Instead he was told TN is closed.
"They said 26 was washed out and the side roads were all destroyed as well". You should turn around and head home was their advice, But David had a daughter to walk down the aisle at 11AM. It's only about 30 more miles.Surely he could make it on foot he thought. So he found a spot to park his car and started jogging. He was in total darkness with only his cell phone light to guide him as he trekked over tall mounds of debris from the deadly hurricane. "I can tell you a lot about the mud and the debris fields where I have to climb six, seven-foot-tall piles of debris of old fences and huge trees and it was just a tangled mess and dead-end roads and all kinds of things.”
At one point he almost died because he was stuck in the mud just as a crew with a backhoe arrived to clear that out. “I was up to my knees in mud and couldn’t move. And he doesn’t see me. Of course, his cab is facing the other way. Most of the time, he’s swinging this thing around, and I’m ducking. Really, I’m thinking this could be it. There was a lot of prayer at that point.”
Once he broke free he grabbed a reflective stick off the road to carry so future run ins might be avoided. With 8 more miles to go the Lord provided a ride. Miraculously it was a man he knew from a previous job who said he was compelled to drive around looking for people to help. He got him to the church in time. A quick shower and someone lent him a suit he was good to go.
His daughter didn't know till after the ceremony how much her dad had gone through to get there. Elizabeth told the news outlets, “That’s so emotionally moving [to know] that my dad loves me that much, that he’ll come and go through all of that to get to my wedding and be there on time.”