The wedding had been planned for the 28th day of September at Old Sherrill’s Inn, about 12 miles outside Asheville, in the mountains of North Carolina. Iris Spik and Chris Chu had invited 94 relatives and friends to celebrate their marriage. Guests came from several states, including Maryland, renting hotel rooms and houses for an early-autumn weekend in the Appalachians.

It all lined up pretty well — until an uninvited guest arrived, a wedding crasher named Helene.

The Category 4 hurricane had formed in the Gulf of Mexico, powered by high ocean temperatures caused by climate change. Helene blasted through Florida’s Big Bend region before carving a 500-mile path of destruction through areas of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina already drenched from an earlier storm. Atmospheric scientists called it a 1,000-year event and estimated that Helene and previous rains dumped 40 trillion gallons of water on the Southeast.

A lot of that water ended up in Asheville, at the muddy confluence of two large rivers and in dozens of creeks and licks that cut through the nearby hollers and hills. Trees fell, power lines came down, rivers rose and flooded country roads.

Prospects for the Spik-Chu wedding at Old Sherrill’s looked grim. Aunts and uncles, cousins and college friends were stranded in the homes they rented, without substantial food and potable water, their cellphone batteries dying. Iris and Chris spent Friday and Saturday, what would have been their big day, trying to contact everyone.

“We had been getting alerts about the storm,” says Iris, who grew up on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and met Chris a few years ago, when both worked in software development in Boston. The couple decided to make Asheville their home this year. “We didn’t know for sure what the weather was going to be. We figured maybe there would be some heavy rain. … But we did not expect this. I don’t think anybody expected this.”

Helene turned out to be one of the most destructive hurricanes since records were kept, with at least 230 deaths reported in six states so far.

On Sept. 27, Luke Malone, Iris’ cousin from Baltimore, watched the muddy water rise in a creek between the house he had rented for the weekend and the main road through Fairview. There was a small bridge over the creek, but the flood had washed away part of the bank on the far side.

Malone needed to get to town to find food for his parents and girlfriend. “But we couldn’t drive the car [a Ford Escape SUV] out at that point,” he says. “So I walked out to see if I could find food, and once I got out there, I realized what kind of situation we were in. … Everything was flooded. There was one road that would have taken me into the town of Fairview, but the bridge was completely washed away, just a massive gap in the middle of the asphalt road.”

Malone turned back to the rented house. He gathered wood, including a picnic table bench, and built a ramp at the little bridge to get the SUV over the flooded creek. He wanted to get his family out of Fairview and on the road back to Maryland.

“But then our car battery died,” he says. “So that was probably the lowest point for me.… But we got incredibly lucky …”

Let’s call it 20 feet of lucky.

A woman renting the property next door happened to have 20-foot jumper cables. “She had a Subaru and was able to get it close enough to our car, and we got a jump,” Malone says. “I can’t believe how lucky we were.”

While Malone and his family got on the road, other wedding guests were in various stages of evacuation, too, trying to communicate with one another and meet up, trying to find food, trying to locate gasoline for their vehicles, trying to find electricity and Wi-Fi service for their phones.

One group of relatives, visiting from Texas, lost their car in a landslide and had to be airlifted by helicopter out of a flooded area.

Malone and, in separate vehicles, the bridge and groom, decided to drive away from Asheville and head north. But they needed gasoline. Finding an open station was relatively easy, but the wait was long – more than three hours. Things got tense at the gas station where Iris and Chris, their friends and dogs waited to refuel. The same day, while waiting in a blocks-long line at a supermarket, Iris heard some ominous talk.

“There was a group of people behind us just saying, ‘This is really bad, it’s going to get really bad, there’s another storm coming,’” she says. “They were saying, ‘You need to get a gun, it’s going to get really crazy.’”

Iris and Chris, satisfied that their guests were managing to leave the Asheville area to safety, decided to drive to Maryland, with Iris’ parents’ home in Stevensville, on Kent Island, their destination.

Before fleeing, they and their friends made the best of an awful situation and staged a wedding ceremony outside the couple’s home. Two pots of blooming flowers adorned the bride’s path to the groom. A friend, Kayley Allen, managed to get one of those instant online ordinations so she could officiate, and Iris Spik and Chris Chu were married by a fallen tree draped with a white veil on the 28th day of September.

Dan Rodricks is a columnist at The Baltimore Sun. Please reach him at drodricks@baltsun.com with any feedback, ideas or news tips you’d like to discuss.