HEBRON — A wedding reception turned into an especially memorable event for the bride, groom and some 300 guests earlier this month after the group weathered severe thunderstorms and a nearby tornado.
Heather Gammon and Kevin Pulkkinen were married Saturday, June 5, at a ceremony at the All Souls Chapel in Poland Spring. They held the reception at the Hebron Pines Campground, due to its proximity to the couple’s home and the overnight facilities there.
Heather said the first dance and some of the speeches occurred before the storm hit. Torrential rain, large hailstones and lightning strikes put a hold on the celebration as guests focused on keeping the enclosed tent from blowing away.
“We had a guy on every pole of the tent,” she said. “We also had people standing on the flaps.”
A smaller tent being used by the caterers to prepare meals was not so fortunate, and high winds toppled it. Heather said some food was salvaged as other guests worked to keep the disc jockey’s equipment out of the streams of rainwater. Her sister and maid-of-honor, Lyndsay Gammon, said the DJ came over at one point to say that a tornado was heading through the area.
“The look on her face I don’t think I’ll ever forget,” Lyndsay said.
The twister touched down to the south of the campground, uprooting trees and damaging structures in Paris and Oxford along a path from the Hebron Road to Merrill Hill Road. Heather said the group was lucky to have missed the worst of the damage, and it was also fortunate that the tent stayed in place and no one was electrocuted by lightning strikes while holding onto the poles.
“I look back on it and it scares … me, because we had so many kids in there,” Heather said.
“It’s a wedding that nobody will ever forget, that’s for sure,” Lyndsay said.
The storm photos made it into the wedding album. One early shot shows the newlyweds at the campground with clouds ominously gathering in the background. Another photo, taken after the tempest, has the couple standing in a newly formed mud puddle. It was included on their thank-you cards, along with the inscription, “Thank you for a hail of a good time.”
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