MEXICO BEACH — Surrounded by the rubble of Mexico Beach, Cori Clark and Bryon Hughes were reminded of how differently they had imagined their new lives together.

Clark, a detective with the Panama City Police Department, and Hughes, a firefighter with Mexico Beach Fire Rescue, had spent the last year planning for their wedding after five years together.

The wedding was going to take place Oct. 21. The service was going to be held in a beautiful two-story house along the Mexico Beach shore. There was going to be a DJ. There were over 100 people invited.

Hurricane Michael changed everything.

Once the storm made landfall on Oct. 10, Clark and Hughes were swept into their jobs, spending hours apart while responding to emergencies, fallen trees that were blocking roads, looters, homes and businesses reduced to rubble.

By Thursday, Clark and Hughes sat down and talked about everything they had lost, but how fortunate they were. However, the stress from planning the wedding as well as just staying afloat after the storm remained.

“We’ve actually spent more in this week on generators and gas and everything than our wedding, so I thought we couldn’t’ do it at this point and put it off,” Clark said.

However, Clark credits Hughes with deciding to move forward with the wedding.

“He said ‘Hurricane Michael has already taken so much from us, we shouldn’t let it take it away from us,’ so we decided to do it,” she said.

When Clark’s friend Justin Lee Richter heard the wedding was still on, he was caught by surprise.

At the time, Richter was in the process of rebuilding parts of his life after Hurricane Michael. His property suffered damage. Even his office at Mowery Elevator had been destroyed. But on Saturday, Richter heard on social media of how Clark and Hughes were still going to get married, the same date and place as before.

“She basically said ‘You know what? We’re just going to do it and if you can make it, that’s fine and if you can’t, you can’t,’” Richter said.

Christen Harris, a paramedic with Okaloosa County EMS who was Clark’s maid of honor, had been friends with Clark since they were both seven years old in Panama City. Like Clark and Hughes, Harris has worked days on end since the storm to help people and clean up damage.

“It had gotten to this point where this hurricane had taken so much from everyone that there had to be some positive at some point,” Harris said. “The decision just finally got made that ‘We’re doing this regardless. We’re not letting this day go and letting the hurricane take one more day away from us.’”

Getting the wedding back together had to be done on the fly. At that point, Mexico Beach had been closed off to incoming traffic due to the storm, but because of the couple’s emergency responder credentials, they and other friends in the law enforcement and firefighter communities were able to hold the wedding along the beach.

Originally, Clark was going to wear the dress her grandmother wore at her own wedding that had been made by her mother. With the dress unreachable yet safe in a nearby shop, Clark wore a $90 dress she bought on Amazon and applied her own makeup.

The couple ended getting married on the beach near the rubble from the house they had once wanted to get married in. Due to the storm, most of their families could not make it to the wedding, but Clark’s father was able to fly out from Colorado to walk her down the jetty to the makeshift altar.

As they shared their vows, Hughes wore his bunker pants. By the end, Clark was wearing her Kevlar vest over her wedding dress. Both were surrounded by the men and women they had worked alongside the past week to help the community.

For Clark, things could not have been more perfect.

“It kind of, at least for me, took me away from the chaos, so it was nice being normal and out of the uniform for a little bit,” she said. “And I felt really pretty.”

Richter remembers one special moment after the ceremony as he walked behind the couple, passing by the debris of homes and businesses of Mexico Beach. At one point, Richter saw Hughes picked up Clark’s wedding dress above the sewage water and debris they walked through.

It’s an image he’ll never forget.

“The stark contrast between the destruction and the beauty of them getting married, it was pretty special,” he said. “It was the best wedding I’ve been to.”

With the exception of a one-day honeymoon in Destin the following day, the couple have had little time together since the wedding, both working long hours in the cleanup and rescue efforts across Bay County.

“She’s doing her thing and I’m doing mine and we just kind of meet at the end of the day, drink a beer and cuddle,” Hughes said.

Sara Lynsey, the wedding photographer and Clark’s friend, felt the wedding was an important thing for people who have been through the worst of the storm.

“I think we all feel like our city is destroyed, so it’s great to have some sense of normalcy,” she said. “I think that’s what it is: hope, that sense that we’re all going to be okay.”

Harris felt that the wedding and witnessing the love between her two friends was a major part of rebuilding her life after the storm.

“Everybody needs to hurt and everyone needs to grieve, but you can’t unpack and live there,” she said. “This was all of us not unpacking and living there. This is still our home, this is still our lives, these are our friends, these are our families.

“We were just very fortunate that we were still able to make it happen.”

For Hughes, he’s happy that the wedding has brought together so much happiness from others.

“If it helped anybody’s spirits come up a little bit, that’s just awesome,” he said.