A date, a flood and a gecko named Gaston

As first dates go, it was a little on the extreme side, seeing as how they almost died and all.

Then again, it wasn't really a date.

Justin Walker was simply giving his classmate Jessica Hammer a ride on a very rainy afternoon. A couple of ill-advised turns later, they found themselves in Shockoe Bottom, generally a fine place to be except on this day -- Aug. 30, 2004.

That was the day the remnants of Tropical Storm Gaston dumped a foot of rain on the Richmond area and flooded the Bottom. You might say it changed Justin and Jessica's lives forever.

"It's the thing that brought us together," she said of the storm.

First-year students at the VCU School of Pharmacy, Jessica and Justin had started classes that day and met by chance at the school gym in the afternoon. She needed a ride to her home in The Fan. He offered one.

However, instead of making a right turn on Broad Street and heading west toward The Fan, Justin turned left toward Church Hill.

"Did I mention I'd been in Richmond one week?" Justin, a native of Stuarts Draft, said with a laugh.

Jessica assured him it was OK. They could cut over to Main Street and go that way. They didn't realize what they'd gotten themselves into until they noticed water rising in the streets as they sat in a traffic jam near Main Street Station.

Out of nowhere, a wall of water swamped Justin's Volkswagen. The truck in front became a seagoing vessel and floated into them. Justin's engine quit. Waves splashed against the car's side windows. The street had become a river.

Justin might not have known Richmond, but he knew it was time to bail out of the car. Jessica wasn't so sure and didn't budge.

"Jessica, I'm not kidding," he told her. "Get out of the car!"

He unbuckled her seat belt and kicked open the passenger door. The two of them swam to the steps of the train station and then moved inside as the water continued to rise. They wound up on the second floor with other refugee motorists and marooned office workers.

They watched as Justin's red car took a nose-dive into the swirling water, its rear-window wiper furiously swishing back and forth.

Eventually, an Amtrak train came into the station heading north but could go no further. Those stranded at the station boarded the train, which went back across the James, and stopped nearby for the night with passengers on board.

Food? Wearing gym clothes, Justin and Jessica had only a few dollars, so in the dining car they had to choose between an order of nachos and a whole sandwich, or an order of nachos, a half-sandwich and a beer.

They went with the beer combo.

Good choice.

"I never have been one who believes in cheesy fate, but there was a moment on the train where I said, 'This is who I'm going to end up with,'" Jessica said. "We had just connected. By the end, he and I were just laughing and enjoying each other's company."

Fate? Maybe so. Justin met Jessica's parents the next day as the two dried out at her family's Chesterfield County home and ate pizza.

That first semester, Justin and Jessica shared textbooks -- hers were in the back of the sunken car -- and dated, though it wasn't so much a formal activity as just something that seemed to both of them like the right thing to do.

On the first year anniversary of their adventure in The Bottom, he bought her a gift she'd always wanted: a gecko. She named it Gaston.

"It truly blossomed from a friendship to love," Jessica said.

In July 2007, on the way back from a meal at Bottoms Up Pizza, they stopped by Main Street Station, ostensibly to revisit the scene of the crime, so to speak. On the station steps, Justin went down on one knee and proposed to Jessica.

Both pharmacists now, they were married last September and will celebrate their first anniversary soon after next week's fifth anniversary of Gaston.

"It was a horrible, horrible event, but a lot of good came out of it," Justin said recently, sitting at the kitchen table of their home in Mechanicsville, "especially for us."

But they tend to keep an eye on the weather before making plans for an evening out.

Said Jessica with a laugh, "We do not go to The Bottom when it rains."

Contact Bill Lohmann at (804) 649-6639 or .