Texas Flood

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 In the spring of 2015, Texas was neck deep in dust, almost five years into a dire drought, the worst the state had seen in over half a century. Conditions were at their most severe in all but a handful of its two-hundred-plus counties, with reservoirs evaporating at alarming rates and deep limestone aquifers draining dry. Special church services to pray for rain, a practice encouraged by the then-governor and a host of other desperate elected leaders, had become commonplace.

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 And then on Memorial Day weekend it started to rain. And rain. And rain. Maybe the result of El Niño, maybe the result of a thousand previously ignored prayers answered all at once. Whatever the cause, in a cliché come to life, all hell broke loose. A forty-four-foot wave roared down the normally bucolic Blanco River, and the small Central Texas town of Wimberley saw seventy homes destroyed. Not damaged—destroyed. Towering bald cypress trees whose nubby-kneed roots first latched into the ground about the time Columbus stumbled across his so-called New World were toppled like reeds, their trunks laid as bare as if stripped and sanded by the most careful carpenter. In Houston, the water that fell from the sky would have filled the Astrodome—a building so big that Texans once claimed it to be the Eighth Wonder of the World—five hundred times over. Enough rain to cover the entire state with eight inches of water. All that water pouring down in just a matter of minutes, hours, days.

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Water can be measured, property damage tallied, but what about the incalculable losses? When it was over, more than thirty lives were lost. It took weeks to recover the dead. Among them a four-year old dancer, a homecoming queen on her way home from prom, and a married couple who volunteered at the Holocaust Museum.  

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And in the ugly light that colors all that pain, something even worse loomed. The losses borne by those who made it out of the maelstrom yet couldn’t keep hold of what mattered most defied calculation by any known device. To the woman who, unlike her elderly parents, made it to safety despite being tossed back into the churning waters of Brays Bayou when their rescue boat capsized, a longer life may come as cold comfort. And colder still for the man found badly injured but alive twelve miles downstream from the riverside home where he and his family were staying. His wife and two children—the tiny dancer and her six-year old brother—were not so lucky. It’s an eternal sadness that cannot be weighed.

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If the thing people fear most is indeed what hunts them down, then it will be fear that will hunt these poor souls until the days they too finally die. Fear that they didn’t do all they could. Fear that they missed the chance to change the odds of the cosmic crap game into which they were tossed. Fear that the supposedly well-meaning who spout platitudes like “everything happens for a reason” just might be right, and the reason was that when the time came they weren’t up to the task at hand, unable to save the ones they loved most.

       

It doesn’t matter that they’ll be wrong. Of course, they did all that they could, but there will be no believing it for them. Whatever their faith tells them about where those they loved have gone, they’ll know it’s a better place than the reality they’ve been left behind to inhabit. Circumstances knitted them their very own chainmail purgatory—one they’ll feel squeezing them until they take their last breath.

       

The aftermath of the catastrophe brought one glimmer of grace, one tiny beacon that shone bright amidst the enormity of the wreckage. Two days after the storm, spotters in a helicopter saw something moving on top of a pile of flood debris near the edge of the still-raging Blanco River. Rescuers on the ground found a wet and frightened golden retriever. Maggie was reunited with her owner, the modern day Job who had somehow survived his dozen-mile journey through Hell. Perhaps together the two of them can find a sliver of peace.