Rosemary, the four-year-old, woke up first. She told my brother-in-law, Lance, that there was something on the roof.
Seven of us were at my family’s river house on the Guadalupe, between Ingram and Hunt, for the Fourth. Our little stretch of river is wide, green, cool, deep, and slow. It is some of the best swimming anywhere and one of the most beautiful spots in Texas, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve spent many peaceful afternoons there, floating and staring up at the cypress trees that tower over the water. The house, a one-story cabin on stilts about fifty yards from the river up our steeply sloped yard, was built right after the 1987 flood that devastated this region, killing ten teenagers. Concrete pillars put our family’s place a few feet above what officials consider a one-hundred-year floodplain. More than once I’d tried to imagine the waters rising that high, but it seemed impossible.
We’d had pizza for dinner and spent that Thursday evening playing hide-and-seek with Rosemary, a rambunctious, expressive, willful little girl with blond hair and blue eyes who can speak Spanish and calls me Tío, and her baby brother, my twenty-month-old nephew, Clay, a towhead who’d just learned to say the words “boo” and “yellow.” After the kids went to sleep, a few of us played charades until about 9:30 p.m., when we all said goodnight and went to bed.
I woke around 3 a.m. to the sound of thunder and rain. My only thought was, I hope it stops so I can go on an early-morning run. Shortly before 4:30, I would later learn, Rosemary climbed down from the top bunk of the kids’ bedroom and went to get her father. Lance stepped out of bed to see what was causing all the pounding and creaking. I stirred at about that time, too, and heard what I figured were the kids running around the house, excited by the storm. Or maybe the winds were causing tree branches to slam against the metal roof. I heard Lance call out for his wife, my sister Alissa, and I got out of bed and walked into the main living area. I saw my dad, Clint, who is 73, and Lance peering out through the sliding-glass doors that led to the back deck. The house was dark, but Dad held a flashlight, aiming it into the night.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“We’re in trouble,” he said. “Big trouble.”
I looked past them. The river was as high as the deck, twenty feet above the ground.
We had spent so many hours on that porch looking out over the yard and to the river below. Now the water splashed against the bottom of its railing. The gravity of our situation didn’t sink in right away, but the facts were clear: We were surrounded by fast-moving floodwater, and we had no way of escaping to higher ground.
Rosemary and Clay Parisher in Austin this summer. Courtesy of Darhys Rodriguez
I ran back to my bedroom and woke up my husband, Patrick. Soon all of us—Dad, Lance, Alissa, Rosemary, Clay, Patrick, and me—came together in the living area. Clay flashed his adorable smirk at Patrick, eager to play. We talked through our options. Getting onto the roof was impossible. We had no ladder, and the eaves were about eight feet above the deck. Patrick weighed whether we could all climb through a window into the live oak whose branches were near the back of the house, then realized it wasn’t reachable. Lance called 911, but the dispatcher said he didn’t know when anyone could get to us.
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