“THE RIVER HOUSE BROKE. WE RUSHED IN THE RIVER.”
On July 4, the Guadalupe ripped our home from its pillars, pulling my family into its waters and into the night. Then morning came.

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.