A different kind of water story.
In 1995 my dad, uncle, me and some friends were deer hunting on our place along the Black River in Southern MO. The area is very hilly and very rocky. It had been raining for two days when we arrived. Steadily, but not terribly hard. That first night the sky opened up (we later heard it had rained 4 inches in 12 hours. Not only where we were, but up river as well).
About 4 AM my dad gets up to pee and finds the river topping the bank. A rise of four feet in about 4 hours. He wakes me and everyone else and because we know the road into camp has a big dip in it that we have to go. Quick. On the way out my uncle’s car drowns and we frantically wade in with a tow rope and get him out. Once in the clear we do a headcount and we are short one person. The 13 year-old son of a friend. In an act of bravery I’ll always remember my dad runs to his truck and speeds off in the direction of camp to find him. We later learned his truck drowns in one of the creeks he has to cross and is swept into a tree. He makes it across and to a neighbor’s house where they slide his boat off the driveway into the river now lapping at his door and somehow get through all of debris floating down river (including a house we saw go by and our camper that was swept away without a trace) and find this young man in the other camper which is at this point floating and jammed between two trees. Dad cuts the canvass top and pulls the kid out and they get themselves to safety. The kid had apparently been groggy and gone back to sleep. At that point he was minutes from dead.
In the meantime, I and one of the others start down the road looking for my dad. Trees are falling by the hundreds as the soil is washed away and rocks as big as cars roll down the hills around us. To this day I remember the roar of the water and crashing of debris being so loud that shoulder to shoulder we were yelling to each other to be heard. About a half mile in we find dad’s truck on its side in a flooded creek. We could go no further so we trudged back to join the others. Two hours later my dad and this kid roll up in the neighbor’s truck. I was never so glad to see him.
We need another 8 hours to get on the road home because the two bridges we have to cross are under 6 feet of water.
We learned the water eventually got 25 feet over our camp and three people died within a mile of us.
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