July of 2002, immediately following my return from Montana, was without a doubt the most traumatic month of my life. As I said earlier, I grew up on the Guadalupe River. This is all well and good, except when it floods. July 2002 saw a flood of near biblical proportions on the Guadalupe, which caused Canyon Lake to overflow and destroy entire neighborhoods with runoff. My childhood home, on the formerly pristine banks of the river, was under 6 feet of water. In the photo above, a Comal County Sheriff's Deputy is watching runoff coming down the spillway out of Canyon Lake for the first time ever, from a bridge that is no longer there. In its place now is a canyon hundreds of feet wide, carved by nature's fury through the limestone hills that I call home. The photo still reminds me of the feeling of helplessness that the flood left me (and several thousand other people) with. This week, work was completed on the renovation of our home -- work that began on July 6 and continued nonstop.

The memories of what it was like to live on the Guadalupe before the flood are what I miss the most today. I didn't get a single evening last summer to sit on my porch and watch the evening light stretch from blue to gray to darkness over what seems like hours of butterfly-filled bliss. In fact, I missed out on the entire experience that is Summer on the river, since I was either in Montana, watching it flood, or cleaning up from the flood. The feelings of anger and despair from the flood are muted now, but I'm never going to be able to look at the river the same way again.