A Pocketknife and Bible Songs: How a Family of 9 Escaped the Texas Floodwaters

Rylan Wilt, 19, hugs her mom Keri Wilt, while listening to her grandmother Penny Deupree tell her story of surviving the flood in her home.

HUNT, Texas—It was July 3rd and Penny Deupree’s house near the Guadalupe River was crowded, just the way she preferred it.

Her son Tad and his wife had driven down from Dallas. Two of her granddaughters had joined, too, a husband and boyfriend in tow, along with two great-grandchildren, ages 1 and 3. There were nine of them in all, laughing, grilling and swapping stories on Penny’s 1.2-acre grassy patch of paradise in the Hill Country, far from the North Texas sprawl where she had raised her kids.

At 82, this is how Penny imagined living out the rest of her life: in this house filled with family and totems, like the portrait of her great grandmother, Frances Hodgson Burnett, who wrote the famed children’s novel “The Secret Garden.”

Around 3 a.m., Penny got up to use the bathroom. When she flushed, the toilet water gurgled up at her. That was strange, she thought.

She tried to go back to sleep but the rain kept pelting the pitched metal roof outside. Something told her to get up again and check the front door of the one-story house. She squinted through the darkness, still half-asleep, and couldn’t believe it.

“It looked like the ocean was coming into the house,” Penny recalled.

A rack of clothes still hanging inside Penny’s flood-ravaged home in Hunt, Texas.

She glanced toward the kitchen and the back door. There was water pouring in from that direction, too. Penny rushed to a bedroom where Tad was sleeping.

“Tad! Get up! The house is flooding!”

Within moments, the entire family was awake. Tad, 60, barked at them to get up a ladder to a small, 12-foot-high loft where the younger kids sometimes slept, but nobody was sleeping there that night.

With water rising behind them, the adults carried Penny’s great-grandchildren up. At some point during the commotion, Penny slipped, and Tad caught her before she fell backward. By the time she reached the loft, swinging her body around so she could fit, her feet dangled in water.

Penny looked across what had once been the living room, and could make out her two terrier mixes, Cisco and Tucker. One was perched on a couch now floating around the house, while the other paddled toward her. Somewhere underneath all that water was a bookshelf filled with first editions of “The Secret Garden,” as well as “A Little Princess” and “Little Lord Fauntleroy,” also written by her great grandmother.

Penny and her husband Tom, who worked in the Dallas area selling oil field equipment, had bought the home in 2007. Even before that, they had taken their kids to Hunt every year to the summer camps that dotted the river. The kids loved those camps, and from their house they could sometimes hear the morning bugles and children singing camp songs rippling across the river.

Penny wished Tom were there right now. They’d been married for 60 years. He would make sure that she survived, that the family survived. But Tom had died of heart failure a few years ago.

“I’m not going to die. I have God and I have my family, and we’re just going to move forward,” Penny thought.

There was just a few feet between where the family huddled and the ceiling. Only one phone, belonging to the boyfriend of Penny’s granddaughter, still had reception. He called 911. Emergency responders told him they were trying to get as many people out as they could, she said.

The water was almost to the loft. Tad cut a hole in the drywall with his pocketknife and started punching it with his hands. When he got through to the insulation, he and the others started clawing it out until they reached wood.

The family survived by punching a hole through the side of the house and swimming onto the roof.

Right next to the loft, the shelf of first editions jutted out of the water. Sitting atop the shelf were several wooden lobster buoys that Penny’s mother had used to decorate her house in Nantucket years ago.

They grabbed them and began frantically banging at the wood, but it wouldn’t break. They took turns kicking it with their feet, Tad’s daughter’s boyfriend, a former college Division I baseball player, pounding at the wood over and over.

“We’re going to die up here,” Tad thought.

Finally, a piece of wood broke, giving way to a mesh covering. Tad reached his hand through and began cutting a hole.

Penny says she can’t be sure how much time passed, but they managed to fashion a small hole through the wall, about 18 inches in diameter. Tad shimmied through and dropped a foot down into the water. He steadied himself against the side of the house and swam a few feet to where he could hoist himself up onto the roof of a newly built extension to the home.

Tad shouted that he’d made it.

One by one, they squeezed through the hole head first, dropping into the water and swimming the short distance to the roof, before raising themselves on top of the house. The adults hoisted the two children above them as they swam. When Penny’s turn came, she curled her knees. Two of them pushed her through feet-first, while Tad helped guide her through the water to the roof.

They sat there shivering in the rain, shouting for someone to help. The lightning flashed so bright across the river, Penny had to close her eyes. When the babies started crying, they all hummed and sang Bible hymns.

Jesus Loves Me. The Lord’s Prayer.

Somehow, the children fell asleep.Tad could hear the house starting to crumble into the flood water. They would need to swim somewhere else soon. After over an hour, a flashlight off in the darkness grew closer. It was a neighbor. The water had receded but he needed a ladder to reach them.

“There’s one in the garage!” Penny remembered Tad shouting down to him.

“I’m sorry to tell you this, but the garage is gone,” the neighbor yelled back.

Soon, he returned with a ladder, and they were down. The dogs were all right, too.

Before them was a landscape hard to comprehend. Where a neighbor’s house once stood, there was nothing. Felled, giant cypress trees littered the land that stretched the quarter mile down to the river. A red car was wrapped around a branch. The guts of Penny’s own home spilled out in the form of soiled photo albums, mangled furniture and her great grandmother’s first editions, now ruined.

“I’m alive,”  Penny kept thinking. “My children are alive. My babies are alive.”

Penny Deupree hugs Robert Horton of R.D. Horton Construction, who built the addition of her home that stayed intact and helped save her family during the flooding.

Later that day, the family was able to cross a washed out bridge to where her daughter Keri lived. They hugged and wept and prayed some more. And they tried to process bad news: the girls from Camp Mystic about 3 miles up the river who didn’t make it; a neighbor who had died; and 161 others were still out there somewhere.

Their family had been spared.

“I’m alive,” Penny said to herself.

The family standing outside Penny’s damaged home this week. Pictured left to right, Rylan Wilt, Keri Wilt, Penny Deupree, Heather Deupree, Patrick Wilt, and Matt Deupree.