The storm was thick, the clouds lowered, and the sky darkened to the point that the headlights were doing little good even at 2 pm. The rain was so heavy that we could only see a car length or so in front. We slowed to 45 mph and were cautious in keeping a good gap between us and the car ahead of us. Trucks were still splashing by us at full speed even though even at 45 we’d started to hydroplane a few times. The water, rising now on the sides of the roadway, had pooled so heavily in the fields that it looked like we were crossing a lake for several miles. On a few occasions, we slowed and pulled over, scared of being hit in the rear and unable to see very far ahead, when the water was so high crossing the highway that there were strong currents and white caps. The dry arroyos we passed were bubbling with rapidly moving brown water from the fields. A tree branch swept by, and we had to swerve a little to miss it.

Just south of Post, Texas we pulled to the side behind a number of cars, and the roadway going in both directions was crossed by a flowing river. No telling how deep. This was “turn around don’t drown” territory, but a car (shorter than ours) crossed going southward and seeing this, the car in front of me went for it, so I stayed close in its wake, and we passed through okay.

I knew that the large pond on the south side of Post would have flowed over the highway, so I knew we weren’t getting through that way, so we followed the other vehicles as they exited and took the Ralls Road through the east side of town. We had to cross a couple more angry high-water intersections and then turned into downtown and found a place to park. Our phones said that the wine bar downtown would be opening at 3 pm, so we decided to wait it out and get a bite to eat when they open. Not long after, the town was, for all intents and purposes, shut down by the 18-wheelers who had detoured through town and couldn’t get back on the main highway. My mom was in contact, and she told us that they’d had nine inches up in Lubbock over the last month, and another inch-plus in the past 24 hours.

The wine bar never opened. At least not while we were there. I reckon the owners were stuck somewhere in the traffic, and we didn’t know then what had happened just north, up on the Caprock. When the wine bar failed to open, we decided to pull into the gridlocked traffic and try to get back on 84 going north. It took a good long time to get going, but then we were climbing the Caprock, and the rain stopped. A few miles north of town, we saw that – heading south – they had it much worse. A pileup had occurred during the storm, just what we were afraid of heading north, and it looked like upwards of twelve vehicles had been smashed up, one appeared to have burned up. Wreckers were there and flatbeds and the workers were trying to clear the roadway. The traffic was backed up for a dozen miles or more and people were standing alongside the road, not sure what was holding them up.

In 2005 when we first moved to Central Texas from out in the dry west, we thought we’d found a hidden paradise. In that year the rains came thick in spring and early summer (just like this year,) and the wildflowers were magnificent, and everything was green. Back home, we averaged just 13 inches of rain a year. Here, we expected almost double that, so we thought we were literally in the clover. The prices of everything were lower and there was ground water, rain for our crops, plenty of game animals.

“Why doesn’t everyone live here?” I asked my wife.

We would find out.

A year later we were in a serious drought, and it didn’t rain for almost ten months.

I knew that the rains come and go. In 2007 we received nearly 41 inches of rain and had so many green beans to pick and can that we gave up after canning over 200 jars and started feeding green beans to all of our animals. In 2008 the 7 year drought, one of the severest in Texas history hit.

We’re in a similar pattern. It’ll rain, and it’ll dry out again. But we still believe we live in a hidden paradise. The droughts just keep out the riffraff.

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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.