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A wave of water 30 feet high spun Jerry Toops like a tornado. Debris battered and cut him. He fought to keep his head up, using all the strength in his legs and upper body to swim, angling across the ripping current toward a line of cedar trees. The night was as black as the water, the trees vague shadows against an ebony sky. As he was swept toward the cedars, Toops grabbed a limb and held on. Wood, pieces of plaster and litter slammed him, accumulating around his waist like flotsam against a pole in a breakwater. The rubble weighed him down. He was an outdoorsman with strong, callused hands, but inch by inch, the weight and force of the water pulled his hand down the tree limb, stripping the leaves.Just when he could hold on no longer, the debris gave way, and Toops pulled himself into the swaying treetop. Clinging there, exhausted, wearing only his undershorts in the spitting snow and 32-degree chill, he was limp with fatigue. He was alive, but as he surveyed the rampaging water, he was certain his wife and babies were dead.
Bedtime came early for the Toops family at their three-bedroom brick ranch house nestled in a forested valley in Johnson's Shut-Ins State Park. At 8 p.m. Lisa Toops put the three kids to bed. She and Jerry, superintendent of the park, followed soon after. Self-reliant and religious, they were used to a work cycle that more closely followed the sun than the flow of commuter traffic. Jerry was a real "ranger type," rugged, fit, good with his hands. His outdoorsman's beard was just beginning to gray at the edges.
The 42-year-old naturalist loved the park, with its strange formations of igneous rock called shut-ins. A billion years ago volcanic activity caused a granite upheaval and confined, or "shut-in," the Black River in southeast Missouri. Over the ages, the trapped water carved spectacular gorges, natural water slides and potholes in the hard rock. In the summertime, the park was a magnet for swimming, camping and hiking, but now, in the weeks before Christmas, all was quiet.
At 4 a.m. that December 14, 2005, the baby awoke, softly crying to be fed. Lisa brushed her sandy hair away from sleepy green eyes, plucked Tucker from his crib near their bedroom and retreated down the hall to the living room sofa to nurse him. Normally, after feeding she'd put him back in his crib, but this night they both fell asleep on the couch.
An hour later, Lisa bolted awake. There was a booming roar -- loud, then soft, then loud again -- a huge tornado, she thought. She tucked the infant under one arm and jumped up. "Jerry, get the kids!" She figured the basement was their only hope. She ran to Tanner's room. The five-year-old was climbing from his bed, awakened by the bedlam. She yelled to him to come, extending her hand, but before she could grasp him, a barrage of water rushed into the house.
It coursed around her ankles, her knees. In seconds the water level was above her chest. Lisa held the baby over her head as the surge filled the room. She didn't know what was happening, but tried to stay calm for her kids. "Hang on to the bed!" she called to Tanner, fighting to stay upright in the flood. The water kept rising, relentlessly. "Hold your breath, baby!" she called over the din. In the next moment, they were in liquid darkness.
"Jerry -- !" That was all Jerry Toops had heard of Lisa's cry to "get the kids." The sharp urgency in her voice sliced through his sleep a moment before the roar cut off the rest of her sentence. The noise. It sounded like a squadron of jet aircraft flying through the house. Jerry's feet hit the floor, and in that same instant, the back wall of the bedroom exploded, slamming him back. A second later, the opposite wall blew out, heaving him and the bed in reverse. He was deep underwater.
Intuitively, he swam upward -- 10 feet, 20, 30, before surfacing in a sea of uprooted trees, Sheetrock, furniture, and granite boulders the size of SUVs. It looked like the Biblical Flood, everything destroyed. He swam to a portion of rooftop that floated nearby and climbed on. "Lisa! Tanner! Tara! Tucker!" he called, but couldn't hear his own voice above the rushing water. Praying to see just one head bob to the surface, he knew the odds were all wrong. He was strong and agile, and it had taken all he had to escape. What chance did they have?
It seemed forever. Underwater, Lisa Toops fought for her life and the lives of Tucker and Tanner. She had no idea where Tara, her three-year-old, was. The thought was terrible. She pushed it aside and focused.
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