With a Texas game warden looking for an injured deer, finding poetry

Posted 12:10 p.m. Texas Game Warden Jim Bob Van Dyke dropped his airboat onto the road, kicked the massive fan on its back into gear, and eased it into the debris-filled water that had flooded Bar X Ranch.

The 5,000 acre subdivision 52 miles south of downtown Houston was totally swamped, a sea of blue rainwater covering what was normally a wide Texas prairie sprinkled with suburban homes.

Onlookers along the roadway told Van Dyke they’d seen an injured, trapped deer.

Van Dyke, a rangy 38-year-old who has worked as a game warden for the last 15 years, planned to patrol the subdivision, check in on trapped residents — and try to find the deer.

“I might have to shoot it,” he warned me.

The engine whirred as he negotiated through the brewing currents, strewn with prairie grasses, broken limbs, and roiling, hockey-puck sized wads of fire ants.

The work was personal; while the area is part of Van Dyke’s area of responsibility, his home is in it too.

“It’s just pretty hard. It’s your community you’re working,” he said later, speaking quietly with a soft drawl. “It’s not what I’m going to lose, but what everyone else will.”

The day before, he’d made rescues in Rosharon and Holiday Lakes, where stubborn holdouts in lowlying areas had been hit with as much as 9 feet of flooding.

He has seen his share of floods over the last 15 years with the game wardens — including last year’s Tax Day floods, which swamped many of his friends’ homes and nearly his own.

He stopped by a tall red brick house, the waters lapping by its front door. The “deer” the deputy thought he’d spotted was there too, a brown cardboard box bobbing in the currents.

He kept an eye on the water and headed west.

For now, the water was mostly clear. That was an ominous sign, because it meant the water was rainwater—- and not floodwaters from up north that still had not flowed downtown.

“We’ve got all the local rain to worry about,” he said. “And everybody else’s to the north of us.”

Van Dyke and his neighbors are confronted with a nerve-wracking guessing game. Water levels are as high as last year’s Tax Day floods, which flooded several of his friends’ homes and threatened several others.

“It’s going to be close,” he said. “With the rainfall, I’m a little nervous.”

Egrets swooped along the water’s edge; hawks soared overhead. Pecan trees popped out of waist deep water, along with lush live oaks, draped with Spanish moss and bright green carpets of resurrection ferns. It was almost peaceful. He paused by his home, his house and carport still above water. Most of his neighbors were also still OK.

The water had already crested in Rosharon, but would rise another foot, maybe even more. It would be a near thing. They’d just have to see.