One night at the end of summer, Tim Deaton and Chad Conway were lulled to sleep by the rain on the roof of their small blue house, built five years ago next to a redbud tree.

The water was welcome after a few hot, dry months. And even the power going out didn't rattle them; outages are a common occurrence in their Perry County, Kentucky, hollow. Down the road and across KY-476, Troublesome Creek rippled down sandbars between thick, green banks.

Kentucky's state geologist called the flood "unprecedented." He also noted that it was "consistent with our expectations" for climate change.

Above the creek lived Conway's mother, Peggy, in a historic two-story home where candles lit the upstairs windows and ferns hung from the wide front porch overlooking her 400-acre property. To get by, Peggy and her family sold pumpkins, mums, and beef from a small herd that grazed a former strip mine on a hillside.

Although Troublesome may have been named for its tendency to overflow its banks, the only time the creek had come near the house was during the flood of 1957. But just after midnight on July 28, Peggy saw that the water had reached the cornfield. Concerned, she drove to check on her son and found water rushing off the mountain behind his home so fast that it swamped the hood of her car. Just down the road, the two steel I beams supporting a bridge were bent into horseshoes. Trailers that Deaton rented a half mile away floated down the creek.

Peggy floored her car up the driveway. Inside, she told Conway the water had reached the barn where he stored hay for his cattle, but he didn't believe her. "Chad," Peggy repeated, "it's already up to my waist in the barn."

During a lull in the deluge, around 3:30 a.m., Conway and Deaton made a break for the barn. An enormous red oak had fallen in front of their house. They found their son Jake's bull, raised for shorthorn breeding, trapped in a paddock with just his eyes and snout above water. Using Deaton's flashlight as a guide, Conway swam into the paddock, pushing the terrified animal to safety.

Down the road, Missy Young sat on her front porch as water rushed by at a seemingly impossible rate. She and her partner, Donny Sexton, strategized how they and their family could escape their two-story home. Around 4 a.m., Sexton floated across the basement on cabinet doors torn from a kitchenette, busted out a window, and placed ladders across an eight-foot gap to the hillside out back. Once across, the family, plus two dogs, sheltered beneath an apple tree.

The world felt like chaos. Lightning flashed across the water. Young heard trees breaking, objects shattering, and booms as the water slammed homes, front porches, and cars into the bridge that crosses Troublesome Creek just yards from their home. When the storm became unbearable, they sought shelter in an empty neighboring house until the water began receding.

At daybreak, Young shivered as Black Hawk helicopters zoomed overhead. Exhausted, Conway walked up an old coal road with Jake. When they reached a clearing above the road, they saw Peggy's handsome white house in a flat plain of brown water. Houses in Rowdy, their tiny community, had water up to their roofs. "People have lost their lives," Conway told his son.

The 2022 eastern Kentucky flood was deemed a 600-year event. Thousands lost their homes and nearly all their possessions. At least 40 people died. Kentucky's state geologist called the flood "unprecedented." He also noted that it was "consistent with our expectations" for climate change.

Three weeks after the flood, Young stood in her gutted basement holding a cigarette. In a gray cutoff T-shirt and light jeans that flared around brown work boots, she pointed out the pantry, once filled with home-canned vegetables, sauces, and jams that she sold at the farmers' market. Three deep freezers were once stuffed with preserved food. Her backyard once held raised beds of medicinal herbs. She calls this the 2nd Chance Homestead, a name inspired by her decade in recovery from an addiction to the opioids she was prescribed for pain following a series of surgeries.

"I didn't come out of addiction the same person that I went in," Young said, looking at the concrete pad where her barn once stood. "I always liked to be outside, and now I need to be outside. I'm the happiest woman alive in the spring when the ground is soft and turned up and I can run through it barefoot."

Young had applied for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But FEMA didn't compensate Young's family for the barn or the contents of their home, because they still have a livable space upstairs; it offered $500 for personal use and $1,036 for two months' rent.

"I don't think they know what to do with people from east Kentucky, especially people like us," Young said. "We grow and preserve our own foods—that's a means of barter, of money, and just food for our family. They don't know what to do with that, how to put a dollar amount on it."

Young decided not to take FEMA's offer because she wanted to be free from "the enormous added stress of dealing with them." She said, "Our peace of mind is worth far more. They added trauma on top of trauma."

Because Peggy's home was above the floodplain, the family had no flood insurance. Three freezers of beef were lost, plus the corn for their cattle and the hay in their barn. A white chicken coop where Jake had kept over 150 show hens—winning state and national championships for his breeding—was flattened. Fifteen hundred mum pots in the backyard had disappeared. Their food cellar, which once held hundreds of jars of corn, beans, beets, apples, tomatoes (whole, juiced, and sauced), sauerkraut, jellies, and jams, was encased in mud.

"When you start taking into consideration everything we've lost," Deaton said, "it's just overwhelming."

The family farm ultimately received the maximum amount that FEMA would pay for home restoration ($37,500) plus a smaller amount for personal losses. Conway found the process trying. "They're wanting you to fight and try to get something," he said. "But people don't have much fight left in them, and they know that, and it's unfortunate."

Young said that the creek didn't look the same. It had never been this wide. She wondered about the life beneath its surface. The water used to teem with crappie and bass before it was choked by debris. The creek had offered her peace after the death of her brother two years prior, she said. But after the flood, "I questioned, how much do I love that? Do I love it enough? Really?"

Like Conway and Deaton, Young said she's not going anywhere. Two weeks after my visit, she told me she had walked down to the creek again. She'd adopted a displaced dog named June Bug, and she wanted to show her she didn't have to be afraid.

"I promised her that we would walk the creek soon," Young said. "It's a process, but that creek has healed me before, and I have to believe it will again."