Terry Labonte spoke audibly as his right hand searched for wood to knock on a couple of times. His mind searched old thoughts from youth-for whether he had imagined he would win two Winston Cup championships, and if he did, the things along the way that might present fear or a new aspect of concern.
"You know," he concluded, "I never figured water, just never figured water." But for a good part of three days, summer floods in South Texas kept the race driver, his pilot, and co-pilot stranded at Labonte's ranch.
"It wasn't a life-threatening situation, but now I can understand how people get in trouble with high water," he says. "It may not look like much until you are there in the current. Then you realize that things can go bad."
Eddie Masencup, the pilot; Clyde Holler, the co-pilot; and Labonte left Chicago in Labonte's jet on Sunday night after the summer race. Their plans were to go to Labonte's Texas ranch for a couple of days, then go home.
"Eddie looked at radar and said to me: 'There's a storm down south of San Antonio. Maybe it will clear by the time we get there,'" Labonte says. "We stopped to refuel in Dallas. We checked the weather, and the storm had not cleared."
It's nearly a two-hour drive from the airport to the Labonte ranch. Labonte keeps a pickup truck at the airport to drive to and from the ranch. So the three climbed into the pickup and headed for the house. They stopped at the small town nearest the ranch.
"We were going to get groceries, but they were locking the store," Labonte says. "It was about 10 o'clock on Sunday night, and everything was closing. We figured it didn't matter, that we'd come back to town next day and get food, so we headed on to the ranch."
You have to understand that traffic jams are few in the vicinity of the ranch. After 17 miles on an unpaved road, dodging four or five feral hogs and two packs of javalina, you pass through a couple of locked gates, scare off half a dozen owls, drive slowly to avoid hitting deer, point your finger at a couple of coyotes and pull an imaginary trigger, and you know you are getting close by the wild turkey tracks in the ditches.
Labonte wanted a remote ranch in his home state of Texas. He found it in 1998, backed up against the Nueces River. With careful planning, he picked the highest spot on his ranch to build a beautiful house. From the house, it's 111/42 miles to the river.
"About 5 miles from the ranch it began to rain hard," Labonte says. "We made it to about 111/42 miles from the house and got stuck. It was pouring down by this time. Finally, we got out and walked through water most of the way to the house."
In the morning, they got a tractor and went to pull the truck out. "We had to pull the truck to higher ground," Labonte says. "The current on the ranch road was strong enough that it tried to wash the truck into the brush as we were pulling with the tractor.
"It rained about 7 inches on Monday, and we kept noticing the river getting closer to the house. We'd put up sticks to see if the water was rising. It was, and we were surrounded by water."
The previous owners had about 30 head of cattle. The cows were part of the transaction. "The cows all came to the house," Labonte says. "They bedded down out front, and every time we'd go outside to do something, they would stand up and look at us as if to say, 'Well, what are we going to do now?'"
Monday night the three castaways began picking up furniture in the house and placing it on counters. "By now the river was within 100 yards of the house and rising," Labonte says. "We were sure it was soon going to be running through the house. We got up about every hour and checked. The cows got up every time we did."
But it stopped raining Tuesday morning, and the river slowly began receding. The men rode 4-wheelers back to the pickup. "We hooked the truck behind the tractor and pulled it about 3 miles to where we could drive it," Labonte says.