Review of Where the River Took Us Rating *****
I started listening to this podcast on July 3, 2026, which happens to be exactly one year after this story begins. I live in the Dallas area, so I was keenly aware of the flood. But there is another reason why this story hits close to home. My wife had been admitted to the hospital that day. Three months earlier she had been diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. The recommended treatment, an oral medication, had caused liver damage. I remember visiting her in the hospital on July 4 and the two of us watching early news reports about the flood. At that time, there were people missing but not many reported fatalities. That would soon change.
This podcast begins by telling the story of one family’s experience of having their house swept away by the floods. Family members from different generations had gathered to celebrate the Fourth of July in a house located near the banks of the Guadalupe River. The timing of the flood certainly played a role in the number of deaths. There were no warning horns or cell phone alerts. People awoke to the sound of thunder and rain pelting roofs. When they did get up to investigate strange noises, the darkness made it difficult to discern the seriousness of what was happening. That changed when water became visible at levels that should have been impossible. The house was on stilts, yet water had reached the porch. All of the family members—ranging in age from 20‑month‑old Clay Harber to Clint Harber, who was in his sixties—scrambled to get out as the water began pouring in and the house started to break away.
The family was separated when the house broke apart. They were carried downstream, where most of them were able to find a tree to cling to as fast current and debris swept by. Sadly, young Clay did not survive. Each of the family members tells their individual story of what they saw and heard. None of them knew the whereabouts of the others, assuming that they had not survived. It was only after the water began to recede and daylight broke that they were able to see that some of them were in trees not that far apart.
One detail that caught my attention was told by Clint. He described seeing a car float by with its headlights on. The thing that stood out to me was that the headlights were pointing skyward, which paints a vivid picture of the scope of the disaster.
While the Harber family’s story is at the center, the podcast wisely expands to cover the tragic events at Camp Mystic, where 25 young girls and two teenage counselors—remembered together as “Heaven’s 27”—died in the flood. To help tell that part of the story, the narrator, Aaron Parsley, interviews a father who lost two daughters at one of the camps—an acquaintance who had reached out to him after his Texas Monthly article. In a desperate attempt to reach his girls, he launched a kayak into the rising river but was forced to turn back when the current became too violent and the sight of fast‑moving debris made such an attempt impossible.
The final episodes cover how survivors are dealing with the aftermath—revisiting the site where their home once stood and the trees that saved them still stand. This story works so well as a podcast because you hear and sense the emotion behind the tragedy. This is especially true when Elissa makes an appearance in the last episode to talk about her son, Clay, and her daughter, Rosemary.
This is a story about a tragedy, but it is also a story about resilience and the need to carry on. The podcast is mostly ad‑free with the exception of the occasional mention of Texas Monthly. The unobtrusive score never gets in the way of the individual stories.
As for my wife, she never returned home after her admittance to the hospital. She shuffled between the hospital and skilled nursing before passing away in October.