The laughed when she planted oaks along the creek for shade — until the flood came in 1982…

The county laughed when Ruby Deering planted oak trees along the dry creek that ran through her place, because everyone in that part of the Texas Hill Country knew two things about oak trees and dry creeks. They knew that an oak takes a lifetime to grow, that a woman planting little oak whips along a creek bank was planting shade she would likely never live to sit under. And they knew that the creek was dry, bone dry, eleven months out of the year, a rocky bed of white limestone and gravel that a person could walk across without wetting a boot, so that planting trees along it for shade made about as much sense as building a dock in the desert. Ruby Deering said she was planting the oaks for shade. The county heard a divorced woman with no husband and no sense planting slow trees along a dry creek, and the county laughed.