He wakes in his bed. Both eyes blink open as the fan swirls overhead. Raindrops streak across the windows in the house on the hill. Tim Brady rises and settles his bare feet on the hardwood floor. It’s 5 a.m.

Today is Tim and his wife, Pam’s, anniversary. Twenty-one years on this 12th day of September. Pam’s up early, too, and the two jokingly congratulate each other on sticking it out this long. How have they done it? They are both astonished and humbled. They love each other, as only a couple who’s survived raising children and dealing with debt and the vagaries of a long life together can.

They’re getting by these days. Pam’s got a job as a customer service representative for First National Bank roughly 12 miles away in Loveland. Tim works on a crew for the city’s street department and splits time as an assistant chief with the Big Thompson Canyon Volunteer Fire Department. Fifty-one, with a thick, blond moustache and tattoos on his upper arms, he’s thin and gentle. Still, there are times—when he’s stressed, when the guys at work are busting balls, when he’s cracking a joke—his native New York accent returns. Faaaaaak.

Tim showers, then dresses in blue jeans and a long-sleeve shirt. He looks out the kitchen window. Five days of clouds and heavy rain. “This sucks,” he mutters.

The phone rings. It’s the fire department chief. Rockslide. Big boulders. No one’s going far today. Tim hangs up and tells Pam the news.

He makes a call to his boss in Loveland and says he won’t be in. He pulls on his black rubber boots and grabs a coat, a department radio, and the keys to his flat-bed pickup, which is parked on the dirt drive out front. Tim tugs a fire department cap low over his forehead and asks Pam if she wants to come along.

Rain splashes onto the truck’s windshield as Tim and Pam swoop down the muddy trail that leads from their house and drops onto U.S. 34 inside the canyon. They roll one mile west to Station 7 and get the department’s Jeep, then make their way another three miles toward Station 8, the department’s two-story headquarters just east of Drake. Shredded leaves are everywhere; mud and small rocks and pieces of tree limbs are scattered on the rain-slicked asphalt. Along the highway—just a few dozen yards below the Jeep’s right side—lies Cedar Cove, a collection of 12 or so houses and cottages tucked beneath a canopy of green. Down an embankment and through a thicket of trees, Pam can see the river transforming. Typically, it snakes through Cedar Cove; now another smaller stream hooks its way around the neighborhood. A section of the overflowing river pushes against an embankment that holds up the highway. A small stretch of the westbound lane is beginning to crumble.

Station 8 sits in a depression 100 feet from the river and is the biggest and newest of the canyon’s volunteer stations along the highway. When Tim and Pam arrive, a few volunteers are already gathered inside, including Jenica Butts, a former Big Thompson Fire EMT who’d recently moved to Glenwood Springs and is visiting friends near Tim’s house. Tim tells Jenica he’s putting her on call in case there’s an emergency on their end.

Tim and Pam trade out the Jeep for Engine 276, one of the department’s diesel-powered wildland brush trucks. It’s got a 200-gallon water tank, but as the couple pulls out and moves east, 276 hardly feels invincible. In the lowlands east of the station, roiling water splashes onto the road. The charging river sounds like a freight train. Tim drives over a snapped power line in the road and dodges the debris from the rockslide.

Five miles east of Station 8, a section of U.S. 34 is giving out. Tim grabs a roll of pink tape, ties it to a guardrail, and pulls it across the highway near a white clapboard building at the edge of the Big Thompson River. He hustles back to the engine and flops down next to Pam. Water drips off his cap brim. Tim’s never seen the river this high. The water’s rising to the bridges behind him. Tim imagines the 1976 Big Thompson Flood that killed 144 people and made national headlines—a reminder of the instability that comes with living in the canyon. An explosion of water; that’s what witnesses had called it. Twelve to 14 inches of rain in a few hours, then a tidal wave. Standing near the water on this morning, though, Tim sees the river as a never-ending torrent. The Big Thompson is overflowing slowly, pushing toward the highway. Soon it will strip the land, inch by inch, like a steam shovel.