PORT ARANSAS, Texas — The walls had begun to contract, squeezed and yanked by the 130-mph winds of a punishing storm Bill and Paulette Rogers had underestimated.

With a resounding crack around 10 p.m., the two-story beach home shook. A tree tore through the upstairs bedroom. The frames and a wall clock came crashing down, and water surged in, fast, warm and deadly. It was then that Bill Rogers, 61, knew he had a made a mistake by staying home.

“Get the dogs,” he shouted. “Move it. We gotta go — now.”

Bill, a lifelong mechanic with tough hands and soft blue eyes, had spent Friday morning boarding up the windows, and Paulette, 64, his wife of 40 years, had picked up the groceries and sundries they figured were enough to outlast a Category 2 hurricane. Thanks to a generator, they spent the evening watching TV news of people fleeing the coast.

They rebuffed texts from Misty and Will, their grown children, who begged them to evacuate with hundreds of their neighbors. They’d weathered bigger storms, and they thought they were on the weak end of this one.

But the forecast changed, as it tends to do, and by the time the couple could question their decision, leaving was not an option.

Paulette corralled their two big dogs and two little dogs — “toys,” Bill calls them­ — and the six of them crammed into a red Ford Focus in the garage.

The Gulf of Mexico’s waters gushed in, reaching the dash.

“I talked to them right before the cellphone went out, and they were in the car, joking about how the winds were so high,” their son, Will Rogers, an assistant English professor living in Louisiana, would later say. “This is how they are as people.”

The cell towers fell. Nowhere to go. No contact, their children watching helplessly as Hurricane Harvey swirled around Port Aransas, promising catastrophic storm surge and deadly rains.

The Focus was being submerged, so they transferred to Bill’s white Ford F-250 Super Duty.

Bill plowed through the water swallowing up his home and headed for a patch of higher ground: a driveway at his neighbor’s house.

He turned the corner, nearly there, and slammed the brakes. Three boats, still attached to their trailers, were whipping in the tide, blocking his way.

He tried to maneuver, but the steering wheel wouldn’t crank. Something was stuck in the axle.

Water was spilling into the cab. Paulette set the dogs, a Chihuahua and a Pomeranian, on the dashboard, with the two larger dogs holding their own in the backseat.

Bill opened the door to see if he could dislodge the debris. He stepped onto the running board, and his feet instantly slipped under him, his body claimed by the surge rushing back to the harbor 200 yards in the distance. With all he could muster, he held on to the door. Paulette reached out and grabbed him.

“If you’re dying today,” she remembers saying, “I’m going with you.”

Finally, Bill heaved himself into the cab, tired and unable to go back out. So, at midnight, they sat and prayed.

The water surged in, up to the dashboard, 5 feet above the road.

As Harvey raged on, Paulette prayed and talked about their plans for the future.

Bill called himself stupid, repeatedly. As a young man in Fort Worth, he had raced motorcycles, and once he had crashed one trying to jump a river. But he would live to tell a reporter, “This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.”

Bill and Paulette told each other “I love you.”

The water did not relent as the dark early morning wore on, and they sat, water to their shoulders, in the cab of a truck, now buoyant, bobbing with boats on the street. For moments at a time they gave in to exhaustion and slept.

At dawn, the water receded and the couple stepped out to find themselves lost in a ravaged neighborhood.

Paulette was looking around for the house, but Bill knew it was right in front of them, unrecognizable, the entire second floor reduced to a pile of wood and broken furniture and clothing. The walls were gone, everything lost: a house, a car, a truck, two tractors and a generator.