On July 28, 2022, I visited the Ellendale neighborhood of St. Louis to document the residents’ recovery from flooding due to heavy rain throughout the week. In a cruel twist of fate and weather, as the neighborhood dried from the first flood, it began to rain again — and it didn’t stop. It poured for two hours. As the water level rose and the nearby Des Peres river surged, I came to some conclusions about journalism, and why I do it. Although I was wading through uncertainty, danger and four feet of water, I knew that the resources that were available to these people were far from adequate. I wanted the city to see what it couldn’t be there to see, and I realized the transformational and rhetorical power of visual storytelling, and I used that power to tell a story.