VERNONIA, Ore. -- Robb Wilson rolls down the car window, throws his arm over the door and looks outside.

KGW photo

The water keeps rising in Vernonia, submerging cars under water and flooding homes.

Like a tour guide pointing out some curious animal, he nods toward a house. That one, he says, had 4 feet of water in it. He points to another. "This guy sold out and moved to Arizona."

Wilson doesn't need to say why.

Nearly anybody who lived here one year ago remembers the day Nehalem River and Rock Creek jumped their banks and crept into more than 340 homes and hundreds of lives.

A year later, the waters have receded, but the flood is everywhere in this town of 2,200.

It is in the whirring of power tools and the pounding of hammers, in the homes lifted high above the Earth, in a small patch of pebbled land, right in the heart of the town, where 21 FEMA trailers sit, like so many Monopoly pieces.

By most standards, Vernonia has come a long way toward pulling itself back together.

"If you had seen that town it was pretty devastating," said Columbia County Commissioner Tony Hyde, himself a Vernonian. "We are head and shoulders above where were last year."

Houses have been gutted -- flooring, walls and insulation -- and then refilled.

The town's children are in school, albeit for hundreds, "school" is a set of modular classrooms.

Families forced out of Vernonia by the river's wide waters, have come back to a town that they say is worth the heartache.

The Vernonia Cares Food Bank has been restocked.

And yet, for each and every victory, it seems, there is a qualifier.

Though a number of the flooded homes are livable again, families risk losing it all to another angry winter. Without insurance, homeowners can't afford to raise or move their homes. Estimates for that kind of work usually start at about $30,000, Wilson says.

Though school is in session, it'll be a long time before a new building can be built outside the flood plain. The dismal economic outlook won't help much, as administrators try to scrape together the $45 million they estimate the building will cost.

The food bank serves about 450 people now, both in and around Vernonia, double the amount before the flood. It's a combination, director Sandy Welch guesses, of the times and the flood. "All of Vernonia was affected by the flood, whether you had mud in your house or not," Welch says.

And not everybody has come back. Their homes will be demolished. Grass will grow in their place. A few years from now, when Wilson gives his tour, he'll point to those swaths of land as casualties of 2007, just like he does the ones from 1996.

Last Wednesday, on the one-year anniversary, Wilson, who directs volunteer efforts, was waiting on a call. Some local boys were supposed to help move sheetrock to one of the flooded homes.

He was dressed in jeans and a red flannel jacket, ready for just about anything he might need to do, though he was hoping that wouldn't include handling sheetrock.

"Slow down you guys," Wilson shouted to two of his staff, who had started loading up the truck before the kids arrived. "Let those guys do the rest of the work."

"I think a lot of people assumed that (Vernonia was OK) a month after the flood," Wilson had said earlier. "A lot of people assume that it's been a month. It'll be OK. ... That's so far from the truth. They don't have any idea."

About 140 houses have been completely repaired in Columbia County, according to the county's director of flood relief. Janelle Cedergreen's is one of them.

When Cedergreen decided to move to Vernonia in 2005, after spending more than a decade away, she climbed the town's hill, looking for a place to call home. There weren't any, so she settled, instead, on a place not to far from the town's schools.

"It was in deplorable condition," she remembers. Cedergreen spent more than $30,000 remodeling the inside, keeping what she could, replacing what she couldn't.

On Dec. 3, 2007, a wet sky hung heavy and low as Cedergreen opened her door and saw police directing traffic on a main road not far from her house.

The water was coming.

She can point to everything in her house she was able to salvage the next day. A table. A chair. An entertainment center (but not its drawers). A few other things.

"I was so tired and upset," she says. "I think I was in a little bit of shock."

She began again, keeping what she could, replacing what she couldn't.

A year later, her home sits high on a base of concrete bricks. Wispy cracks, so thin they could be a trick of the eye, stretch across her walls, signs her house is settling after the lift.

Cedergreen's home is one of about 20 that have been lifted in Vernonia. There are others that should be, no doubt. But without insurance, it's a difficult proposition.