HOUSTON—The morning before Hurricane Ike hit, Matthew Nez was in a joking mood.

He was capturing on home video the rising tide at his mom’s Crystal Beach home.

A mom who was defiant.  According to her, Ike was not a danger and she’d stay in her house to prove it.

“There is no way the water is going to rise to that roof!”she said. “There is no way. It is all news media, weather propaganda and I want to stay.”

And so they did.

The water rose near the bottom of their house 15 feet off the ground and the wind made them begin to second guess their choice to stay.

And as Ike arrived in the dead of night it was now too dangerous to go outside.

“Man I wish you could see this. The wind is horrendous,” you could hear them say in the video.

Their generator quit. The camera stopped rolling and Crystal Beach went black.

“Wasn’t a very smart idea. We never had an idea it would have gotten that bad or we wouldn’t have stayed,” Matthew Nez said.

Matthew Nez and Connie Travis survived to tell this story.

“The rest of the night was literally hell for me!” Connie Travis said.

And to shoot a few more frames of video after Ike was their neighbor’s helicopter rescue. Then came their own coast guard helicopter ride.

That’s when the reality of their choices finally came into view.

It wasn’t until that helicopter ride that they got their first look at what had happened to hundreds of their neighbors. That’s when they first realized perhaps the folly of the decision they’d made.

“So many people have lost everything, you know everything. No. What’s the point? I would never do it again,” Travis said.

Matthew and Connie admit they would not atempt a hurricane again, even though, remarkably, their house is still standing.

The images of what happened to their neighbors are daily reminders all around them. And then there are the echoes of that last conversation with a 911 operator who told them to get ready to die.

“Write your social security number on your arm so that if you get swept away we can identify you. That’s when I freaked out!” said Travis.

But Connie and Matthew are also from a family of builders.  They are already helping clean up Crystal Beach while offering themselves as an example of what not to do in a storm.

“People always say let’s ride out the hurricane and see what it’s like. Ok well I did and you don’t want to do that, “ they say.

Because they tempted Ike and got lucky. And that’s something that’s a bit easier to admit when you’re one of the few who tempted Ike and survived.