Click here to view a photo gallery from the flood.

Chris Wagner, a North Dakota National Guardsman, took on the challenge of the Grand Forks flood, evacuating his family and other families with a kind of "we can handle this" positive attitude, his wife said. But he had this one day when the anger and frustration really reached an apex, he said.

And then something happened.

"One day, I'm sitting there physically exhausted, emotionally gone, trudging through mud, wet, dank … in my garage,"he recalled in a recent interview.

His 100-year-old house, about two blocks from the Red River in the historic Sherlock Park neighborhood, was at ground zero, a condemned area that would no longer be allowed to have houses on it. He returned a couple of weeks after the evacuation to save what he could.

He said he had had a couple of beers, was getting kind of relaxed, starting to get a little emotional, when he saw a big tour bus come by.

"We were a sideshow by then,"he said.

People in the bus were taking pictures of victims cleaning up. "This kind of sucks," he remembered thinking, and kind of waved at the bus, disgusted, and shook his head.

"It was entertainment for them."

He said he started getting tears in his eyes, and was just feeling mad, muscles tense, on edge. He looked around and everything looked like blobs of mud, his expensive power tools under it. And then he saw a mud blob on the garage floor, something underneath it.

He picked up this particular mud blob, cleaned it enough so he could see it was a mug from his childhood.

"For whatever reason, I looked into it,"he said.

And he saw that inside of it, in the mud inside, there was something lodged in there. He got it out.It was the size of a 50-cent piece, a quarter-inch-thick piece of plaster of Paris. Something he doesn't remember ever seeing before.

He said there were two words on the small piece.

"Be strong."

Wagner, who says he knows who his true boss is, said he immediately looked up and said, "Got you, boss."

Message understood.

"I'm going to get through this," Wagner remembered thinking.

He still has the "Be Strong" piece.

"It's on my desk, eye level,"he said.

Kelly Wagner said she got chills when he told her, and was uplifted by it, and she still gets chills whenever it's retold.

The Wagners got through it.

Kelly Wagner and the couple's two girls ended up living back in their hometown of Bismarck with Kelly's sister, Tammy Mills, until they could be reunited with Chris Wagner, who stayed in Grand Forks.

Ten years later, the couple, in their mid-40s, live back in East Grand Forks, Minn. They, and daughter Caitlin, 17, now live about one mile from the river in a townhome. Their other daughter, Leah Wagner, 25, is finishing a master's degree in wellness management and is interning in Grand Forks, with the possibility of getting long-term employment there.

Kelly Wagner, who had been a stay-at-home mom at the time of the flood, began to work part-time to help someone she knew whose downtown law firm was a mess after the flood.

And she thinks it was because of the flood that they now own a business.

She said that, because she took the job, an opportunity came up to buy a business for a great deal from her employer, which is what Chris Wagner stays busy at six days a week, now that he's retired from the National Guard. It's called Premier Living, at 301 N. Third St., and they sell hot tubs, rec room items, futons and above-ground swimming pools.

Where their old neighborhood was, it's now a community campground. The spot where their house was, at 724 Second St. N.W., is now a camping pad.

Chris Wagner said they go rollerblading in the area and have sometimes yelled out to people camped at that camping pad, No. 54, "Welcome to our home."

The Wagners think both cities - Grand Forks and East Grand Forks - have changed for the better since the flood: new schools, updated and new downtown buildings and infrastructure.

"Adversity happens to everyone,"Chris Wagner said. "I'll go to my grave believing that it's how you approach it, adversity, that determines how you'll fare long-term and short-term."

He said he believes in positive thinking - that if you're negative, you're going to attract that to you.

Or maybe you'll attract a muddy mug with a clear message inside.

(Reach reporter Virginia Grantier at 250-8254 or at virginia.grantier@bismarcktribune.com.)