OAK ISLAND, Texas – About a 5-iron shot from the Trinity Bay, a golf club is impaled up to its grip in muck. A huge hunk of sheet metal sways and creaks in a tree. An overturned bathtub and an upright toilet stand near a shattered mirror and a single tennis shoe.

Vickie Dearman finds very little where her father's home used to be. The slab is wiped clean, scattered who knows where. She wanders around collecting pieces of her family's life: a cast-iron skillet, some silverware, a ceramic elephant her mother made. There's no sign of her father's motorized chair. The 84-year-old was evacuated before the storm.

"There's his toilet. I know it because of the red seat. I gotta get pictures for insurance," she says.

About a mile away, down a road that dead-ends into Double Bayou and doesn't even show on a map, is a place that wasn't much before and is now even less after Hurricane Ike. Of the four homes and two trailers that used to be here, only one is still standing. Another was moved but remains habitable. The others are mostly in shreds.

That's the case across much of Chambers County, which straddles Trinity Bay to the east of Houston and Galveston. Much attention has been paid to heavily populated Houston and highly vulnerable Galveston, but Chambers County took Ike's hardest punch – on the so-called dirty side of the storm as it rolled ashore last weekend.

Some of the highest recorded wind gusts – over 100 mph – were at nearby Anahuac. The storm surge was 15 feet in some places.

That explains the mess that residents have returned to find.

"We just didn't think it'd be this bad," says Ruby Lasseigne. "All you heard about was Galveston, Galveston, Galveston."

The trailer she used to live in lies in the mud, 30 yards away from its foundation.

"Now look at it. It's ruined," she says. "Maybe we'll get FEMA trailers, but they don't know we're here."

Oak Island isn't an island at all.

According to the Handbook of Texas, the piece of land between the east and west forks of Double Bayou was named for a clump, or island, of oak trees in the water. Early inhabitants included the owner of a cotton gin in the 1880s, but the town wasn't officially founded until 1951.

Aside from a seasonal flock of tourists, area residents have included workers on nearby offshore drilling rigs and fishermen, a modest, hard-working lot. In 2000, the population was 255.

As Ike barreled toward Texas, most residents got out. Not Eric and Dennis Stephenson, and Eric's girlfriend, Robin Dixon. They took refuge aboard two oyster boats lashed together in Double Bayou. Ms. Dixon didn't like the idea, but she went along with it. Later, she was glad she did.

"I woke up and looked out, and I could see the treetops," she says. "Our trailer over there, you couldn't see it. We were in it just a few hours before ... I thought it was the end of the world."

After the storm passed, Eric Stephenson dived into the water and piloted a skiff between trees that marked the road and steered to Oak Island. They rescued three others who'd stayed behind.

Now they're all left to pick up – and pick through – the pieces.

Michelle Pingry is helping her aunt, Ms. Dearman, look for belongings where her grandfather's home used to sit. She carries a shovel over her shoulder and sloshes through the mud.

"I don't know why anyone would come back here," she says. "People don't have a lot of money."

Her own home, several blocks away and 12 feet up on sturdy pilings, took on water but survived the beating.

"The stairs are gone," Ms. Pingry says. "We can't get up to it, so I'm down here helping."

Moments later, she finds a deer mount stuck in a tree, one of its horns in the muck below. She carries it out to her uncle.

"Hey, is this yours?"

"Yeah, it is," Steve Shirley yells back. "I don't know that I still want it."

He hasn't a doubt about his future.

"I'm rebuilding. Where else am I supposed to go? There's not much left to salvage. It's all gone," he says. "I'll rebuild, but it'll just be a metal building. Won't cost me so much."

Some of his neighbors aren't so sure.