A rescue story

A friend of mine - who we will call "George" - bought a little Ruger Standard .22 almost 50 years ago. Over many decades, he carried it while game bird hunting, used it to control rats around the chicken coop, and dispatched many, many groundhogs. It was a very accurate and fun little gun to shoot and was one of his favorites.
Last year, Hurricane Helene came knocking. The waters rose, and my friend's home on the Jack's River in Georgia slowly began to flood. Everyone scrambled to preserve important documents, valuables, and everything we hold precious over a lifetime of memories. The little pistol was forgotten in a gun case under the seat of his son's Ford Explorer. The Explorer was swept away downriver almost ¾ mile. A destroyed, hammered, broken wreck - it lay half-filled with sand, mud, rocks, broken glass, and buried in debris for almost two months while the family focused on cleaning out the mess at home.
Eventually, they had a wrecker drag it out of the riverbed and haul it back to the house. When the pistol was discovered, it was badly rusted, pitted, and jammed with fine sand in the mechanism.
George stripped it down, thoroughly cleaned it, and spent many hours with sandpaper and emery cloth trying to remove the rust, but the surface pitting remained.
That's how it came to my shop. Some more hours with an emery wheel and blisters on my thumbs, then a fine-grit sandblasting, and then into a tank of a hot caustic blend of salts and lye, boiling at 300 degrees for 30 minutes. Then quench in cold distilled water, then back into a tank of boiling distilled water for 20 minutes to remove all residual salts. All the parts were inspected, oiled, and reassembled, and the gun was test-fired with ten rounds for a function check.
George now has his favorite .22 back, looking and working like new - and with a big story to add to its long history.