I've gotten questions from people about how this terrible flooding was even possible, and I've seen some despicable finger-pointing and misinformation on social media by those who have no familiarity with the area. As background, my grandparents' place was situated between Heart O' the Hills camp and Mystic – a three-quarter-mile stretch of river running South to North. In Middle and High School, every time I visited, one of my favorite activities was to travel up and down the river in a canoe until we either couldn't go further or ran out of energy. I've been up and down that stretch of river between the two camps more times than I can count and have probably travelled the stretch from one end to the other in a single trip more than most anybody – a guess I feel confident about because in many places, you'd have to get out and carry or drag your canoe because the water running over the limestone rock bed was so shallow. There are a couple of stretches there between the two camps that are extremely difficult to get through - something to keep in mind as you watch search and rescue efforts.
A view from the grandparents’ place. Camp Mystic is just down the hill to the left.
Traveling back and forth along the Guadalupe, whether with siblings, cousins, or friends (and eventually a girlfriend that would one day become my wife), we'd do things like fish (in some secluded deeper spots along the cypress trees on the riverbank, you could catch bass the size of a toaster), swim, or see what we could find. As mentioned in the media, flooding in that area is frequent, and you often find things the river washed downstream. There was even an old (probably 1930s) rusted-out car back in one of the more wooded parts of the river. Throughout that stretch of the Guadalupe, though, it is uniquely beautiful. On the east bank, in particular, there are enormous cliffs filled with small holes and caves that drop straight down into the crystal-clear water below.
Now traveling up and down the river between the two camps, sometimes, depending on who I was with, we'd get bold and try to make it through and past the camps to see how far we could get. This was pretty easy heading downriver past Heart O' the Hills. Perhaps they just didn't care about a few kids paddling through. Still, the river was a little more easy-going that way. Because the bank was fairly steep on the camp's side, you couldn't see us traveling along unless you were standing right by the river. So, we'd paddle through and, a few times, made it as far as Crider's Rodeo.
This wasn't the case as we headed upriver to Camp Mystic. There's about a four-foot dam on the downstream side of the Mystic property that creates a little lake. So, to get past it, you'd either have to (1) get out and carry the canoe around and put it in on the other side, which was trespassing, and, though children, as Texans we know you don't go trespassing, or (2) get out of the canoe and, while standing in the middle of the river, pick up the canoe and lift it over the edge of the dam. Now, being the very thoughtful teenage amateur lawyers that we were, it was our contention that doing so was not, in fact, trespassing, as the Guadalupe was a navigable waterway. Therefore we were free to travel as far as we liked (dam be damned) so long as we didn't disembark up the bank onto anyone's property. We had a fair amount of commitment to this principle of navigation, given the effort it took to lug a canoe over the dam while dodging the occasional water moccasin (which, at one point, middle school me was fairly sure was about the size of a python). In hindsight, it was probably not the safest course of action.
We never made it much further than the Mystic dam. I found this particularly annoying because there was a great fishing hole filled with the biggest bass you'd ever seen on the opposite side of Mystic, just under the highway 39 bridge near the main entrance. Inevitably, and quite immediately, we'd get run out after getting over the top of the dam - in most cases by a man that obnoxious teenager me referred to as "some old guy" – in hindsight, likely camp director Dick Eastland. Dick Eastland lost his life last week trying to save girls from the flood waters. While his brief, momentary interactions with me were not exactly friendly given my encroachments, the fact that he would often run us off every summer at the drop of a hat is just one small, anecdotal example of how diligent he was in his role as guardian of that camp.
One of the things you'll notice as you make that journey upriver toward Mystic is that the river narrows substantially. The terrain is remarkably different from when you get further down the river toward Kerrville, particularly after the North and South forks of the Guadalupe meet: the banks in that direction are less steep and widen out a fair bit.
The river at Mystic also runs West to East until just past the dam, where it collides with the east side cliffs and ridgeline I mentioned earlier and turns northward. At that point, the river forms a slight bottleneck. Steep cliffs rise up, and in portions of the river, it gets very, very shallow – if it hadn't rained recently, we're talking an inch at most. It was easily the most treacherous bit of the river in my stomping grounds: you'd slip and slie on the limestone rock as you dragged your canoe to the deeper spots, inevitably ending up beat up and bruised along the way. What this means is that as water is traveling down that river, there’s nowhere for it to go but up. It can’t diffuse across a wider area as it did downstream. As it slams into that ridgeline and bottleneck, that problem just gets exponentially worse.
While I know the stretch between those two camps about as well as anyone, obviously, many people know the camps themselves far better than I do. But, if memory serves, the cabins at Mystic were well away from the river, uphill and nestled up against that same steep ridge I mentioned well before it meets the river. They weren't anywhere close to the water. I see numerous social media posts about how it was negligent to have the cabins there or trying to cast blame on the camps or the National Weather Service. You don't understand flash floods in that part of the country, and you don't know what the river is like in that section of the Guadalupe. To say they should have anticipated that perfect confluence of weather, topography, and timing, all in the middle of the night to cause a tragedy in that particular spot is absurd. To borrow from Laura Seay: "I get that when a tragedy occurs people want to look for someone to blame. The reality is that sometimes terrible things happen and it's nobody's fault. And sitting with that awful reality, trying to help survivors as best we can, and not losing our empathy is all we can do."
I love that little stretch of river. As an adult, I later got married there. It's heartbreaking to see the pain, suffering, and death happening along it. With a daughter about the same age as those lost campers, whom I had the opportunity to take fishing on the same little stretch of river from my childhood before my grandparents moved away, I can only imagine what their parents are going through. Please donate to the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country (https://cftexashillcountry.fcsuite.com/.../create/fund...).