The Texas Floods and the Lives Lost at Camp Mystic

The sleepaway camp where my ten-year-old daughter will live for a month this summer forbids phone calls for the first six days, except for emergencies. Then the kids get one brief call at an appointed time, once a week. That’s also about how often the camp sends photos, in which your child may or may not appear. (I comb through these like they’re a lost roll from Dealey Plaza: there’s Badge Man, there’s Babushka Lady, there’s my kid.) No personal devices—cellphones, iPads, G.P.S. trackers—are allowed. Instead, my daughter and I exchange handwritten letters. Last year, I had started to think she was having too much fun to write home, but, in fact, she’d written five letters in seven days, and they all arrived at once.

I’m grateful for our camp’s restrictive communication policies, and I know that many other sleepaway camps take a similar approach. Kids should be free to throw themselves into the stuff of camp—swimming, hiking, crafts, singalongs, stage performances, playing “froccer”—without getting tangled up in the tethers of home. Sleepaway camp ideally feels like a world unto itself, a secret witchy ritual in the woods, at once wild and self-contained. By the time kids are old enough to take part, parents have had years of practice entrusting them to sitters, teachers, and other caregivers for many of their waking hours; entrusting those kids to what amounts to a temporary society unto itself is a big but logical next step. And although a parent may feel guilty or uncomfortable admitting it, it’s nice to cede all control of the child-rearing job for a few weeks, to have the chance to miss your kid. It’s nice, once in a while, not to have to think about her at all.

Of the more than ninety confirmed victims of the catastrophic flooding in central Texas, which began in the early-morning hours of July 4th, twenty-seven of the dead were campers or counsellors at Camp Mystic, a girls’ Christian camp in Kerr County, on the western banks of the Guadalupe River. At least ten campers are still missing. The river rose approximately twenty-six feet in forty-five minutes, and apparently swept the girls away in their bunks as they slept. The youngest children were eight years old. Photographs of the aftermath show mattresses ripped from the coil springs of bunk beds, comforters and lunchboxes and sneakers and stuffed animals caked in mud. In one photo, I saw a rescue worker carrying a camper’s tie-dyed trunk; I had to turn away.

The disaster is still unfolding, with heavy rains forecast in the next few days. As for the devastation that the area has already endured, presumably there will be plenty of blame to be handed around in the weeks, months, and years to come. Was the National Weather Service, one of the many federal agencies recently hollowed out by DOGE, properly staffed and equipped to forecast the floods? Did local officials respond to the imminent threat with appropriate speed and care? Should officials have evacuated the low-lying areas near the Guadalupe River—including the bunks at Camp Mystic—on the afternoon of July 3rd, when the Austin/San Antonio office of the N.W.S. issued a flood watch? Why weren’t Kerr County officials able to secure the financing and construction of a flood-warning system after previous deadly disasters? (At a press conference on Sunday, some of these questions were posed to the Kerr County sheriff and city manager, who abruptly ended the session and left the room, as reporters continued to call after them.) And to what extent was the tragedy caused or exacerbated by climate change—and by the greed and nihilism of its corporate and political enablers, including Ted Cruz, the climate-change-denying senator from Texas?

The search for someone or something to blame can be a moral and rational one. Blame, if properly placed, can spur action and save lives in the future. But blame is also a means for the pattern-searching, cause-and-effect-oriented parts of the human brain to seize control of an uncontrollable and unfathomable set of circumstances. When a child is harmed, her parent, in scrambling to make sense of her family’s sorrow and misfortune, may settle on blaming the person closest at hand. If only I had kept my child at home. If only I hadn’t sent her to that camp. If only she’d been safe with me. If only I had done my job and protected her. About twenty miles east of Camp Mystic, a family of three, in town for the rodeo, went camping together; the father has been confirmed dead, and his wife and son are still missing.