By Friday night, the Fourth of July weekend had transformed from a celebration to a vigil.
Our collective gaze was averted from colorful fireworks displays to the brown and churning Guadalupe River in the Hill Country, and the death and destruction left in its wake for miles.
Water, so essential to life, also possesses deadly power.
Stories of torrential rains and floods cascade through ancient civilizations as myths and legends signifying death and renewal. In the Babylonian tale, a petulant god sends a deadly rainfall that lasted seven days and six nights. In the Old Testament story of Noah’s ark, rain fell for 40 days and 40 nights to cleanse the Earth of wickedness.
The weekend’s devastation in the Hill Country wasn’t because of vengeful gods or supernatural forces but because of nature’s occasional but inevitable demonstration of its power, coupled with a lack of preparation for it.
EDITORIAL: Tragedy hit quickly in Texas Hill Country floods. Answers must follow
The flood didn’t happen because of the “wrath” of the Guadalupe River or because it was “angry” or “raging” or any of the other emotions we might attach to a force that overflowed creeks and rivers, flooded homes, uprooted trees and houses, floated vehicles, tore apart concrete and washed away lives.
Rivers don’t have emotions. Human beings do.
The Guadalupe River carried Texans to one of the most heartrending weekends we’ve experienced in some time, bringing us to that rare place where we stood together, bounded by the same emotions — grief mixed with fleeting driftwoods of hope that were quickly snatched away.
For many of us, it may have been late Friday night or early Saturday morning before we understood how hard Kerr County had been hit by the rain, how deadly the flooding, how historic the possible loss of life.
If there was one moment when many of us became riveted by the tragic events it was when the news surfaced that more than 20 girls — 7, 8 and 9 years old — from Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp south of Hunt in Kerr County, were missing.
This isn’t to make less precious the lives of other people who were missing, lives that ended in those floodwaters. But any tragedy is magnified when children are victims, and the sheer number of children missing from one camp was difficult to comprehend — so difficult that many of us hopefully imagined that since so many of them were from one camp, that meant that they were all safe, gathered in one place, cut off from the world without cellphone service and Wi-Fi, someplace where they would be found and rescued.
We saw pictures of them on social media, and hoped and prayed, just as we saw pictures of other missing people, entire families, and hoped and prayed.
Hope receded upon seeing pictures of the damage to Camp Mystic, including the wreckage inside the cabin where the girls had slept in bunk beds.
Camp Mystic joins Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, where 19 children and two teachers were killed by a mass shooter, as a place whose name will forever evoke sadness.
As of Monday morning, the death toll reported by Kerr County from the flooding was 75, including 27 children.
In the picture of the cabin where the girls slept, what was most emotionally unsettling wasn’t the disarray or the black mud on the floor and cots. It was the bright colors, the purples and pinks, of the girls’ belongings, their comforters and bath towels.
Things packed for them by their parents.
Things they left behind.