Crossroads Podcast: Tragedy, Faith And The Texas Floods

Imagine Texas a century ago, before air-conditioning changed almost everything.

The oven-blast of Texas summer has arrived, a season that in reality starts in May and, on most thermometers, lasts through early October.

What do Texans want to find if they have the financial ability and the time to get away from that searing reality? To be blunt, they are looking for water, breezes, dry air and, yes, altitude. This brings us to the tragic headlines at the heart of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast.

Most of the Lone Star State is, and I note this as a prodigal Texan, a large slab of sun-baked concrete. But there is one small, strategic, complex and almost magical exception to that rule — the Texas Hill Country. The region is defined by the Guadalupe River and the rocky plateau around Kerrville. The prevailing winds come from West Texas and even New Mexico.

Consider these numbers. The altitude in the swampy Houston area is 50 to 60 feet above sea level, or thereabouts, while San Antonio is at 800 feet (with a humid river running through downtown). However, to the northwest of San Antonio, it’s 51 miles to Bandara, 65 miles to Kerrville and 70 miles to Fredericksburg. The altitude in and around Kerrville? That’s between 1,600 and 2,200 feet.

For decades, where have Texans of means gone to fish, camp, hike, play golf and, in the evening, open the windows at their cabins, houses, ranches or other getaways?

Here’s another important question: Where did religious groups, scouting networks and other non-profit organizations look for land on which to build campgrounds? Where do people — from Texas and adjoining states — gather in tents and small RVs on July 4th and other holiday weekends during the summer?

Also, one of the most famous campgrounds for a century or more?

That would be Camp Mystic.

The New York Times offered an excellent feature on July 5, as the terrifying realities of the Kerr County floods swept through mass media from coast to coast. It was written by an experienced religion-beat specialist, as well as a reporter based in San Antonio. The double-decker headline:

For the Parents of Camp Mystic, an Agonizing Wait for Missing Children

Stories of rescues have begun trickling out, but some children from a storied summer camp on the Guadalupe River in Texas Hill Country remain unaccounted for.

It’s impossible to ignore the religion angle when dealing with this kind of story in Texas, a state in which — as we used to say when I was growing up — there are “more Baptists than there are people.”

Here’s the overture on that must-read report, which the Times team updated several times as more details emerged:

In the leafy neighborhoods of Dallas, Houston and Austin, from where Camp Mystic in the Texas Hill Country draws many of its campers, parents have attended vigils at churches and refreshed Facebook pages and news sites looking for updates after the flood.

Group texts have flown with rumors about girls who were found and girls still missing. They exchanged phone numbers, stories and prayers.

And still, as of Sunday morning, more than two days after the Guadalupe River surged over its banks in the predawn darkness of July 4, 11 girls from Camp Mystic, a Christian camp in Central Texas, remained missing, along with one counselor from the camp.

The wait has been agonizing for Camp Mystic’s tight-knit community of parents and alumni, connected to a children’s retreat where Texas Monthly said three generations of descendants of Lyndon Johnson had gone, and where Laura Bush once served as a counselor. One of the young girls who has been confirmed by her family to have died in the flooding is Janie Hunt, a scion of the Hunt oil fortune.

There’s no way around the longstanding connections between the Hill Country camps and the economic, political and cultural structures of urban Texas.

The region is not packed, when it comes to full-time residents. The population of Kerr County was, in 2024, estimated to be 53,990. However, the economic development agency in nearby Gillespie County, population 28,159, noted:

In Texas, Fredericksburg has the highest percentage of millionaires, where 701 households with more than $1 million in assets makes up nearly 6.5% of the area’s population. …

Kerrville is No. 2 on the Texas list, with millionaires making up nearly 6 percent of the area’s population.

This small, rather mystical region is also home to nationally known musicians, artists, small conference centers and other connecting points to the wider world. It’s not just a playground for the wealthy.

In the podcast, I was asked to describe my connections to the Hill Country — which began with church-related trips to the Guadalupe River-region while I was an undergraduate and graduate student at Baylor, to the north in Central Texas.

What is more important is that one branch of my extended family has been based in Kerrville for decades. My sister’s husband, a retired Baptist pastor, served two terms as Kerrville’s mayor — ending in 2022. They are connected to Kerrville life at every possible level.

It’s hard to describe the Texas Hill Country without experiencing it firsthand.

For example: Need a strong cellphone signal during an emergency? Try that in a canyon with walls of solid rock on both sides, four- to five-stories tall. How dark does it get in the complex nooks and crannies of the Hill Country when the electricity has been knocked out?

Of course, the Hill Country has long been known as a textbook example of a region in which flash floods are common.

The hills are not mountains, but they are more than small, sharp-edged plateaus. There are trees and thickets of brush, but everything is defined by the rocky terrain and water. There were terrible flash floods in the 1980s and ‘90s and reporters may want to check out what safety measures were approved after those disasters.

The timing for this latest drama could not have been worse. Another of the flood-related Times reports noted that the people gathered in the Hill Country for the 4th of July were:

… victims of the cruelest perfect storm: a severe, stalled weather cell wringing out over a remote river basin in midsummer holiday, all in the dark of night.

Had this one come 12 hours before or after, when the light of day would have allowed people to see what was happening before it was too late, there would likely have been far fewer fatalities. A 1932 flood of similar scope struck the region during midday. It ripped away six cabins at Camp Mystic, but no campers died.

During the podcast, host Todd Wilken and I discussed many questions linked to the future of small, independent religious and secular camps in the Hill Country and in other isolated, beautiful parts of America. They face complex legal and economic challenges, even as their work, according to key experts, is becoming more important during America’s mental-health crisis, which is hitting children especially hard.

Here at Rational Sheep, readers will want to check out this post, which includes interesting commentary from the After Babel network:

Camps and scouting vs. "screens culture"?

Local congregations should become more active in real-life (analog) adventures -- right now

I will end with one other passage from the Times feature about the history of Camp Mystic.

Texas Monthly once called Camp Mystic “a near-flawless training ground for archetypal Texas women.” That archetype has changed over the years, but at Camp Mystic it includes both strength and femininity. Activities include basketball, fishing and annual “war canoe” races, but also cheerleading and a class called “Beauty Inside and Out” that features spa-style treatments and discussions on etiquette. Campers wear white clothing to nondenominational Protestant worship services on Sundays. (The camp also offers Mass for Catholic campers.)

Camp bonds may be sustaining the Texas women and men connected to the tragedy. But they still lack information.

In that void, many people connected to the camp were sharing a variation of its logo with the message “Praying for Mystic,” as well as the Bible verse John 1:5: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Please watch the viral video at the top of this post. It’s incredibly moving, for many obvious reasons, as noted in this Rod Dreher commentary: “Youths Praising God In The Flood.”

As these girls were finally able to be evacuated — after waters receded on two-lane roads nearby — they passed through the destruction in parts of their campground. The sounds of their shock are obvious. But the girls also responded by singing camp songs and hymns they had learned.

I caught a fragment of a campfire classic that became popular when I was in high school, written by pianist Kurt Kaiser, a Christian-music legend who became a friend while my wife and I were at Baylor. In fact, Kaiser played all the music during our wedding, including a beautiful, improvised solo based on Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” — especially the lovely sunset finale.

One of the songs that these brave girl’s are singing is Kaiser’s “Pass It On.” Here are the final lines of that song, which can be heard early in the evacuation video:

I wish for you my friend
This happiness that I've found
You can depend on Him
It matters not where you're bound

I'll shout it from the mountain top (Praise God!)
I want my world to know
The Lord of love has come to me
I want to pass it on

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