The four-wheel-drive truck lurches along the Guadalupe River in the Texas Hill Country. In the back, Abby, a cadaver dog, rests her muzzle near my shoulder. Fox News blares from the radio. We aren't searching for bodies today, though two people—Camp Mystic camper Cile Steward and RV traveler Jeff Ramsey—still haven't been found.
I'm here researching a forthcoming book on the July 4 flood last year that killed 27 campers and 119 people total. A 37-foot wall of water tore through the night. Locals call it a 100-year flood, a 500-year flood, even a 1,000-year flood. Some describe it as an inland tsunami or a cyclonic bomb. There's no precedent for what they call the pitch-black wall of death.
My guide is Tom Olson, a veteran, firefighter, nurse, paratrooper, drone pilot, and cadaver dog handler. He's given me access where a writer from Chicago would otherwise get nowhere. “Don't tell them you're from Chicago,” he warned me on the phone. “Say Virginia.” Born in Richmond, that works. After flying into San Antonio and driving 45 minutes to Kerrville, my research might have ended at the Holiday Inn Express if Tom hadn't vouched for me.
Residents of Kerrville, Hunt, Ingram, Center Point, Comfort, and the camps along the Guadalupe have been saturated by media coverage, with poor results. A war has erupted since the catastrophe. Lines are drawn; lawsuits are filed. On one side sits Camp Mystic, a century-old Christian summer camp for girls owned by the Eastland family. Owner Dick Eastland went down with his Chevy Tahoe while trying to save campers. On the other side are the parents of the lost girls, organized as Heavens 27—grieving, politically active, well-educated. There is no middle ground.
We stop below Camp Mystic. Abby runs in the river. The terrifying inland sea is gone, but it left houses, trees, semis, and cars flung about or destroyed. Now the river is shallow enough to cross on foot—which I do. Days after the flood, Abby circled spots on new fields and roads formed by tons of sediment. Human remains dogs can detect scent through tons of earth. Backhoes then excavated adults and children entombed in the new riverbed.
We've been stopping for interviews. Many locals side with the Eastlands. Their mantra: “People who haven't lived through this don't understand.” Translation: The flood was unprecedented, an act of God. The media, the lieutenant governor, the Heavens 27 parents don't get it. They don't live here. This flood was biblical—an inland sea moving across the land at night, washing away people, RVs, camps, tents, cars, trucks. Unless you were there, it's impossible to understand.
Driving up the Guadalupe, we see crosses, concrete slabs where houses stood, more slabs where RVs were hooked up, lone chimneys, 50-foot trees bent sideways, 15-foot concrete stilts that didn't save a vacation home. Toilets, kitchen tables, the detritus of life—and always the vast highway of the river's migration. It's awe-inspiring and impossible to square with the barely moving river we splash across.
We finally reach the camp itself. It's been raining the whole time I've been in Texas. A gloomy mist shrouds the morning. Camp Mystic is in the distance across the river that destroyed it. A security guard blocks us from crossing. Tom launches a drone to scout the camp. I photograph the memorial cross with stuffed animals and mementos from first responders. The weather has bleached the toys; hats and badges have faded. The camp sits abandoned, many trees gone, looking denuded and sterile. Abby sniffs bracelets, jewelry, water bottles, stuffed animals of eight-, nine-, and eighteen-year-old girls who passed through. The thousand memories of girls who went there are gone, washed away with everything else.
William Hazelgrove's forthcoming book, The Camp Mystic Flood: A Story of Tragedy and Heroism, is due in July 2027.
