Robert Brown, a Dallas businessman, owns what used to be a handsome five-building vacation estate in Hunt, Texas, set above a sloping bank on the Guadalupe River. This week, a work crew was hauling away river mud from the buildings, and tearing out drywall and waterlogged insulation.
The July 4 flooding, the worst anyone can remember in the small Hill Country community of Hunt, has left at least 129 people dead in Central Texas, with scores more still missing. The grief is particularly acute in unincorporated Hunt, where at least 27 people from a girls’ summer retreat, Camp Mystic, were killed.
Much of the town is now trashed, with debris lodged in the branches of the trees and heaps of soggy junk along Highway 39, the main road that runs along the Guadalupe. On Wednesday, skilled horse-riders in cowboy hats and ball caps were searching Mr. Brown’s property for bodies.
But Mr. Brown, who grew up in coastal Corpus Christi, Texas, is not giving up on Hunt. After the workers gut his buildings, he said he wants them to renovate them. It is a decision colored by the deep connection he feels to the Hill Country, a region in the middle of Texas that is also central to the state’s history, spirit and western mythology.
“We always had a major love for the Hill Country growing up in Corpus Christi, down on the water,” Mr. Brown said last week. “It was our so-called Colorado, I guess, for us. We considered those mountains back in the day,” he said of the Texas hills.
Texas, a state larger than any country in Europe, is a place of staggering geographic variety. But the Hill Country has a distinctly western feel, with a rolling, rugged topography that spreads across 26 counties and a trove of natural and cultural riches. The Comanche once traded with German settlers here. The state flower, the bluebonnet, explodes in bloom in the spring. The yearly Kerrville Folk Festival preserves and promulgates the rich mosaic of vernacular Texas music.
For Texans living in the big cities of Houston, Austin, Dallas and San Antonio — places of roaring concrete freeways and interchangeable suburbs — it has long been a place, within a half-day’s drive or less, to not only unwind in nature but also to feel a little more Texan.
That is the theme that powers the anthem “Luckenbach, Texas,” the ’70s country duet by Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson that paints tiny Luckenbach, a Hill Country village, as a refuge for soul-weary Texas city dwellers. That has long been the draw of Hunt — and a reason why, amid the suffering, there is also an optimism that it will come back.
Though it has fewer than 1,100 residents, according to census figures, Hunt, at the confluence of the north and south forks of the Guadalupe, is part of a broader web of familial and social connections that spread far across Texas. Wealthy families have long kept big vacation homes here, while families with more modest incomes have rented cabins or camped along the river for generations. At the numerous children’s summer camps in town, friendships are forged that are often reinforced later in life in the big Texas universities and in big-city social and professional circles.
“The good thing we’ve got going for us is the incredible outpouring of support throughout the community, the state and even across the country — and the fact that Hunt, Texas, is so unique,” said John Dunn, a former owner of the Hunt Store, a key gathering place in town. “We’re going to come together, and we’re going to rebuild.”
Mr. Dunn was standing outside of the store, which had caved in on itself as the floodwaters surged, but all around him were the first signs of recovery. Makeshift kitchens were cooking food. A huge tanker truck full of gas had parked in front of the store to fill up rescue and recovery vehicles free of charge. Pallets of cleaning formula and other essentials were everywhere.
A few yards down Highway 39, a family carefully cleaned off glass mud-caked dinner plates recovered from a half-ruined house. The local Baptist church, still intact, had transformed into a makeshift clothing outlet, with items arranged by size and draped over every pew in the worship hall.
There was an effort to keep things upbeat. A couple of big pickup trucks were painted with the slogan “Texans helpin’ Texans.” On Wednesday afternoon, someone was blasting Kenny Chesney’s “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy.”
But there were also tears, pain and frustration. The shock of the flood was still fresh.
At a news conference on Wednesday, Jonathan Lamb, an officer with the Kerrville Police Department, said that in the early hours of July 4, a patrol sergeant with the department became trapped on a temporary island as floodwaters in Hunt rose around him.
Soon, he saw dozens of people on their roofs.
The sergeant found a police detective who lives in the area. “For 13 hours, those two officers, along with some Hunt volunteer firefighters and an E.R. doc, provided care to that Hunt community,” Officer Lamb said.
Many were brought to safety at a small K-8 public school up the hill from the river.
Numerous homes by the river and the highway were damaged, washed away or reduced to concrete slabs. Some of the properties higher up in the hills on a street called River Road — which some locals call “River Oaks Road” because of the several Houstonians from wealthy enclaves like the River Oaks neighborhood who summer there — appeared to be in better shape.
Hunt has bounced back before. But the lure of the Hill Country’s natural beauty has long been at odds with the danger posed by the volatile Guadalupe.
The town was founded in 1912, when Alvie Joy bought the land from a friend, Bob Hunt, and named the place after him, according to a Kerr County historical website. Mr. Joy traveled to the Rio Grande Valley and to Houston to convince people to move and take advantage of the cooler climate in the hills.
The children’s camps began opening in the 1920s, and vacation homes were built. But in 1932, the website states, “Hunt proper was washed away in a flood.”
Another notable, and deadly, flood came in the summer of 1987. The Kerrville Mountain Sun, a local newspaper at the time, said that a man named Boss Merritt had probably saved many lives in Hunt by warning them that the waters were rising. The paper said Mr. Merritt had taken over the town watchman’s role from another man who had lived on the headwaters, and for many years used to call people when the river was rising.
Today, hard questions are being asked about whether local officials should have invested money in more sophisticated monitoring and warning systems.
The past week, people were also wondering whether parents will be too nervous to send their children back to the storied summer camps, and what kind of civil legal actions the camps might face. A number of people whose homes were damaged or destroyed said that if they built back, it would be differently, taking into account floodwaters whose height exceeded what anyone could have imagined.
The wealthy and the people who work for them were all hurting.
Alfredo Alba, 45, who was helping to gut Mr. Brown’s vacation home, said that working-class Hispanic residents in town, many of whom maintain the summer camps and vacation properties for the visitors, were in a state of disarray. Hunt had long been considered an attractive place for Hispanic laborers, Mr. Alba said. The salaries at the camps were solid. Children from Spanish-speaking households were welcome at the tiny public school, and parents were happy to raise them far from the threat of big-city crime.
Now, people’s homes were damaged or destroyed, and others had scattered to live with relatives or friends. The community had already been on edge, he said, with worries about ramped-up immigration patrols.
“There were a lot of them living in fear,” Mr. Alba said in Spanish. “And now a lot of them don’t have a place to live.”
The job now, it seemed, was to give them a town to come back to. Haley Lehrmann, the new owner of the Hunt Store, said she would find a way to get her wrecked place open again.
Down the highway, another beloved gathering spot, Crider’s Rodeo and Dancehall, had fared better. The damage to the bar and dance hall seemed minimal. Rows of cowboy hats still hung on the wall, as did the signs offering $4 Budweisers and $5 Shiner beers.
Tracy Moore, the owner, figured that one day — though probably not this summer — the place would be putting on their little local rodeo again and giving people a place to dance the two-step.
Yes, she said, Hunt would come back. But she added, “I don’t ever think it will be the same way.”
Richard Fausset, based in Atlanta, writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice.
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