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 local churches and refreshed Facebook pages and news sites looking for updates after the flood.
Group texts have flown with rumors about girls who had been found, and girls still missing. They exchanged phone numbers, stories, and prayers.
And still, as of Saturday afternoon, a day and a half after the Guadalupe River surged over its banks in the predawn darkness of July 4, 27 girls from the Christian camp in Central Texas remained missing.
The wait has been agonizing for Camp Mystic’s unusually tight-knit community of parents and alumni, connected to a retreat where Texas Monthly once said three generations of descendants of Lyndon Johnson had gone, and where Laura Bush served as a counselor. Early reports of the flooding on Friday morning sparked a frantic response, with very little information to go on.
Parents whose daughters were at camp in the session that began last weekend raced toward Kerr County, with only a brief email from the camp: “We have sustained catastrophic level floods,” it read. “If your daughter is not accounted for you have been notified. If you have not been personally contacted then your daughter is accounted for.”
About 750 girls were at the camp this session, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas said at a news conference on Friday.
Hundreds of campers who had been stranded on Mystic grounds for hours are emerging with harrowing but piecemeal stories of the torrential rains that flooded the camp.
Jenny MacLennan’s 10-year-old daughter was among hundreds of children rescued on Friday. Her cabin was high enough that counselors decided to keep the children in the cabin as the rain continued to pour down overnight. The next day, they were rescued by Texas Parks and Wildlife officers, and brought by bus to a reunification center.
It was Ms. MacLennan’s daughter’s first summer at sleepaway camp. But after the bewildering and exhausting day was over, “she got into the car and started singing the six songs,” Ms. MacLennan said, referring to a set of songs sung by Mystic campers for nearly a century. “That’s a true testament to the joy that they kept in these kids’ hearts.”
Another mother, who asked not to be named because of the ongoing search and the intense media scrutiny, set out from Dallas on Friday morning to retrieve her daughter. Having heard nothing official beyond the email, she had only hope.
At the reunification center at Ingram Elementary School, also in Kerr County, she and her husband waited for hours. At 5:30 p.m., they were able to speak to their daughter by phone. Almost three hours later, she emerged, wearing clean and dry clothes lent by other campers on higher ground.
It was then that their daughter’s story started to emerge, in fits and starts: Waking up in the middle of the night, being guided by counselors to wade through rushing water to the indoor balcony of the camp’s recreation center, a sleepless wait as water rose, a muddy trek to another camp site, a helicopter ride that her daughter described only as “loud.”
“We’re just so grateful to have our daughter with us,” she said on Saturday from Dallas. They had driven straight back through the rain, arriving at 1 a.m. “I’m so grateful for the people who kept her safe.”
Texas Monthly once called Camp Mystic “a near-flawless training ground for archetypal Texas women.” And camp bonds may be sustaining the Texas women and men connected to the ongoing tragedy.
What they still lack is information. A news conference in nearby Kerrville, on Saturday afternoon saw Gov. Greg Abbott, Senator John Cornyn of Texas, and Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, praise federal and state rescue workers and offer their prayers. They didn’t offer any news on the missing of Camp Mystic.
In that void, many people who are connected to the camp were sharing a variation of its logo with the message “Praying for Mystic,” and the Bible verse John 1:5: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
The camp is to celebrate its 100th birthday next year. It has been run by the same family for three generations. Dick Eastland, the camp’s director, who has lived on the property since the 1970s with his wife, Tweety, has been reported among the dead.
Ruth Graham is a national reporter, based in Dallas, covering religion, faith and values for The Times.
Edgar Sandoval covers Texas for The Times, with a focus on the Latino community and the border with Mexico. He is based in San Antonio.
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