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 Saturday evening, more than 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 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 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, 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 walked to them, 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,” the mother 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.”
The rescued included two daughters of Representative August Pfluger of Texas, a Republican whose district includes a portion of the flooded region. “The last day has brought unimaginable grief to many families,” Mr. Pfluger wrote on social media. “We mourn with them as well as holding out hope for survivors.”
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.
During a news conference in nearby Kerrville on Saturday afternoon, Gov. Greg Abbott, Senator John Cornyn of Texas and Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, praised federal and state rescue workers and offered their prayers. They didn’t offer any news on the Camp Mystic missing, though Ms. Noem prayed for “the beautiful children that we’re still looking for.”
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.”
In Kerrville, the authorities set up a designated phone line for parents of the missing girls, instructing them to call with the camper’s name for more information. “Please do not go to any location, including area funeral homes, in an attempt to locate any missing person,” the city’s police department requested on social media.
Mystic alumni are unusually bonded, considering the fast-friendship nature of all sleepaway camps. Before the flooding, many were already making plans to attend the camp’s 100th anniversary reunion weekend next spring.
“Camp Mystic laid the foundation for whom we have become as women,” said Kate Carlson Wrammert, who attended Camp Mystic for about a decade in the 1990s and then served as a counselor for two years.
Decades after leaving camp, she rattled off the daily schedule from her Mystic days: breakfast, activity, lunch, quiet time.
Ms. Carlson Wrammert, who now lives in Atlanta, asked one Mystic friend to be her bridesmaid when she married. She and another group of Mystic friends had already planned to take off work to travel to the century celebration.
The camp 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.
Alumni described the Eastlands as the camp’s patriarch and matriarch, a constant presence at the camp. Several said that Mr. Eastland seemed to somehow remember every former camper who returned with her own daughter after years away.
The couple had only sons, so “their daughters are all the campers,” said Clair Cannon, a real estate agent in Dallas.
Ms. Cannon’s mother attended Camp Mystic starting in 1963 and then returned as a counselor. Ms. Cannon was a camper from 1988 to 1993. Then she sent her own daughter for eight years, until she graduated as a camper in 2022.
Like many alumni in recent days, she has found her thoughts turning to her years at camp, marveling at how a place of pure childhood joy, where seemingly nothing could go wrong, became the site of a devastating tragedy.
The river, in particular, had been a source of joy for generations of campers until this week. One of the songs in the camp songbook begins:
There’s a camp on the Guadalupe River,
It is the camp of my dreams,
Where the whippoorwill calls softly
And the bright moon beams.
“This calm, serene waterfront,” Ms. Cannon said. “To think of that same water becoming so dangerous and aggressive and doing this, it’s so hard to believe.”
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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