A few specific sounds punctuate summer evenings in rural Iowa. A chorus of spring peepers, for example, or the shrill conk-la-ree of a red-winged blackbird on the side of a county road. But only one demands a response: the hostile, metallic beep of a NOAA weather radio.
For 25 years, my mother ran Camp L-Kee-Ta, a small Girl Scout camp in the southeastern part of the state, which meant that, every summer, she was responsible for the safety of 64 girls and a staff of 20 young adults. At the first declaration of a tornado warning, Mom would walkie the counselors, instructing them to move their campers indoors. She’d ring the camp’s cast-iron bell as the wind began to howl. And, because my family lived on-site, she’d toss me in the truck before driving from the cabins at Hickory Hills to the huts at Trail’s End, checking for stragglers. Within minutes, we’d all convene in the basement of the Troop House, the largest camp building, a few dozen girls sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor with snacks and songbooks. I don’t recall much crying in these moments as the storm raged above us. Mainly, I remember singing.
Camp felt safe, in the literal sense but also the figurative one; there, girls could challenge themselves, free from the judgment of the outside world. At camp, we—for several summers, I was a camper too—learned to dive, to build a fire, to make friends. We practiced our courage and resilience, how to skin our knees and keep on hiking, how to carefully extract a tick. Even when disaster sent us underground, we were always ultimately okay. It was good for campers to be a little uncomfortable and homesick. These moments were and are the purpose of camp—preparation for the trials of real-world life.
And what I haven’t been able to stop thinking about is the unfathomable tragedy that, last week in the Texas Hill Country, at least a dozen little girls lost their lives while they were learning how to be brave.
Camp leaders across the country can’t stop thinking about it, either. “It is quite literally our worst nightmare,” Georgia Del Favero, a co-director of Camp Birchwood, a Minnesota summer camp for girls, told me. Right now, hundreds of camps, including Del Favero’s, are in the middle of a summer session, or are about to welcome a new busload of children for three days or a week or a month. Moving forward requires accepting that, at camp as in life, we can make plans and follow guidelines, but even then, “we can’t always prevent tragedy.”
Camp Mystic is a Christian camp, and one of several summer camps dotting the Guadalupe River in central Texas. It’s a century-old, sprawling complex with two campuses and a range of activities on offer, including horseback riding, riflery, and synchronized swimming. Last week’s flood came only a few days into a month-long summer session, and hundreds of campers were spread out across several cabins. When the rain began in earnest, early on the morning of July 4, most of those campers were still asleep.
Details about what happened next are murky, and news reports are difficult for those unfamiliar with the camp layout to follow. What comes through most clearly, at least to me, is the charm of Mystic’s site names, instantly recognizable to anyone with camp experience: Senior Hill, where older girls stayed and were safe from the rising river; the Giggle Box and Wiggle Inn cabins in the lower part of camp, where girls were able to ride out the flood or evacuate; the Bubble Inn cabin, full of little girls who couldn’t. What comes through, as well, is the heroism of Mystic’s staff, who smashed cabin windows to push their campers outside, carried girls on their backs, and wrote campers’ names in Sharpie on their arms in case they were swept away in the flood. Dick Eastland, a longtime co-director of the camp, navigated his truck through the dark water and died trying to save the girls at Bubble Inn.
Many children currently attending summer camp still have no idea that any of this has occurred. Lots of camps follow a no-phones policy that provides kids a psychological haven from the noise of modern life. But their parents have seen the news, and camp-office phones nationwide have been ringing for days. It’s hard to know what to tell parents, Ariella Rogge, who oversees the High Trails Ranch camp for girls, in Colorado, told me. You can help to calm a parent’s fears by outlining the stringent safety standards most camps follow or the staff’s extensive disaster-preparedness training. Still, 10 girls from Texas are set to attend Rogge’s camp this week, and some of their parents are understandably unnerved, she said. “My husband didn’t go to camp, I didn’t go to camp, and I am incredibly risk-averse,” one mother told her, according to Rogge. Then again, the mother said, “this is what my daughter has been dreaming about all year.”
Rogge isn’t sure whether that mother will still send her daughter to camp next week. But she hopes so. She’s trying to help anxious parents recognize that two things can be true. “You can know this is going to be a really great experience for your daughter, and that she’s going to have all this personal growth,” Rogge said, “and you can be really nervous and scared.” Camp directors like Rogge and Del Favero will use this moment to review their safety procedures and communicate them to concerned parents; they’ll train counselors on how to comfort anxious campers. Some camps might need to reevaluate cabin locations or work with local officials to install effective weather-warning systems, which didn’t exist near Mystic. But my hope is that people won’t use this tragedy as an occasion to bubble-wrap their kids, or to take away from their child the chance at a life-changing summer.
This week, I called my mom to ask what she would say to parents if she were still directing camp. “I’d show them how we mitigate risk,” she told me. But then, she said, she’d tell them all the stories: of the girls who’d been shy before camp and who, by week’s end, bloomed with confidence; of the campers who cooked themselves dinner for the first time under a starry sky; of the little girl who fell from a horse, went to the hospital, and demanded to immediately be brought back to camp.
When Mom and I spoke about the Mystic campers, we talked less about the tragedy itself, and more about all the times when we were sure that they’d been brave. How, woken by the sound of thunder, girls might have climbed down from their bunks and gathered their bunkmates with urgent voices. How they might have waited one extra minute for a new friend to grab a flashlight or a teddy. How afraid they probably were, but also how determined, as they waded together into the muddy water.
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