We are all Mystic camp.
In Memoriam.
We are all Mystic camp.
We who love the rivers.
We who sleep in our tents listening to the sound of the rivers running by.
We who paddle our boats on the lakes and the rivers.
We are all Mystic camp.
We are all the open wound.
And the missing children.
For those of us who have paddled the Guadalupe, or any river, this disaster stands as a stark blow to our hearts.
No man can ever step in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man. Said Heraclitus, around 500 b.c.
Let us sing with Gordon Lightfoot: “Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?”
All that remains are the faces and names of mothers and fathers and daughters.
What none of the rescuers are saying, is that whenever a body is recovered from a flood, or even a survivor is rescued from a flood, is that they are usually totally naked, because the flood debris and rushing water has torn their clothes off.
The news is reporting a “wall of water, 30 feet high.” This is wrong. It isn’t a wall of water. Look at videos of flash floods: The first several hundred yards of the flood are a mix of trash, and jumbles of debris, scraps of wood, and branches. It isn’t water, it is a sludge of broken wood and rocks and debris. By the time the water gets several feet deep, to where it is mostly water, it also contains logs, and cars, and broken buildings. Projectiles that stab and crush a body. Like, it isn’t the fall that kills you, it is the sudden stop at the bottom. It isn’t the rushing water that kills you, but the log that crushes you between the refrigerator and the car.
Summer camps for children are usually the most safe environments for children during the summer. Trained and dedicated staff realize they are there for the children, in dangerous environments, and take special care to be watchful. Waterfront activities are watched by trained lifeguards. Craft and physical activities are attended by experienced staff, who are aware that children who are just learning and experimenting often make mistakes and take actions that are dangerous, and thus watch them carefully.
Being in the outdoors, and usually distant from any civilized facilities, camps are watchful for weather events, and have plans to deal with them. A camp that has functioned for several years or decades, usually has had to deal with extreme weather before, and has experience in responding to them.
We play in our boats and live our lives as if things will go on the way they’ve been going for years. The Brazos, the Trinity, the Guadalupe and the Buffalo Bayou flow to the sea. The Sun rises in the East, and sets in the West, and it gets hot in South Texas.
But sometimes things change. We should be aware that we could be dealing with a new situation and must work through it the best we can.
Plan and expect the normal things: heat, storms, mosquitos, broken paddles, alligators and snakes, PFDs, holes that a boat gets, and so on. But be aware that sometimes when you hear hoofbeats, it is not a horse; it’s a giraffe, or a unicorn, or an Earthquake, or a flood, or an asteroid. Some days, events happen that change our lives forever.
Heraclitus in 500 BC told the great truth about rivers, that no man can step in the same river twice, because the water has moved on, and you’re a changed man.
We go to the river to have them change us.
We go in our boats and or paddle boards and our floats for the river to change us.
And they, themselves, change.
We are all Mystic camp.
We who love the rivers.
We who sleep in our tents listening to the sound of the rivers running by.
We who paddle our boats on the lakes and the rivers.
We are all Mystic camp.
In the piles of shredded trees and shredded cars and shredded tents and shredded bodies.
We are all Mystic camp.
We are all the open wound.
And the missing children.