A firsthand account from the Texas floods

When the sliding-glass door opened and water poured in, [Parsley's brother-in-law] Lance ran to it, shoved it closed, and held it shut. The pendant lamps began to swing wildly over the kitchen counter. The house was shifting. It lurched sharply, and we all struggled to stay on our feet. It felt like walking down the aisle of a plane during strong turbulence. 

“We’re moving. We’re moving,” [Parsley's husband] Patrick said. The realization was terrifying. The rushing, still-rising water had lifted the house off its pillars. It was afloat. 

And then it wasn’t.

I saw part of the deck rip away. I heard windows break from every corner. Cracks split the walls. We crashed into something, probably a tree. I don’t know how long it took—ten seconds, maybe fifteen—for the house to come apart. 

[Parsley's sister] Alissa managed to keep both kids on the countertop, one hand on each, still trying to reassure them. As the house came undone, she grabbed one in each arm. This is the part that will forever haunt me. If I or anyone else had been closer to them, we would have helped her. We would have grabbed one of the kids. But we didn’t know that we were about to be plunged into the water. We simply didn’t know. 

It’s easy, in reading the news accounts of the horrific drownings of so many young campers in the Hill Country floods, to miss what Camp Mystic has meant to generations of a certain kind of Texas woman, and what the loss of it will mean going forward.

But maybe you had to see the place to really understand what the Stacy family, which has run the camp since 1939 (it was created thirteen years before that) had in mind early on. I’ve often thought that a lot of the Texas landscape is an acquired taste, but the area around Hunt, due west of Kerrville, has always been easy to love. The emerald-green Guadalupe is shaded by tall cypress trees, and the calls of wild birds compete with the rushing of small waterfalls. There are red-tailed hawks and white-tailed deer, wild turkeys and bobcats. No matter your faith, watching the early-morning mist come off the Guadalupe or wading in its cool, clear waters could guarantee some kind of peace and tranquility, at least momentarily.