What It Means to Be a Mystic Girl
When I was little, I asked God for straight hair. I begged him to persuade my ballet instructor to let me dance en pointe instead of holding me back to give my ankles another year to strengthen. And I prayed that my parents would send me to Camp Mystic.
These are the kinds of things girls think about and talk about with one another, and with God. I grew up in Austin, Texas, and every third girl I knew went to Mystic, the Christian girls’ camp that was devastated by flooding last week. Every year a camper goes, she gets a letter made of felt to bring home, representing one of the camp’s two “tribes”—T for Tonkawa or K for Kiowa. I had one of my first tastes of jealousy in seeing the string of red letters grow, summer after summer, on my childhood best friend’s bulletin board. When I got to the University of Texas, my sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma, was full of women who had gone to Mystic.
The Mystic Girls always said they have an unbreakable bond, one that lasts through life. Many campers dreamed that someday, their own daughters would attend; mothers would put their daughters on the Mystic waiting list right after the babies were born. My friends’ mothers and aunts spoke of the 99-year-old camp with the same reverence they usually reserved for Jesus: His glory. His presence. The Almighty. Mystic.
“It’s hard not to feel like you are surrounded by a higher power when you’re down there, because it’s just so beautiful,” my friend Olivia Marrus told me. Olivia went to Mystic for 10 summers—nine as a camper and one as a counselor. And it’s true that Mystic had the best kind of Texas landscape: old cypress, live oak, and pecan trees; soft grasses; the cool Guadalupe River running through what is known as “Flash Flood Alley.”
[Elizabeth Bruenig: An inhospitable land]
Most nights, campers take turns leading a devotional. “You’re asking things out loud, and you’re not afraid to work through problems together,” Olivia recalled when I spoke to her this week.
“If God is real, why did this boy say something mean to me?”
“If God is real, why didn’t I get Head Belle on the Highland Park Belles team?”
If God is real, why were at least 27 campers and counselors at Mystic swept into the Guadalupe and killed?
Many people don’t understand what summer camp means to Texans. It is not just a way to keep kids occupied when school is out of session and the heat makes you feel like you can’t breathe. It’s a way of life. And Mystic is one of the oldest and most prestigious camps in the Texas Hill Country. Former First Lady Laura Bush was a counselor. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters attended. Campers have included the daughters of three Texas governors. My parents, transplants from the Northeast, didn’t understand why a summer camp was so expensive.
Mystic might sound stuffy, but my friends often say it was the place in the world where they felt the most free, the most uninhibited—a place where faces were freckled and untouched by makeup. There were no electronics. No boys. No parents. The camp offered archery, riflery, horseback riding, basketball, and competitive canoeing. The refrain I’ve heard repeated in texts, Instagram posts, and prayers since the July 4 flood is “Mystic is love.” Olivia told me that campers sang all the time, everywhere. They sang even in the back of a school bus last week— “That’s how it is with God’s love (praise God!) / Once you’ve experienced it / You spread his love to everyone / You want to pass it on”—as they were evacuated out of the destruction.
Mystic knew that campers would come back summer after summer, so the same group of girls always shared a cabin, with names such as Bubble Inn and Giggle Box. The oldest campers were called aides; a year later, many of those girls returned as counselors. Counselors who came for three years were rewarded with the ultimate keepsake: a Mystic ring, a gold, cursive CM forever branding the owner a Mystic Girl.
Like every self-contained world, Mystic has its own vernacular, its own logic. People understandably want to search for blame after a tragedy, to find a reason for the catastrophe. Some have asked if Mystic could have been better prepared for this disaster. Why, people have wondered, were the cabins of the youngest campers so close to the river?
It’s easy to say now that they shouldn’t have been, but the cabins were close to the river for reasons both symbolic and rational. Little girls stayed on the “flats” and worked their way up the hill as they aged. The cabins on the flats were closest to the nurse’s office, where campers could go if they were ill or just homesick.
A small creek separated the senior commons from the rest of camp. During really big rains, the creek could flood, and the bridge that crossed it could become impassable. But Mystic was prepared for that. Girls could access a shed of food in the senior commons until they could get back to the rest of camp. In her 10 years, Olivia never experienced a rain big enough to flood the creek, let alone the river.
“Nobody ever talked about the Guadalupe flooding,” she said. “That was just so not something that was even plausible to anyone. Why would you even think that? Big rain was just a rainy day: Stay in your cabins. Hang out with your friends. Play cards.”
Although Texas seems to be perpetually in a drought, storms aren’t abnormal. I have gotten more flash-flood alerts during my life in Central Texas than I can count. My brother and I used to cheer when the roads flooded enough for us to go “puddling”—driving through the deepest ditches so water would splash all the way up onto the car’s roof. (As our mom would point out, this isn’t safe.) So I wasn’t immediately alarmed when I heard the first reports of flooding near Mystic. Neither was Olivia. The realization that this was not just another big rain hit her when she saw a video of a cabin from a nearby boys’ camp floating down the Guadalupe. I began to understand only when I was told that a girl I once babysat was missing.
Olivia’s phone exploded with text messages from former and current campers and counselors: I feel like I’m gonna throw up. I’m sick to my stomach. What the fuck is going on?
“We were taught to deal with most situations,” Olivia said. “Are you taught to deal with a hundred-year flood? No, because how do you teach anyone to deal with that?”
Olivia imagined what it must have been like to be there when the water rose, in the place that had been her reprieve from every bad thing that had ever happened to her, the place that had helped her believe in God. “You can see yourself being the counselor who’s terrified, trying to get her girls to safety. You can feel yourself being a 9-year-old, four days into camp, being terrified. You can put yourself in the shoes of any person that was there,” Olivia said. She “could have been you.”
People want to find the villains responsible for the tragedy at Mystic—state or federal agencies, the camp, the government, the world—because they want to hold someone accountable, to make sure such a disaster never happens again. But also, they don’t want to confront the idea that, maybe, God permits such unimaginable cruelty.
More than 160 people are still missing from the floods across Central Texas, some of them Mystic campers. Early in the week, families and friends were posting photos of the girls they were looking for on Instagram. Now they are posting tributes to their memories. As each day passes, the likelihood that there will be no more survivors settles across the region.
“This thing that happened is so unprecedented and unbelievable,” Olivia said. “I never felt anything but so safe and cared for at camp.” Mystic, she went on, “gave me my best friends. It gave me the happiest memories. It gave me a lifetime of lessons.”
For nearly a century, Mystic has taught girls to be brave, confident, intelligent, fun, and kind. It taught them that God is everywhere and that friendship is everything. They need those lessons now more than ever. Maybe we all do.