Camp Mystic, revisited

The four-by-four bumps up and down the Guadalupe River in the Texas Hill Country with Abby’s muzzle behind me and by my head with Fox News blaring on the radio. Abby is a cadaver dog, but we are not looking for bodies, even if Camp Mystic camper Cile Steward  and RV camper Jeff Ramsey have yet to be found.

Instead, we are looking for the traces of the flood that has me in Texas, researching for a forthcoming book. Tom is a first responder who was scouring the Texas River basin after the July 4 flood last year that washed away 27 campers and 119 people in the path of a 37 foot wall of water. It has been called a 100-year flood, a 500-year flood, and even a 1,000-year flood, an inland tsunami, a cyclonic bomb and Armageddon. Take your pick, but there is no precedent for the pitch black wall of death, as some residents later called it, that swept through the Texas Hill Country on the night of July 4, 2025. 

I am here for five days of interviews.longtime resident Tom Olson who is a Vet, firefighter, nurse, paratrooper, drone flyer and cadaver dog master has given me an entrée where there would be none for a writer from Chicago.

“Don’t tell them you are from Chicago,” he tells me on the phone. “Say Virginia.” I was born in Richmond, so that seems good enough. After the flight into San Antonio and the forty-five-minute drive to Kerrville, the mission of research could have ended right there at the Holiday Inn Express, were it not for Tom telling people it was okay to talk with me.

The residents of Kerrville, Hunt, Ingram, Center Point, Comfort and the owners of the camps up and down the Guadalupe have all been........

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