Days after floodwaters swept through Camp Mystic and other parts of Central Texas, rescuers recovered the body of camper, Virginia Hollis.

The emergency weather alert had come early Fourth of July morning: There would be life-threatening flash flooding in Kerr County, Texas. And Camp Mystic – an all-girls Christian camp situated along the Guadalupe River – housed about 750 campers on the flood-prone site as heavy rains started pouring.

When a reporter asked Texas Governor Greg Abbott who is to blame for the deaths of more than 100 people in this month’s catastrophic Guadalupe River flooding, Abbott scoffed. Wh

Federal regulators repeatedly granted appeals to remove Camp Mystic’s buildings from their 100-year flood map, as the camp operated and expanded in a dangerous flood plain.

Lawmaker, father of 2 girls at Camp Mystic: "Going to be a long road for many of the campers"

For decades, Dick and Tweety Eastland presided over Camp Mystic with a kind of magisterial benevolence that alumni well past childhood still describe with awe.

For grieving communities, the kinds of public memorials familiar from history — stone cenotaphs, bronze monuments and statues — feel inadequate to the demands of the present. Implacable and stolid, they can seem more about their own physical grandeur than the lives they honor.

When Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp for girls nestled in Texas Hill Country, experienced catastrophic flooding on July 4, Executive Director Richard “Dick” Eastland worked to get his campers to