When 25 campers and two counselors died at Camp Mystic during catastrophic flooding last July 4, former campers shared their grief over a tragedy that occurred in a place that so many cherished.
Many of the Camp Mystic girls have stayed in touch with their friends over the years. But now the effort to reopen the camp this summer is tearing some of these close-knit friends apart.
Peter Holley, who wrote about this for Texas Monthly, said the Camp Mystic community has the weight of family history behind it.
"This is a community that has generations invested in Camp Mystic. This is a place that their family, their mothers and grandmothers went," he said. "Camp Mystic has always been a source of nostalgia for these women, but it also goes back to their distant past over the last century.
So people have been invested in Camp Mystic for decades. It defines who they are as adults in many ways. These are relationships that they carried from camp into high school and college and then professional relationships afterwards."
Holley said the main people who are against the camp reopening are the family of those who have lost children last summer.
"Largely the people who don't want the camp to reopen are members of the Heaven's 27 community. Those are the parents who lost children in the July 4th flood and many of their family members and supporters," he said. "They're asking for a deeper investigation into how the flood occurred. Some of them want the camps to close forever, but others merely want it to take a year or two for lawyers and state investigators to go back to the camp, figure out what happened so it won't happen again."
However, some of the campers who survived the flood last summer want to return to camp this year.
"This is such a complicated issue, and people fall on different sides of this debate about whether to return or whether the camp should be closed. Many of the children, kids who did survive last summer's flood, actually do want to return," Holley said.
"This can seem pretty shocking from the outside if you don't know how they're thinking. But when you talk to kids and you talk to the parents who want their kids to return, what they generally tell you is that 'my daughters were traumatized by this flood.' And the only people who understand what that was like are their fellow campers."
Holley said some parents feel the best way for their children to heal is to be among people who went through the same thing they did.
"Whether that needs to happen at camp is another question," he said. "Part of what I wanted to explore with my story was showing that kids are struggling and hurting, and many of them have PTSD symptoms from the flood. And there needs to be a discussion surrounding how parents and families deal with that moving forward."
The rift over whether to reopen the camp is tearing longstanding friend groups apart, Holley said.
"This is a brutal, brutal fight. It's painful largely because these are people who've known each other their whole lives and now they find themselves on opposite sides of this debate," he said. "There's nothing more sensitive and more hurtful than talking about children who've lost their lives. And so if you fall on that side of the debate, you cannot understand how people would go back to Camp Mystic. But if you have children that are hurting and desperately wanna go back, you cannot understand why parents can't necessarily understand that as well."
As it currently stands, Camp Mystic is on schedule to reopen this summer.
"They are not yet in possession of a license to reopen, but it's my understanding they probably will get the license," Holley said. "That will open half of the camp, not the camp that was affected by the flood. That's not going to be open because that's going to be under investigation. But the other half of the camp is going to be opened and people will be returning to that, which is about a half mile or so from where the flood actually occurred."
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