Camp Recollections in a Time of Floods

The news has been full of reports out of Texas, of flash floods that came in the darkness and swept campers away--and whole camps that were at the water's edge.  These reports remind me of  Hurricane Helene reports, in the way that there were warnings that got increasingly dire, and then the situation became increasingly dire.  I read about one couple in a campground that went to sleep in a gentle rain and were swept away by the Toe River; one of their bodies has yet to be found.

I am thinking of my own time leading Girl Scouts on a backpacking trip by the Chatooga River.  It was summer, so we slept under tarps.  The  first night there was a terrifying thunderstorm, and we all huddled together, with girls crying to go home, right now, please.  Eventually the storm passed, and we settled into an exhausted sleep.

In the morning, the girls still wanted to go home, and I was inclined to agree.  Happily, our leader wasn't having any of it.  We packed our wet gear, hiked to the next site, and spread it all out to dry, which it did by bedtime.  The rest of the backpacking trip passed with no incident, and in the end, we were glad we stuck with it.

I wonder if those girls heard the reports of cabins swept away and thought back to that storm.  In our case, from what I could tell, the river didn't rise, and the rainfall wasn't abnormal.  I was more worried about lightning than floods--it was a different time.

In that pre-cell phone time, we couldn't have gone home after that first stormy night, even if we had wanted to, at least not easily.  We'd have had to hike back to the place where we began the hike and then had to find a phone and then called the home Girl Scout camp, which was a day's drive away.  By the time they would have come for us, we would have had a day or two of waiting.  Far better to be out on the trail, hiking towards the  pick up point further down the river.  I can say that because no one was hurt, and there were no other threats looming.

Last night, a different kind of camp started--it's Music Week at Lutheridge!  It will be a different kind of week for me; I will miss a lot of it.  But I plan to go to evening events.  Last night was Holden Evening Prayer at the chapel, as the sun set.  It was a peaceful way to offset the news stories about a different camp experience, far away in Texas.