Climatologists peg the start of Central Texas’s years-long drought to the La Niña event of 2021; over the past four years, we’ve had a “rain deficit” of 36 inches. On July 4, parts of the Hill Country—that distinct, creek-carved, cedar-green and chalk-bright thumbprint in the heart of my state—received almost half of that in one day. Kerr County got 12 inches in just a few hours. With the death toll rising and more still missing, this is now set to be the deadliest flooding event in modern Texas history, surpassing even Hurricane Harvey.
The land here has always been prone to flooding; its thin soils and steep slopes funnel water into rivers with brutal speed. When I heard about the children lost at Camp Mystic, I thought about the Hill Country girls’ camp I went to as a kid, also set along a river. The riverbed was nearly all limestone—bright, slick, shallow, quick and easy to underestimate. It made for fun canoe runs but there was nothing to hold onto if the water came fast. When it rained, the counselors would put a chain up blocking the trail down to its banks.
Just weeks ago, news organizations published solemn remembrances of the 2015 Memorial Day floods in nearby Wimberly that killed 13 people; at the time, The Texas Observer’s Forrest Wilder described the floods as “like nothing you’ve ever seen.” Previously unthinkable disasters have followed hard on that flood’s heels. Since 2013, this area has experienced two “500-year storms” and one “300-year storm,” to borrow the terminology that civil engineers still use to describe events that were once thought to be rare.
Warnings from the National Weather Service went out as quickly as they could, starting on July 3. The nut of the horror seems to be older and more intractable than the Trump administration and DOGE cuts: Local officials lacked the infrastructure — literally, no local alert system in Kerrville—to warn residents effectively. As Rob Kelly, Kerr County’s top elected official, told The New York Times, “We’ve looked into it before … The public reeled at the cost.” Asked on July 5 if he thought that the weekend’s events might change the calculus, he replied, “I don’t know.” (By this time, 15 children had already been reported dead.)
I signed up to help with sorting donations and shifting displaced pets in foster homes only to find out thousands of people had signed up before me. On Sunday, the city of Kerrville asked people to stop coming to the area; so many had already shown up with flatbeds, boats, chainsaws—anything that could carry help in or haul wreckage out they didn’t need any more non-professional volunteers. Instead, they are directing folks to drop-offs and fundraising. There is such a powerful instinct to help, to give, to protect—an urge to collective action that is instantaneous when the threat has come and gone.
This reflexive aversion to taxes and the social safety net didn’t come out of nowhere. Conservative politicians in Texas in particular have spent decades weaponizing the impulse to aid each other on the ground, lauding it as superior to help “from the government.” They frame government as a thief rather than a partner and separate “community” from the structures meant to uphold it. And when the government does falter, as all complex systems sometimes do, those failures become proof of its supposed uselessness. In their project, government failures are a design feature, not a bug: starve public systems of resources until they cannot deliver, then hold up their collapse as proof that nothing public can be trusted. But what is H-E-B’s emergency relief, really, if not a massive public works project that also sells groceries? The problem isn’t massive institutions; maybe it’s that Texans have been trained to love the wrong ones.
What mutual aid groups and even H-E-B show us, whether they mean to or not, is that mutual aid and volunteering are not the opposite of government; they are what government ought to be. Taxes are just a sandbag brigade stretched across thousands of miles.
I have strong opinions about what the taxpayers of Kerr County should do differently—and about that decades-long GOP project to undermine faith in government—but as images of the mud-torn Hill Country dominate my phone, I’m drawn to thinking about the middle-term, and how I can influence the people closest to me. Not today or tomorrow but in six months or a year. Maybe the challenge is for those of us who already believe in public systems—who already vote and believe in how taxes work — to go smaller, too. To show up at the food pantry, or at a lifeguarding shift at the YMCA, lending a hand at a church fundraiser, or spending time at a Big Brothers Big Sisters orientation. We need to do more than protest or write letters and start building trust through repetition, routine, and being reliably present in the places where politics don’t lead.
Billy Lee Brammer saw rivers as old wounds, boiling around the fractures. The Hill Country has always offered up those wounds. But Brammer’s The Gay Place is a lightly fictionalized account of his time as a speechwriter for Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Texan willing to believe in a government big enough to heal historic wounds. Texans sent him to Washington to build the Great Society, even as they mistrusted Washington itself. That spirit feels far away right now. But maybe it isn’t gone. Maybe it’s just waiting for us to notice each other after the waters recede.
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