Where the River Remembers

The sacred beings of the Guadalupe.

I have a story

There have always been stories we tell after disasters, especially those involving the Texas Hill Country. Some of them are filled with statistics, cubic feet per second, rainfall rates, loss of property, others are cloaked in fatalism, quiet shrugs that murmur, nothing could have been done. But when mounting fatalities include the young we are in another realm.

I have a story, an older and deeper one, that begins before considering the unspeakable loss of last week. I know this river. I spent months in my youth at Camp Stewart and for years my two daughters went to Camp Mystic.

I can still hear their screams of joy and laughter as we came to pick them up after a month stay. The beauty of the country and the sweet smell of the Guadalupe just near the water’s edge. And those giant oak trees that shepard the water, year after year. On hot July days you can feel the sad and tender weight of summer born aloft by giant branches bent as if to pray.

The awards ceremony at the end of each term my daughters went to Mystic was in the low lying area that would be ground zero for so many in last week’s tragedy. This ground held memories, ones we cherished, and now ones we fear and hope to forget.

A summons to remember

But after the horrible loss of life and tragedy that will thrum for ages is honored, there is another level within the drama. That flood wasn’t just a storm; it was a summons to remember the raging, primal, unmovable forces that boundary our lives.

The remembrance of inscrutable forces is something we have forgotten. We make jest at Native American rituals honoring gods and goddesses, and we are mostly entertained by the universe of supranormal beings in the image industries. But, mostly we don’t believe much of anything except what we see.

On occasion we may invoke something “spiritual” with incense and hymns, but with the ancient, indifferent forces, ones that still govern the land and sky and all else between, we have lost contact, and some would say favor.

The river triad: a god and two goddesses

Who were the old gods and goddesses here when the Mystic tragedy unfolded? First and foremost, came Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory herself. Her voice isn’t loud, but it is steady and insistent. She remembers every flood that ever carved its way through this rugged terrain. She carries the long knowledge of the land’s hunger, its patterns, its sudden betrayals. Mnemosyne speaks through the old men at the feed store who recall floods from decades past. She speaks through meteorologists who know what this river does when it’s swollen with rain from the hills. She speaks through maps, through stories, through quiet warnings passed from one generation to the next.

But her wisdom was ignored, again.

Because as always, Eris had already slipped in through the back door. Eris, that dark and shining goddess of chaos, not petty, not malicious, but necessary. She does not bring strife for the sake of spectacle. She is the rift-maker, the one who shows where our systems are false and fragile.

Eris doesn’t need much room, just a little complacency, and a little pride and a little too much faith in human cleverness. She watches as we place homes close to the river, as we dismiss warnings as over-cautious. She watches as we confuse comfort for safety, as we soften our edges and tell ourselves that this time, it’ll be fine.

And then, when the sky opens and the waters roar down from the hills, Eris lets it all unravel.

Her gift is brutal clarity.

Those girls, those sweet precious girls in bunks just a few feet lower than the others. That’s all it took, a slight difference in elevation. And there was only a quarter mile between life and death. Both of my daughters had spent time in those cabins, and I could never have imagined the horror that flushed through those sweet spaces, even after seeing the raging of that river in my days at camp, but I had forgotten and somehow so had we all.

But that’s not an accident, that’s the razor’s edge where Mnemosyne and Eris meet: memory ignored, and consequence delivered.

And then, of course, there is Pan.

Pan, the wild-eyed and untamed god of nature, the one who lives in the spaces we pretend don’t exist anymore. Until the sudden lurch of panic when the water breaches the banks, when the lights go out, when the air fills with screams.

Pan doesn’t cause the flood, but he rides it, laughing and shrieking through the trees, through the campsites, through every heart suddenly aware of its own fragility. He doesn’t apologize, and he never has.

He is the land’s heartbeat and reminds us that we build our lives on ground that is never truly tamed. That our maps and levees and warnings mean little in the face of wildness awakened.

It would be easy, so easy, to say, “Nothing could have been done.”

But that’s a lie Eris would laugh at. That’s a forgetting Mnemosyne would mourn. And it’s a blindness Pan would mock as he dances through the wreckage.

Another force is now present

There is another force here, too, one more dangerous than any flood, and far harder to name.

The Titans.

They are no longer the giants of stone and fire we read about in old myths. No, they wear different masks now: corporate logos, sleek suits, polished smiles. They do not stomp and roar; they dismantle quietly, methodically, piece by piece.

They are the ones who strip away the layers of protection we once trusted, the local newsrooms gone dark, the emergency offices hollowed out by budget cuts, the seasoned meteorologists pushed aside for no apparent reason.

They dismantle the institutions that remember. They sever the lines between the past and the present and do it with cold precision, disguised as “efficiency,” as “progress.”

They are the ones who sell us forgetfulness, packaged in bright screens and soothing slogans. They want us docile, distracted and to believe that nothing ever happened here before, that history has no claim on us.

And we, exhausted and overwhelmed, have let them. We’ve let them gnaw away at the root of everything that once bound us together. We’ve let them strip Mnemosyne of her voice, until memory itself sounds quaint, old-fashioned, irrelevant.

And so the Titans thrive, feeding on our forgetfulness.

This flood was not just a clash of weather and water, it was the Titans at work, erasing memory until the moment of reckoning arrived, and we were left exposed.

Because it wasn’t just the storm that killed those girls.

It was the dismantling of memory, the slow erosion of institutional wisdom, the casual dismissal of every voice that tried to warn us.

It was death by a thousand cuts, and the final blow came from the river.

The Titans are not finished. They never are. They will keep pulling at the seams of our culture, undoing us thread by thread, until we are too fragmented to resist.

Remember or perish

Unless we remember.

Unless we refuse to let Mnemosyne fall silent.

Unless we name them for what they are.

Because if we don’t, they will keep winning, not with floods alone, but with fires, droughts, famines, wars, every disaster made sharper by the dullness of our forgetting.

I have walked the banks of this river, where my daughters once played. I have seen the places where the ground dips just enough to make the difference between safety and loss. I have heard the stories the old men still tell, if anyone will listen.

And I know this much:

The Titans may have money, they may have power, they may have the ears of kings and presidents.

But they do not have memory. That belongs to us.

And I will not let them take it.

Not here.
Not now.....