By Hilary Scruggs Beebe
El Tambo is the name of the home I built for my mother 12 years ago on the North Fork of the Guadalupe in Hunt, Texas. It means “roadside inn.” It’s not a large property, but private; a small house on tall piers with long spans of glass looking over the shimmering green waters of what some call the Velvet River.
Long summer days spent at leisure with those we love are the whole purpose of the place –– and for the last several months, David and I had been looking forward to spending this July 4th there with our dear friends and owners of The Big Bend Sentinel, Maisie, Max, and their 3-year-old son.
Our guests were late leaving Austin on the 3rd. Max called as they were packing up, and we touched on the weather. The sun was out, but it had been raining a little every day. David hollered to Max over me that 2-5 inches of rain was predicted. This struck us as little more than an annoyance, and we concluded we would end up inside for at least some of the holiday. The regional flood watch that was in place was not unusual.
Max wanted to know where the house stood with respect to the river. I responded that the house was 20 feet from the river, but with five grandchildren, my parents had already gated and thoroughly child-proofed the deck. “What happens when it floods?” Max wanted to know. “Well,” I explained that the house was built to recent FEMA standards to withstand a 500-year flood, but “if it floods, you basically can’t leave.”
As an abstraction, the low-water crossings that dot the Guadalupe amount to a brief vignette each time the road and the river weave in or out of the other. On a normal day, you catch a glimpse of something –– a swimming hole with a rope swing or shallow rapids where folks set up lawn chairs to bask in the sun. In a flood, the crossings recede into the mud-colored current, and the spaces between them become islands of their own.
At any rate, we had no cause for concern. It was David’s birthday and I was cooking dinner. We put our 2-year-old to bed a little earlier than usual, fearing the excitement of her friend’s arrival would overstimulate. “We are going to have so much fun tomorrow!!” I assured her and we said her prayers, rushing because I had a lot to do. But as I wrangled her into pajamas and zipped up her sleep sack, I made our customary request to God for protection.
Dinner consisted of mushroom risotto, good conversation and too much wine. When we went to sleep after midnight, the sound of the rain outside rendered nothing if not a deep sense of relaxation.
Sometime after 3 a.m., Max and Maisie woke us up, anxious that we see the river. We stumbled back to the main room and looked down –– flashes of lightning lit up a vast spread of brown, fast-moving rapids –– not merely beside the house but beneath it. The sight took me aback, and I ran to different vantage points to look again as though it could possibly have been an optical illusion.
Max and Maisie wanted to leave –– but I explained that the road either way to the left or right of us would only take us into the river. We could get up a hill by crossing the road –– but only if it was still possible to drive. We walked out in the rain to the driveway, where the water was just up over our ankles. If we were going to leave, we had to do so immediately.
We roused our toddlers and ran to start our cars. Once parked a safe distance from the raging river, we had nothing to do but wait. With the storm clamoring overhead, our house below went dark, just 4 minutes after we exited the mechanical gate. A notification came over my phone regarding severe weather and flash flooding in the area. No kidding.
About an hour later, headlights came towards us from up the road, and a friendly neighbor called out my parents’ name.
It turns out our neighbor, Paul Simone, is a volunteer firefighter with the Hunt VFD, foreman of the ranch up the road, and one heck of a Good Samaritan. He and his wife Martha took us into their hunting cabin, furnishing us with beds, food, flashlights, cooking supplies and even toys to divert the children.
Exhausted, we all crashed in the dark cabin, and when I woke a couple hours later my mind was racing – was it possible the house was gone? I quietly left and drove down the hill to find the river had receded as fast as it had risen, leaving a mark that indicated it had peaked within 2 feet of the 500-year flood plain.
The rain had not entirely stopped, so we collected necessities and spent the day in the Simones’ cabin –– finding dark humor in our plight, marking basic victories of survival like making coffee in the car and grilling meat we had marinated the day before. With no Wi-Fi and weak cell service, we only started to sense the gravity of what had happened from the frantic messages slipping through from family and friends. Maisie and I drove to the top of the hill where we could get a slightly better signal. Then we read the most horrific news.
On Saturday, Max and I were up earliest and found the low-water crossings were passable again. First, we drove west, where the road was blocked a mile or so down –– an abandoned truck in a precarious crater. Heading east, we went as far as Camp Waldemar, where a sheriff’s deputy told us we could get all the way to Ingram and reach I-10.
None of us will ever forget that somber drive. The damage on the North Fork was not insignificant –– the road is littered with debris. We wondered how much livestock had gone loose. Passing Waldemar, we saw them loading school buses with little girls who should have been having the best summer of their lives –– but would yet be rejoined with their families to see happier times ahead.
When we got to Hunt, where the Forks meet, we encountered true devastation –– homes and vehicles crushed, if not eliminated. Where rows of old cypress trees once shaded the river, remnants were deformed, stripped of bark, and littered with debris, up to 30 feet high in the air. In the flood’s wake, the natural beauty of that stretch of river has been scourged, and there is only evidence of violence left behind.
The heaviness in the air was palpable and, looking at the faces of those we saw along the way, I knew we could all feel that weight –– of pervasive death and mutual grief.
We’re back in Marfa now, and I think we are yet to truly exhale. We cannot overstate our gratitude to Paul and Martha Simone. They were strangers who showed us care and kindness in our hour of distress. We are encouraging those who want to help to support the Hunt Volunteer Fire Department.
We are thinking a lot about what went wrong to exacerbate this disaster. With so many still missing and the final toll yet unclear, we believe it is important to refrain from casting blame and find unity for recovery in the present. Only by the grace of God and the passage of time will all the pain this event has caused be extinguished.
For us, there will be more summer days spent at El Tambo, and the physical reminders of this tragedy will be gone before long. However, having experienced for ourselves the dangerous potential of our beautiful river, knowing the terror of those lost and the agony of the bereaved, we as Texans owe it to our children to never forget. We must put aside differences and pursue every means possible that this cannot ever happen again.