The Fourth of July weekend brought news of disastrous flooding in Texas and the Carolinas. The deluge in the Texas Hill Country is one of the deadliest American floods in the past 100 years. Salvation South magazine editor Chuck Reece still marvels at how Southerners in these communities rally to offer their help — and how extra effort to hold onto that spirit will prove healing.
CHUCK REECE: When I was a child in the Appalachian foothills of North Georgia, I would hear people ask my father if he could make it somewhere — you know, to dinner at somebody’s house or to some community function. When Daddy got such questions, I often heard him reply this way:
“I aim to — good Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.”
Now, it feels like the creeks and rivers rise nearly every day — and they swell far higher than they used to.
On the Fourth of July, when folks in the Texas Hill Country just wanted to eat hot dogs and watch fireworks, the Guadalupe River rose over 22 feet in just two hours, then swelled so high the flood gauges failed.
As I write these words, over a hundred people are dead across six counties in the Texas Hill Country. At Camp Mystic, a summer camp for girls, floodwaters killed 29 campers and counselors; 10 remain missing.
The next day, a tropical depression came off the Atlantic Ocean and made landfall in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, then brought massive rainfalls up through central North Carolina. The streets of Chapel Hill — one of my favorite towns in North Carolina — looked like rivers.
I read in The Texas Tribune about a 65-year-old woman named Kathy Perkins who lived alone with her dog, Marley, in Ingram, Texas, on the Guadalupe. She lost her home and is staying in a shelter in nearby Kerrville. She talked about crying in the night, not for her own losses, but for the girls from Camp Mystic who were still missing.
Perkins told a Tribune reporter, “You just want to say a prayer, but then you wonder if they’re even still out there to be prayed for. There are just no words.”
No, Ms. Perkins, there are no words. But there are things we can count on in such situations. The South is a divided land these days, they tell us, but I can guarantee that in Texas and the Carolinas right now, folks are coming together. Disasters bring Southerners together more reliably than potluck suppers.
The disasters will become even more frequent as climate change continues, and as the political disagreements show no signs of abating, one might reasonably wonder if folks will stop uniting in the wake of disaster. But I do not. Why do I remain so certain the rallying — the coming together to search for the missing, to feed and shelter the survivors, to hug the necks of the grieving — will continue?
Because no matter how tortured we allow our heads and hearts to become, there remains inside each of us a primal urge to extend grace to our neighbors who suffer. And I know we all yearn for the day when more of us remember that impulse after the disasters have passed.
Come see us anytime at SalvationSouth.com. We’re the Southern family you wish you had.
Salvation South editor Chuck Reece comments on Southern culture and values in a weekly segment that airs Wednesdays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on GPB Radio. Salvation South Deluxe is a series of longer Salvation South episodes which tell deeper stories of the Southern experience through the unique voices that live it. You can also find them here at GPB.org/Salvation-South and wherever you get your podcasts.
The Fourth of July weekend brought news of disastrous flooding in Texas and the Carolinas. The deluge in the Texas Hill Country is one of the deadliest American floods in the past 100 years. Salvation South magazine editor Chuck Reece still marvels at how Southerners in these communities rally to offer their help — and how extra effort to hold onto that spirit will prove healing.
