Into The Mystic

I’m not from the Texas Hill Country. I didn’t grow up along the Guadalupe. But I’ve visited a handful of times and I can attest to its beauty. As we’ve witnessed this weekend, it also holds the terrible.

I got up this morning thinking I’ll have a phone-free Sunday, unplug from the madness and all that. Yeah, short lived. I couldn’t resist, weak bag of flesh that I am. To my weak bag of flesh credit, I did avoid the majority of madness, but I couldn’t stop reading the reports out of Texas. And one in particular had me in tears, as it should’ve. It was a note from the parents of one of the girls from Camp Mystic -

From the Marsh family: “Our family is completely devastated by the loss of Sarah and her dear friends at Camp Mystic. This is a tragedy that no parent can prepare for and it will never be right this side of heaven.”

I don’t know the Marsh family. I never met 8yr old Sarah. But I have a daughter named Sarah (both with an h), and the snapshot of Sarah Marsh struck me as eerily like the snapshots I have of our Sarah at 8yrs old—radiant, full-eyed, smiley…alive. And my weak old fleshy eyes began to flood. Damn, damn, damn. And damn.

I don’t have any easily-shareable-social-media response. I’ll leave that to the Zach Lamberts and Benjamin Cremers of my algorithm. Yes, I’m naming names, it’s getting to be a bit much, gents. Of course I’m probably just jealous of their virality. Yeah, I’m sure that’s it, just my weak bag of jealous flesh. Father, forgive me.

But I will say this. Several reports I read used the word “tragedy.” It’s a legitimate word choice to describe such a terrible happening, no doubt the go-to word for a journalist (or AI). Yet any sighting of that word causes me to think back to Norman Mclean’s Young Men and Fire and his distinction between “tragedy” and “catastrophe.” In a nutshell, catastrophe is destruction leaving chaos and senseless death in its wake. But tragedy, while equally devastating, holds within it a meaning or redemption or at least the hope of redemption. The Mann Gulch fire Maclean wrote about was a catastrophic event yet he sought to craft it as tragedy, to tell its human story, to name names and describe faces once alive but now dead too soon. It is the horribly beautiful work we creatures of flesh do to carry on in this life. Yes, there’s only one right word for what happened this weekend in Texas—tragedy.

I also couldn’t read about Camp Mystic and not hear Van Morrison’s voice crooning “Into The Mystic.” God what a song. Granted a strange association, but there it is. That transcendent ballad is about many things, but at least one is about coming home, about magnificently floating into the mystic as that fog horn blows. Sort of an olive branch of hope in the midst of history’s storm. Sort of.

But while there may be glints now, such hope is only crafted later, woven as days and weeks and months and years pass. Now is the time to weep and rage and wonder why, why, why in God’s name? To hold each other close, weak bags of flesh that we all are, and to groan.

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