Grieving for the Lives Lost in the Hill Country

My family lived many years in San Antonio Texas. If anyone ever asks me where I’m from, I say San Antonio, regardless of the fact that I spent more years in Houston than I spent in San Antonio. San Antonio and the surrounding hill country hold the best memories for me and were the best years of my life. If you grew up in the hill country, you can easily take its beauty for granted and don’t realize what a fabulous place it is until you move to a big city like Houston. But that’s another story for another time.

As a little kid in the 60s, my family rented cabins with family friends on the Blanco River in Wimberley. It was a brief trek down the hill to the river with tires on ropes hanging from trees along the way. The creek we spent the most time in was ice cold and crystal clear with a dam we could sit on and be surrounded by cold water pouring over us, with the deeper parts of the Blanco around the corner. At night in our cabins, specifically the screened-in porches where we slept, you could hear the soothing sounds of the burbling creek as it lulled us to sleep.

As a teenager in the 70s, we did the Comal River thing in New Braunfels long before it was fashionable and eventually turned into a tourist destination. We had a favorite spot on the river that we dubbed “stinky falls.” Uncapped sulfur wells emitted the rotten egg odor, hence the name. For the most part, stinky falls was an undiscovered playground to everyone except the teenagers in the area. We would drive there late at night on the weekends, with plenty of beer for all the underaged kids. When they decided to turn so many areas on the river into a tourist destination, they capped the wells to hide the odor. Wouldn’t want to offend the tourists you see. But that was the end of stinky falls as we once knew it.

In 2015, I was working in Wimberley just uphill from the Blanco River. On Fridays, I used to look out the office windows and watch people drive over the Blanco River bridge to spend the weekend in Wimberley. Sometimes they would stop in and ask us where something was, and they always seemed in awe, sort of trance like. It always reminded me of that scene in the movie Field of Dreams when the dad asks “is this heaven?” Wimberley really is heaven. When people drove over the bridge into Wimberley on Friday for the Memorial Day weekend, it was no different. No one had any idea that that weekend, the Blanco River and Cypress Creek which also runs through Wimberley, would flood the area with tragic consequences. Had there been any idea this was going to happen, they would have never allowed people into Wimberley that weekend and would have evacuated the town; it was the epicenter of the disaster. Flooding of that magnitude just never happens so there was no reason to be alarmed when the rains came. Come Monday morning, it was impossible to drive into Wimberley, the Blanco River bridge had been heavily damaged, but I found a roundabout way and was able to make my way in.

Miraculously, our building was spared while everything around us either washed into the river or was destroyed by the flood water. Our parking lot became the hub for the national guard, local and national TV news stations. People perished, homes that had been standing for 50 years or more washed into the river. There was a small house about a hundred yards up from the river that I admired every morning when I drove over the Blanco bridge. It was made of stone and rock native to the area. I always thought if I had the wherewithal to buy it I would. That house ended up in the river and lodged up against the bridge.

Now here we are in 2025 and the Guadalupe breached her banks on an unimaginable scale, swallowing homes, businesses and tragically, people. The Guadalupe has flooded before; but not like this. It was shocking and unexpected, just like the 2015 Blanco river disaster although the Guadalupe flood was far, far worse, considering how many lives were lost.

Since a flooding event this great never happens in either river, when heavy rains are predicted, if you live there or are camping, you weigh your options, even when you receive warnings of potential flooding. If you’ve lived in the area for decades and are far enough uphill from the river, you think you’re okay, and make the decision to stay. I’m sure that was the mindset of many people who perished. But, had people been told to evacuate, many of the roads going over and along the river are very low and cars would have been swept right off those roads before they could reach higher ground which makes me think it could have been even more tragic. As it were, I’m sure many people driving on those roads were unexpectedly caught up and swept into the raging waters.

All we can do is grieve for the lives lost, clean up the mess, pray for search and rescue and what they’re having to go through, and for those who were personally affected or lost a loved one, as impossible as it probably is, try their best to move on.

The Texas Hill Country is in my heart and in spite of these disasters, it is still one of the most beautiful places on Earth.