The Illusion of Control: Notes on a Hill Country Drowning
By Earl Cotten for The Earl Angle
The Guadalupe River flows through the Texas Hill Country like a remembered promise. Clear, usually, and shallow over limestone, a place for children to wade and skip stones. It is a landscape of deep shade and sudden, blinding sun, of live oaks twisting towards the sky, and quiet hollows where the heat gathers thick as wool. Camp Mystic, nestled along its banks for a century, traded on this promise of pastoral ease, of innocence preserved under a benevolent sky. On the Fourth of July, 2025, the sky delivered something else entirely. It delivered a wall of water twenty-six feet high. It delivered seventy-eight deaths, twenty-eight of them children. It delivered a specific kind of American silence – the silence that follows the rupture of fundamental assumptions. The assumption, primarily, that someone is watching the weather.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We tell ourselves that system…
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