‘We're Going to Rebuild.' A Hard-Hit Texas Town Looks to the Future.
The July 4 flooding, the worst anyone can remember in the small Hill Country community of Hunt, has left at least 129 people dead in Central Texas, with scores more still missing. The grief is particularly acute in unincorporated Hunt, where at least 27 people from a girls' summer retreat, Camp Mystic, were killed.
Much of the town is now trashed, with debris lodged in the branches of the trees and heaps of soggy junk along Highway 39, the main road that runs along the Guadalupe. On Wednesday, skilled horse-riders in cowboy hats and ball caps were searching Mr. Brown's property for bodies.
But Mr. Brown, who grew up in coastal Corpus Christi, Texas, is not giving up on Hunt. After the workers gut his buildings, he said he wants them to renovate them. It is a decision colored by the deep connection he feels to the Hill Country, a region in the middle of Texas that is also central to the state's history, spirit and western mythology.
'We always had a major love for the Hill Country growing up in Corpus Christi, down on the water,' Mr. Brown said last week. 'It was our so-called Colorado, I guess, for us. We considered those mountains back in the day,' he said of the Texas hills.
Texas, a state larger than any country in Europe, is a place of staggering geographic variety. But the Hill Country has a distinctly western feel, with a rolling, rugged topography that spreads across 26 counties and a trove of natural and cultural riches. The Comanche once traded with German settlers here. The state flower, the bluebonnet, explodes in bloom in the spring. The yearly Kerrville Folk Festival preserves and promulgates the rich mosaic of vernacular Texas music.
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