In the dark, amid screams, Ainslie had 16 terrified little girls and one headlamp

Texas: The first drops of rain had yet to fall when Ainslie Bashara, a counsellor at Camp Mystic, noticed that one of the younger girls had begun to tear up. They were walking back to their cabin, Giggle Box, as another storm swelled over the Texas Hill Country. The girl feared what was coming, so Ainslie wrapped an arm around her.

“It’s just heat lightning,” Ainslie, 19, recalled assuring her that evening. “There’s nothing to it.”

It was just past 9pm on July 3, the start of Ainslie’s night off from tending to Giggle Box’s 16 “littles”. She popped inside to grab her backpack just as the girls, all between eight and 10, began to brush their teeth and slip on their pyjamas. Ainslie said goodbye and headed out for a break with friends. By the time she came back, shortly after midnight, she had to sprint. The storm had begun to pound the 99-year-old Christian camp situated along the Guadalupe River in Hunt, Texas. The cabin was no more than 180 metres from the bank.

One of the cabins at Camp Mystic in the aftermath of the flood.Credit: AFP

Ainslie had arrived a week earlier for a month-long stay. She couldn’t remember a time when Mystic hadn’t been part of her life. Her aunt and older sister had attended, and she’d started at age seven, spending 10 Julys riding horses and catching perch, exchanging friendship bracelets and learning about Jesus. Her younger sister, entering her last year as a camper, had begged Ainslie to return this summer as a counsellor.

So now, inside Giggle Box, she changed out of her wet clothes and into shorts and a T-shirt, quietly sliding into her bed in a corner near the front door. The girls lay still in their beds, some snuggled with stuffed animals. Ainslie stared out the window. A native Texan, she’d seen hundreds of summer squalls, but this one felt heavier. The thunder cracked like fireworks inside the cabin.

Ainslie couldn’t sleep, braced for a frightened camper to slink over in need of comfort. The lightning lit the room like flashbulbs, and at each strike, she scanned faces around the room. Then she noticed a car pass by – a bizarre sight at that hour. She glanced at her watch: 1.58am.

She soon heard another noise that, at first, felt out of place. Two nearby cabins housed Mystic’s youngest campers, and the eight-year-olds had started shrieking.

Ainslie, a rising college sophomore and her cabin’s oldest counsellor, hurried across the room to her two co-counsellors, who’d each just graduated from high school. Both were restless. “This storm is really bad,” she said, preparing them to help console their girls if they, too, began to break down.

They always left the windows open to keep the cabin cool, and now, as Ainslie lay on her bed, she noticed older kids from another cabin running up the road with blankets and pillows.

“Are we staying or leaving?” she yelled through the window.

Families come to pick up salvaged belongings.Credit: AP

“Stay in your cabin!” she recalled a staff member shouting back.

All the girls in Giggle Box had woken up, she said, and they were terrified.

“We need to leave,” the girls started saying. “We need to leave.”

“Our cabin is safe. The other girls’ cabin is not,” Ainslie tried to explain. “That’s why they’re leaving, but we are staying.”

The storm pounded the 99-year-old Christian camp situated along the Guadalupe River in Hunt, Texas.Credit: AP

Rain was spitting sideways through the windows, so she and the other teens climbed onto beds to shut them until someone noticed water pooling in the cabin, spreading across the floor.

The counsellors told the kids, all in pyjamas, to put on shoes and, if they had them, rain jackets. Ainslie cracked open the door and a mass of water muscled through. She heaved it shut. The teens slid a trunk in front of the door as they told the girls to stack all their clothes and personal items atop their beds.

Much of Ainslie’s material life was stuffed in bins beneath her own. Her backpack and car keys. Her favourite outfits, for Sundays, when they got to dress up. Her Tecovas cowboy boots. Her Mystic memory box, with the Bible she’d been given 12 years ago, now plastered in sticky notes and neon highlights and tucked with letters from her late grandmother. And the sticker she’d earned after catching her first fish with camp director Dick Eastland when she was eight. And the 10 buttons from every birthday she’d spent at Mystic, that she planned to wear later this month when she turned 20.

“It’s your happy place,” Ainslie said. “You want to have all your happy stuff with you.”

A staffer outside removed the window screens and left, presumably to aid other cabins, so Ainslie rushed to her dresser and pulled out a headlamp her dad had given her to read nighttime devotionals. She turned on the porch light and peered through the window at the water below, believing it couldn’t be deeper than a foot or so.

“Okay, we’re going to go out,” she told the girls around 3am, but the first in line, a nine-year-old, was afraid to jump.

So out Ainslie leapt, and when her bare feet touched the ground, the water, rushing past with such force it felt like rapids, crested at her waist. If the girl had gone first, Ainslie realised, she would have been swept away.

Stunned by the cold, Ainslie caught her balance as her co-counsellors inside kept the girls calm and coaxed them through the window. The pair eased the first girl out to Ainslie, then a second, then a third. All of them were crying. They clung to Ainslie – her arms, back, waist, hair – as the former dancer slogged through the current towards a dry pavilion almost 30 metres away.

At least 27 campers and counsellors died at Camp Mystic.Credit: AP

With her toes digging into the gravel, she felt a crush of panic against her chest. What is going on, she recalled thinking, because the air now smelled like sewage, and this place where she’d made many of her happiest memories had become something she did not recognise.

“It’s going to be okay!” she shouted over the river’s din, her eyes fixed on the pavilion.

She dropped off the first set of campers, told them to wait, and returned to Giggle Box, repeating the trip until the cabin was empty. The counsellors counted – 13, 14, 15, 16. All there.

A staffer ran over to check on them before setting off to help others. Ainslie’s sister, Addison, was somewhere on Senior Hill, but that was on higher ground.

“Bow your heads. We’re going to pray,” the chattering teens told their girls. They asked God to make them brave and pleaded with Him to help their friends.

Down the hill, Ainslie saw a cabin that housed some of the littlest girls. In the windows, the beam of a flashlight swirled. Between her and them was the water, which had surged now almost to the pavilion. Over the roar, she could hear the girls begging for help.

“The sounds are just horrific,” she said later. “And you can’t do anything.”

They scrambled atop benches until the water reached those, too, and the counsellors guided the group to the foot of a steep, rocky hill.

“Get ready to climb,” they told the girls, some of whom, like Ainslie, had forgotten their shoes. But they had to go, even as rain battered their faces. Ainslie felt like she was clambering up a waterfall.

Each time the river rose and they had to hike to a higher spot, the counsellors counted their girls again: 16, 16, 16.

She watched as a group from another cabin scrambled up and down a separate section of hillside, yelling the name of a girl they feared had been lost.

Ainslie couldn’t bear that possibility. She’d met Giggle Box’s campers just five days earlier but had already grown devoted. In a call with her mother that week, she’d marvelled at the spirit of her littlies, whose joy she couldn’t help but adopt.

“Can I pray about my stuffed animal that I left in my cabin?”

Now those littlies were huddled in the darkness, their bodies trembling from cold, their wet hair clinging to their faces. They asked God to stop the rain.

“Can I pray about my stuffed animal that I left in my cabin?” one girl asked, so they prayed for Banana the monkey, too.

Nowhere had Ainslie’s faith grown more than at Mystic, a place that, to her, felt holy. Hours earlier, the counsellors had performed skits. One group had spoofed Wicked and another Love Island, Ainslie said, but her group had decided on “Jesus Highlights”. She played the disciple Peter, caught in a boat amid wind and waves when Jesus encouraged him to believe that he, too, would not sink.

“Fear not, Peter, for I am with you, even in the storm,” Ainslie had written in the script for the friend who played Jesus. In the skit, Chloe Childress, 19, had walked on water.

Ainslie didn’t know that Chloe Childress, pictured, would not survive the night.Credit: AP

From the hillside, Ainslie watched the power go out, then her headlamp did, too. Everything was black, but she could still hear the screams.

Ainslie didn’t know that Chloe would not survive the night and that every girl in her friend’s cabin would die or disappear.

Shortly after 6am, a grey light began to reveal the devastation below, but to Ainslie, it seemed that the sun never rose over Mystic that day. The clouds didn’t part. The rain didn’t stop.

As the flood receded, the three counsellors led their charges back down the hill to the pavilion, now layered in mud and broken tree limbs. They had so many questions Ainslie couldn’t answer: “Is our cabin okay?” “Do we get to go home?” “What time is breakfast?” “Do we get to take a shower?” “Is my mom on her way?” “What happened to my sister?”

Mexican firefighters search for bodies in the Guadalupe River outside Camp Mystic.Credit: Bloomberg

Staffers shuttled over other children from across the camp.

“You would go up to them,” Ainslie recalled, “and they looked like a little ghost.”

Eventually, the staff shepherded them to the recreation hall and conducted a headcount. That’s when Ainslie began to realise how many lives the flood had taken. She stepped outside, away from the girls, and for the first time, Ainslie wept.

Days later, as Mystic’s death count reached 27, she would feel overcome with rage: at God, at the circumstances, at herself, because she couldn’t do more.

“Evil strikes in the holiest of places,” her mom would tell her, and she’d try to hold on to that.

She never blamed the camp. At her orientation, Ainslie said, she received emergency training, but how could anyone have prepared them for this? Mystic’s leaders had done their best to keep them safe, she said, both before the flood and during it. If Mystic reopened, and if Ainslie had daughters, she’d already decided to send them, too.

In the hours after the worst of the storm, on July 4, the counsellors and campers gathered in a dining hall and waited for military helicopters to rescue them. That’s when the teens were handed Sharpies and told to write the girls’ names on their arms or legs.

“You’ve already made it through the hard part,” Ainslie told them as she jotted the letters on their skin. “You’re safe.”

The girl missing on the hillside had been found. Banana the monkey was safe on a top bunk. It would take hours for Ainslie to notice the ant bites or the throbbing in her feet. She, along with about 15 other counsellors, waited for all the campers in the dining hall to be flown out, she said, before they readied to leave. None were older than 19, but, like Ainslie, all of them had risked their lives to protect their little ones.

Ainslie peered at the helicopter on the soccer field, its engine thumping. “We did it,” she said to one of her Giggle Box co-counsellors, and they all headed across the grass, ducking beneath the twirling blades and climbing aboard.

The rain still had not stopped.

As the helicopter ascended, the few counsellors who still had phones soon began to receive cell service. As they did, posters of the missing children appeared on their screens.

The young women gripped each other’s hands. They bowed their heads.

Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.

Washington Post

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