Photograph by Ginna Allen (C ’29).
Ginna Allen, News Editor
Summer camp has been part of my life since before I was born. My parents grew up going to camp, and it eventually became the place where they met. The moment I was old enough, I started packing my bags every summer to leave the real world behind and immerse myself in camp’s endless, chaotic fun. When I heard there was an opportunity for me to return to Camp Capers in Waring, Texas, as a staff member and intern from Sewanee, my love for camp was not my only motivation. It was the unique opportunity in this internship to develop a curriculum that illustrates the connection between our faith and the environment that convinced me to spend my entire summer back in a sweltering Texas summer.
The internship was founded by Greg Robertson (C ’78), a Sewanee English major turned geologist and Corpus Christi native who saw the innate value of linking Sewanee to the Episcopal summer camps in the Diocese of West Texas, including Camp Capers in the Texas Hill Country. With this connection , interns from Sewanee could approach camp ministry with the unique environmental experiences that Sewanee provides within its 13,000 acres of vibrant forests and historic rock formations. For my part, I encounter my faith every time I set foot on the Domain — from the fog blanketing the plateau on quiet mornings to the fireflies hovering above the tree line at Morgan’s Steep. So, this summer became an opportunity for me to bridge two places that I love while deepening the campers’ understanding of nature’s relevance to their faith.
The official name for my responsibilities at camp was “Creation Care.” I find this name a nice encapsulation of its theological purpose: appreciating God’s creation and maintaining and caring for that creation. At its core, Creation Care shows nature’s integral contributions to our faith and how we are called to be stewards of the earth. As God’s children, we are part of creation, and to live within creation means that we must respect it.
When deciding on specific themes to focus on Creation Care, I always came back to the practice of slowing down and using all of our senses to notice the smallest details in nature. Whether it was campers taking a closer look during a nature scavenger hunt in sprawling prairie grass fields, pausing for a quiet exhale during a peaceful river meditation by the Guadalupe or learning something unexpected during a competitive round of clue-card match of Texas Hill Country wildlife, I strived to offer a balance between educational activities and classic camp fun.
My favorite moments when teaching Creation Care were always in the river. I can still feel the water beneath my feet as we would wade through the cool shallows of crisp river flow under the shade of towering spruce trees. I can still hear water gurgling over river rocks while barn swallows chirped their parts in nature’s song. The river was the best classroom I could have asked for, and as I guided the kids through it, I found myself just as captivated by the scenery as they were.
Amidst my reflections on the summer, I spoke with Rt. Rev. Dr. David G. Read, the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of West Texas and a frequent presence at camp. He said it best as we discussed why environmental study is an essential part of the summer camp experience at Capers. “The whole idea of retreat is how we leave something behind, and we go somewhere where in the beauty of creation, we can encounter our living God with fewer distractions of daily life, whatever daily life looks like for somebody,” he said. “That act of going out into nature and the theology within the creation bears the fingerprints of the Creator. By being in creation, we learn something about God just by being and observing, playing, worshiping in the midst of the beauty of creation.”
Removing campers from their usual routines also allows them to be immersed in nature and open to all their faith has to offer. “Not that there isn’t creation in the city too, but it’s just different,” Read said. “It makes us more open to what God might have to say to us in the moment or experiencing God with fewer distractions than we might have in our daily routine. I think that’s the underlying part of theology in camping ministry where people go out of the routine and go to a place where there are fewer distractions.”
Alongside my duties in Creation Care, I was tasked with implementing a land management or restoration project anywhere within Capers’ 188 acres along the Guadalupe River. When considering my approach to this project, I immediately thought of the Fourth of July floods last year and their physical and emotional impacts on the Hill Country. 136 people died in the flood, with three still missing. 28 of those deaths were at Camp Mystic, another Christian summer camp a 50-minute drive from Camp Capers. The river also took the lives of two Sewanee alumni from Houston and the toddler step-grandson of a third Sewanee alumnus from Austin.
The chaotic violence of the floods stripped vital vegetation from the Guadalupe and destabilized its riverbanks. The massive flow of water, debris and silt shifted riverbeds and washed away spawning beds, clouding their waterways with deep layers of thick sludge.
I grew up swimming in this river and resting along its banks, and it deeply pained me to see it suffer such devastation; so supporting the river’s healing process was very important to me. I decided the most impactful thing I could offer as the Sewanee intern was not through planting seeds or measuring soil levels. Rather, I wanted to use my journalistic skills to reflect on the floods and how the scale of tragedy pushed us to reckon with our faith in moments when we have little control over our natural world.
I also wanted to empower the campers to nurture personal connections to creation in a way that strengthens their understanding of faith. Building this relationship is so important because it is easy to lose a sense of one’s beliefs when nature unleashes such horrific violence. The natural world is uncontrollable, and to reckon with that fact is even harder when there is not a foundational understanding of nature’s role within our faith. I hoped for the campers to return home from their week at camp with the idea that nature and God are not competing forces, but rather that nature can be a direct way to encounter God.
That seemed particularly important in the wake of what has happened along the Guadalupe in the last two years — a tragedy that has directly touched many of the campers and their families and communities. I recognized that fact because even I still struggle with the scale of last year’s flooding. I was at camp two days after the Fourth of July floods as rescue teams scoured the nearby area in search of those lost. There were times that week when we would be immersed in camp activities, only to be interrupted by helicopters bellowing overhead. It was as if to remind us of the startling tragedy that had unfolded around us only a few days before.
It was a really hard week, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else. Camp is truly an incredible place to come together and share a communal love for God and each other, no matter what else may be going on. Coming back a year later as Creation Care coordinator pushed me to make sure the campers had space to process their feelings about nature, both good and bad.
Read described this nuance in using faith to process natural disasters as he and I talked about last year’s floods: “All those feelings are there, especially with last year’s flood with so many young people who lost their lives and just the sorrow and grief of that. I think the other thing that floods remind us of generally is that human beings are the only species that majorly change creation and have really big impacts on creation.”
“And to some degree, I think we can control creation,” he continued. “Think how many dams have been built on the Mississippi River. It’s almost all concrete now. And so floods remind us in a healthy way that even though we have lots of knowledge and power and scientific knowledge and ability to do all kinds of things, creation remains out of our total control and parts of it are still unpredictable. That’s humbling, in a good way, for human beings to realize that we can’t predict the future. We can’t see far enough to know.”
On July 16, the river reminded us of this lesson once again. Only 377 days after last year’s flooding, the Guadalupe rose 32 feet within three hours. Thankfully, Camp was prepared. At the beginning of the summer, the entire staff, including myself, had undergone extensive training and drills to be prepared in the event of another flood or other unforeseen danger. Once again, there was no serious damage to Camp property, and the camp session continued with only a few minor adjustments to program areas and activities. Even so, witnessing a flood firsthand opened my eyes even more than ever to the importance of learning how to support the environment and each other when such things happen.
“I think it’s a challenge of recognizing that the river is this amazing, beautiful asset that people have been living along for tens of thousands of years. But also having some kind of balance to recognize it’s also a very powerful force that sometimes is destructive and spills out of its banks, which has been doing so for millions of years,” Read said.
Professor of Forestry at Sewanee and faculty advisor for the internship, Dr. Scott Torreano, had visited Capers last summer after the July 4 flood to record floodlines and collect data on direct impacts to the surrounding ecosystems. When he got word of this year’s flood, he caught the first flight to Texas.
“Obviously, nobody thought that there would be a very similar intensity event so soon during the camping season the next year, but here it came,” Torreano said. “And so, I felt like that would be a lost opportunity if I didn’t go out immediately. So as soon as I could arrange travel and the instruments to take the data, I went out there and documented it.”
With his findings, Torreano hopes to provide accurate data that outlines the patterns of these floods and offers new insights for future flood maps, as well as land management and utilization. Witnessing the immediate aftermath of the two floods was especially valuable, he said. “What I found striking was the similarities in the land contours at which the high water marks were found. And the data I’m suggesting shows a strong correlation between the high water mark of the floods in both years and a given contour on the landscape.”
While this flood may have set back some efforts from last year’s recovery, the work to better understand and reconcile with the river, for both scientists like Dr. Torreano and people of faith like Bishop Read, has never stopped. The Episcopal Diocese of West Texas has continued its extensive support of recovery efforts in the Hunt and Kerrville areas since the earliest days after last year’s flood. This includes partnerships with St. Peter’s Church in Kerrville, Episcopal Relief and Development, and the Hill Country Area Foundation.
“What does it mean for the creation along the river?,” Read asked. “One of the results of last year’s flood was that the state of Texas and the federal government came in and scraped all the riverbanks for miles and miles. All the riparian part of the ecosystem was removed in their search for missing people. And so that whole transition area between the river itself and the hills was literally scraped down to the rock. How do we be part of healing, replanting, doing things to alleviate erosion that we created in our search as part of that flood recovery?”
Even though the summer has come to an end, I am still thinking about Read’s question and how we can all do our part to care for creation. I am only further reminded of our planet’s sanctity when I am on the Mountain as it catches the last glimpse of summer’s heat before leaning into autumn’s cool breezes. Yet what I think of most after 12 weeks at camp is how I arrived at Camp Capers intending to teach children how to see God in creation, never expecting the Guadalupe to teach me the same lesson. For that, I will always be grateful.