Floods Saturate But Can’t Destroy Wimberley’s Spirit As Little Town Fights Back

By, JOE HOLLEY

SPECIAL TO CORRIDOR NEWS

   WIMBERLEY — On Feb. 26, 1972, an avalanche of black water and coal mine waste roared like rolling lava down a West Virginia valley called Buffalo Creek. The fast-moving flood destroyed or severely damaged 80 percent of the homes in the 17-mile-long valley, left some 5,000 residents homeless and took the lives of 125. Sociologist Kai Erikson described the deadly flood as a “writhing mass of water, driving houses before it and bouncing trucks on its crest like beach balls, making a sound like thunder, and belching smoke and sparks as it wrenched power lines apart. No wonder that people would remember it as a living creature.”

   I was thinking about Erikson’s classic account of that West Virginia disaster, a book titled “Everything in Its Path,” as I sat in a long line of vehicles earlier this week waiting to cross the Blanco River on Ranch Road 12, the main road into this little Hill Country vacation town. Because the normally placid stream transformed itself into a “living creature” last week, traffic was reduced to one lane on the damaged bridge. Below us, on the wreckage-strewn banks of the still-roiling river, majestic 500-year-old bald cypress trees had been uprooted by flood waters more than 40 feet high; others, like skeletal sticks jutting up from the riverbank, were an abnormal orange color, their bark, leaves and limbs stripped away by the force of the water. Comfortable homes with wide, green lawns sloping down to the river had been left in shambles. Or else they were gone. People died in those homes, I reminded myself. Other people lost everything they owned.

   Erikson’s book endures because it combines a beautifully written description of everyday life in the mountain-hollow mining communities of West Virginia with a detailed analysis of what a community experiences long-term when disaster strikes: New York City after 9/11, New Orleans after Katrina or, on a smaller scale, Wimberley after the Memorial Day weekend flood.

   As the Yale sociologist emphasizes, the rebuilding and reconstruction is often easier than the psychological recovery, which may take years.

   “People who go through such wrenching experiences,” he writes, “often develop what I describe as a sense of vulnerability, a feeling that one has lost a certain natural immunity to misfortune, a growing conviction, even, that the world is no longer a safe place to be.”

   I talked to Jan Stephens, 55, who moved with her husband, Jonathan Vaitl, to their dream house on the river about 15 years ago. He died in 2013, but she stayed on — until the river destroyed her home. “It was our little bit of heaven — our beauty, our quiet, our river,” she said, sitting in a lawn chair outside the log-cabin guest cottage where she’s staying temporarily. “Now, we’re in purgatory.”

   A couple of days later, I talked to her by phone. “I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever get back home,” she said. I could hear the quiver of fear in her voice.

   I’m no psychologist, so I wouldn’t presume to assess the mental health of a traumatized community. In Wimberley this week, I did see an outpouring of concern and assistance on the part of residents who had survived the rampaging river or were unaffected by it, as well as from individuals and organizations volunteering from all over Texas and beyond.

Getting clothes washed

   At Wimberley’s only laundromat, I talked to Deborah Hempel-Medina of nearby Dripping Springs, who with three of her friends came up with the idea of helping flood survivors with a task so simple most of us probably would not have thought of it: getting clothes washed. The morning after the flood, the women got in touch with Jamie Bishop, an Austinite who owns Wash Day, and soon they had an impressive process going, at no charge for survivors. The two of them, along with dozens of volunteers, had been working 18- and 20-hour days taking in mounds of wet, muddy clothes already stinking of mold and delivering them clean and fresh again the next day. They expect to take in 8,000 to 10,000 pounds before they’re done.

   Bishop, 38, mentioned an 83-year-old woman who brought a small basket of clothes the morning after the flood. “This is all I have left,” she told him.

   “Those are the stories that will humble you,” he said. “Wimberley has been great to me as a community; it’s my duty to give back.”

   Traci Maxwell, a real estate broker and school board member, is coordinating one of Wimberley’s three relief centers. “We are a volunteer community,” she said, standing amid tables in the Wimberley High School gym that were stacked high with clothes and household goods.

   Watching neighbors helping to haul out ruined furniture and appliances from houses invaded by 6 feet of water the night of the flood, I could see what Maxwell meant, and yet Erikson would suggest that something else is going on, as well. “The energy with which rescue operations are pursued and the cooperation of neighbors’ act to reassure people that there is still life among the ruins, and they respond with an outpouring of communal feeling,” he writes. He also points out that when this “wave of good feeling” dissipates in a few days or a few weeks, survivors will still need their neighbors.

  Wimberley in the old days was a ranching community — sheep and goats, as well as cattle — but these days it relies on vacationers. For generations, many from Houston, San Antonio and Dallas have rented guest houses along the Blanco or beside Cypress Creek. They may live someplace else, but they have an abiding connection to the little town among the hills where, every summer, they relax in lawn chairs on the rocky banks of the spring-fed river, or where they watch their kids hunt for heart-shaped rocks in the cool, clear water. In the evening, they share a meal with friends and family at picnic tables in the backyard, and the murmur of their voices on the river, the occasional firefly dancing in the dark, is, for them, Wimberley. This summer, some of those well-loved places and hundreds of those majestic trees won’t be there to welcome them.

Open for business

  In and around the compact little downtown square and along Ranch Road 12, shops and cafes are open for business. The flood did not affect them. The town is sure to feel the economic pinch, but as Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Cathy Moreman told me, it’s still unclear how severe it will be. “Our fear is that people are still under the mis-impression that Wimberley’s under water,” she said.

   Meanwhile, the people of Wimberley, even in the midst of their recovery task, can smile at some of the strangeness they’ve experienced. Former Houstonian Eddie Gumbert, who with his wife Dorothy moved here in 1970, told me about a family forced to retreat to the second floor of their riverside home. Deep in the dark night they heard thrashing, splashing sounds in the living room below. Venturing downstairs, they found a horse in the house. They managed to coax the frightened animal upstairs, where he spent the night with the family. Venturing outside the next morning, they met a man ambling down the debris-strewn road, a man with a question: “Y’all haven’t seen a horse come by here, have you?”

  There is physical and psychological damage in Wimberley after the flooding by the Blanco River, but residents and those who vacation in the Hill Country town aren’t giving up hope. 

Joe Holly is a contributor to the Houston Chronicle where this story originally published and is reprinted here with full permission. You can email JOE HOLLEY at joe.holley@chron.com ? twitter.com/holleynews.