I am haunted by the deaths of the little girls at Camp Mystic. Absolutely haunted. Surely all of us are, so huge is this tragedy.

But I’m thinking in particular of my fellow former camp counsellors.

For two summers, I was a counselor at the Presbyterian Camp Montreat in the Smokies in NC. (Echoes — longtime camp, much beloved. Me, whose mother grew up in the Hill Country in Texas.)

I was 18 and 19 in my counsellor years. Sure, I was a veteran babysitter. But this was a whole different level of responsibility.

My girls were ages 8–10, mostly first-time campers. They needed so much.

Twelve little girls, used to 12 different night-time rituals that I could never have adequately summoned up. They wept. They feared. They quarreled. They’d lose a tooth and expect me to be the same tooth fairy that would have come to their home. They’d hurt themselves outside of infirmary hours, and I could only hope I was doing the right thing to soothe them.

Out there on the lake, as their canoeing instructor, it was me or nobody who’d keep them safe.

When it comes to summer camps — for all the beauty and power of the campfires and the songs and the sports and the woods and waters — we put very young people in positions of responsibility for very young children. I’m betting that most of us who had that responsibility feel a kind of latent anxiety about it to this day. An anxiety that is powerfully awakened by this tragedy.

I can’t quit running the reel through my mind. When did the water start coming in? How quickly? What did those young women do when their campers were threatened by a wall of water 20 feet high, with the strength of Niagara falls? What was within their power to do? What did they say to them? These little girls?