Three more days left at this camp before my cousin, Nina and I can go home. This whole business of a camp for twelve-year-old girls in the Hill Country of Texas, near Austin, never appealed to us. We are the right age, but we are Hispanic, unlike these gringo girls.
I blame our gringo fathers for forcing Nina and I to go to this godforsaken place with girls who have nothing in common with us except for their age.
Nina runs like the wind and swims like a fish, winning all the running and swimming contests. She leads our soccer team to victory. But her comment about the origins of the game, our Aztec warrior women who decapitated the losers and used the heads of the vanquished as the next soccer ball, does not impress the gringo girls.
But the camp counselors admit my cousin and I are always helpful. Everyone admits we add to the camp a different esprit de corp.
I’m a plant and animal lover and lead several groups in the ways of the plants and trees that surrounded the camp. I identify the various spirits of the earth who control the water, flora, and fauna at the camp.
I sit by the bank of the river, contemplating all of this, when evening creeps into the day and Nina joins me.
“Gabriel, cheer up. Only a few more days left,” she says as she nudges me for more room on our river rock.
“I know, mija, but hush,” I say. “I’m listening for our Abuela. She cries at the bank of this river every night and I can’t figure out why.”
“I think she weeps for our discomfort in this place. This place is not for us. She senses that.”
“I think she’s upset about the cypress trees along the riverbank. They don’t belong here in central Texas, but with us at home along the border and into Mexico. Their root balls feed off the river water too much. It’s not healthy.”
“So, you’re familiar with their root balls, Gabriel?” Nina says, wiggling her eyebrows suggestively.
“Seriously, you, of all people, should worry about grandmother’s calling to us at this gringo camp.”
Nina was born only a week after our grandmother took her own life. Distressed by the rising water of the Reservoir at Amistad that submerged her own village, she stepped into those very waters and never came back. The only thing still visible in that old town was the cross on the steeple of the church.
“Why does she weep and call to us?”
“I don’t know, Gabriel.”
We sit in silence until the stars pop out and then we walk back to our individual cabins. “I hate sleeping in the same room as twenty other strangers,” Nina says, grudgingly, as she shuffles away. I shiver in agreement.
That night, as the thunder roars and the lightning flashes in arches over the night sky, before the deluge, I awake to my grandmother’s voice.
“Gabriel, come to the river’s edge. Nina meets you there. Leave this place before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what, Abuela?” I whisper half-asleep.
She says, “Get dressed and put your shoes on.”
Like a zombie, I do as commanded and find Nina by our spot along the river.
“You’re here,” I say.
“When your grandmother wakes you up and tells you to get to the river quickly, you do just that. She says for us to climb the cypress tree.”
I take comfort that Nina is with me and that together, with Abuela, we will be okay. Climbing the tree in the rain, we settle on a high, sturdy limb. We can hear the water rising without seeing it.
We hear the gringo girls screaming for help as the camp is flooding. Through sheets of rain we see SUVs floating by with their headlights on swirling in deep, swift water.
“Shouldn’t we have warned them what’s happening?”
“Gabriel, do you think that they would believe you? Hey everyone, wake up; my grandmother’s ghost is warning of a deluge.”
All the while, my panic rises with the water. I clutch my silver necklace engraved with a capitalized and entwined N and G. Nina fingers her identical necklace. We both feel our namesake jewelry as a talisman against the evils of the storm.
“Gabriel, it’s story time,” Nina whispers to distract from our perilous situation. She wraps her arms around me and launches her tale. Doubly entwined with the cypress and with Nina, I listen to her retelling our adventures on the Frio River in Garner State Park near our home. Navigating the Frio in our inner tubes, Nina and I raced for sixteen miles in the river’s swift water until we reached our dads, waiting for us downstream. Nina names the trees that we passed on our journey. Occasionally, she misnames a species, and I murmur a correction as I doze off to sleep.
The morning sun wakes me. I sit up from the protective branches of the cypress tree and see that I’m stuck in a massive clump of trees, root balls on display for the world to see, and the reason why this nest of vegetation sheilded me from drowning in the swollen river.
“Nina, that’s the last time I’m trash talking an invasive species’ root ball,” I say. “We owe our lives to these trees.”
I look around for my cousin and cannot see her. I call her name over and over again. From a highway bridge over the river, I see strangers shouting for rescue Zodiacs and frantically pointing in my direction.
“Abuela, I can’t find Nina,” I whisper.
“Gabriel, don’t worry about your cousin. She’s safe with me. In time, you will see her again. For now, you endure the way of water. Rivers whisper stories about your adventures and bravery. I’m with you always.”
“I’m Gabriel of Uvalde,” I tell the men from the Zodiac, “I’m looking for my cousin, Nina. Have you seen her?”