An excerpt from Camp Bratton-Green: As Remembered by Many Who Experienced It by Linda Kay, Ed.D., 1991.
CHAPTER X | The Last Day
On the evening of the winter solstice, December 21, 1990, Tom Guest was sitting on the front porch of his home, the Gray Center’s managers house, thinking that it had been fortunate that the DOY conference had been cancelled for that night since the weather had turned so nasty. He began to notice that the rain was falling perpendicular to the ground. He heard a loud rumbling noise and in an instant ran into the house screaming, “Tornado! Tornado!” His wife Lil and their son Tai just had time to dive into the hall for cover as Tom jerked open the front door to relieve the pressure from the storm and was almost sucked out the door by the force of it. And then it was over—and an overpowering smell of pine filled the air. Tom’s heart stood still as he glanced across the dirt road toward the Big House, fully expecting it to be gone. In the gloom of early night, it appeared untouched. He grabbed his big spotlight and he and Lil jumped in his van, and they drove down the road toward camp, shining the light to and fro into the trees. All seemed fine. And then they came to the opening in the woods where the heart of the camp was. The flood light caught the roof of the A-framed chapel, and he knew what had happened. Camp Bratton Green was not there.
The administration building, the dining hall, and the recreation hall were gone. The roof of the chapel was standing, but all of the glass walls had blown out, and the back wall was not there. A huge pine tree had apparently been uprooted on the other side of the lake and had been driven into six inches of cement in the side of the swimming pool. Tom’s maintenance building had disappeared. This they could see from the floodlight.
By 9 P.M. that night telephone lines in Mississippi were relaying the message, “Camp Bratton Green has been struck by a tornado. I don’t know the extent of the damage, but it is bad.”
The next morning the light of day brought the horror into clearer focus: the trees! All of the trees … across the lake, around the swimming pool, over the tennis courts, around the baseball field … looked like broken off twigs or were uprooted and had fallen onto the buildings around them. All of the girls cabins were caved in at one place or another. And the baseball field looked like an unkempt wood yard. Uprooted trees had been thrown into a huge heap. And behind the baseball field—none of the tree tops were there. Looking across the lake just on the other side of the dam, a huge U shape had been carved out of the pines.
The totality of the devastation was hard to grasp. A steady stream of visitors began to arrive, some taking video pictures and snapshots of the wreckage. People walked around in silence, trying to comprehend this tragedy. Pictures of former camps were strewn everywhere—smiling faces of campers sitting in front of the administration building: grim reminders of what had been.
Even as the visitors walked through the boards and fallen walls, the shrill whine of power saws filled the space where the buildings had been standing the day before. Between the spurts of the powerful saws, people walked through the corner of the kitchen still standing and spoke softly, “The dishwasher looks okay … it is so strange what a tornado touches and doesn’t touch. Look, the pots and pans are still on the shelves, neatly stacked.” Silently they walked the familiar sidewalks which now looked strange—the buildings they had joined lying in twisted metal and splinters of wood. The whole area looked small and diminished. Not nearly so large as the camp had been in one’s memory.
The next day, Sunday, priests all over the diocese announced the terrible news to full churches of people—the faithful and the less faithful who come only around Christmas time. During the week of Christmas and New Year’s Eve, Episcopalians called each other to talk about what had happened and what was going to happen at the camp. The permanent staff of the previous summer met on the Gulf Coast and were comforted by each other. On New Years Eve at a party in Jackson, they toasted the old camp, the new camp, and the staff that would bear the burden of the next summer’s camp. This staff would be in a new camp. A camp with only memories of the traditions that they had known for so much of their lives. These young people realized what a great loss had taken place. Cecil Jones. Jr.’s children, Lewis and Lauren, both said, “I wish it had been the new camp at Alison’s Wells. Then only daddy would have been upset. It has no memories yet.”
When Henry Hudson had gone to tell Cecil Jones, Sr., the news in Meridian, Cecil was quiet for a moment, and then replied in his slow manner, “Well, we built it in three months. You’ll have to rebuild it in three months.”
And the camp will go on. Trees will be replanted, and in time, they will grow to lovingly surround the camp, but not in my lifetime. The million dollars in damage will be cleaned up, a new facility will be built, and perhaps, the new camp will be better than the old. And it will, in time, have a story to tell, just as the old camp did. And someone will write that story, years from now. For the present is always turning into the past, and our lives are constantly filling with memories of the good things in our lives. We somehow tend to file away the bad times and fondly cherish for ourselves the memories that make us feel good. Camp Bratton Green makes us feel good, about ourselves, about each other, and about our relationship with our Lord. It is a time for making new memories, while we file away our pictures and T-shirts of the old camp along with our Scout badges and old address books.
“The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Amen.”
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