Sunday Essay: On Austin—My Austin

The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, April 11th. It is the 39th of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.

Last week’s essay: On the Mystery

Sometimes, when I’m driving home at night at the end of a shift, usually up 183 towards Leander for whatever reason, and it feels late because it’s the weekend and it’s been dark for a while, I put on The Killers, and when I get to All These Things That I’ve Done, I picture the farewell video I like to think we’ll put together when The Barking Crow meets its end. I like to think we’ll put it to that song.

I like to think that video will mark the end of something successful, by any standard of that word. I suspect that, if it really is the end of a success, it’ll be an end that catches many by surprise, and I like to think that’d be a good way for it to go—just a few years after a “breakout,” hanging it up before becoming trite or overdone or anything of that sort. A Bill Watterson ending. Maybe the morning after the NIT Championship, five or six or eight years down the line, when God willing Fargo’s getting old and God willing there’s a kid or three around and it’s time to move on from this series of escalating jokes. I don’t know if that’s when it’ll go, or how it’ll go, but I hope it is. And I have a hunch that should the blog’s time come this way, it’ll come alongside the end of our time in Austin.

Other times, when I’m driving home at night from far away, maybe up 35 from one of those sprawling, side-of-the-highway apartment complexes, and it feels late because it’s the weekend and it’s been dark for a while, I put on something sadder. Something emptier. Something like Lua, by Bright Eyes. I did that recently. I put on “Lua Radio” from Spotify, the existence of which seems like it might make Conor Oberst shudder. On Your Porch came on—that song the guy who went on to make fun. made when he first left Arizona. I hadn’t heard it before, and by Texan standards it was cold outside, so I listened to it a few times in a row as I made my way back north. On the third or the sixth time through, I happened to pass under 35 on the Dean Keeton loop-de-loop at the same time as he sung, “and these last three years, I know they’ve been hard,” and it brought out a couple tears. Because it’s been about three years now since everything started. Everything that brought me to Austin.

I’m cognizant of the fact I don’t know Austin as well as so many. But I’d offer that I know this Austin particularly well, and by this Austin I mean the Austin of 2019, 2020, and 2021—the Austin I’ve inhabited. I’d only visited three or four times before moving here, and the first of those was just five years ago, so my eyes aren’t clouded by halcyonic nostalgia. I spent the first of these three years here driving people around this city, and the second of the three driving food around this city, and I suspect I’ll spend the third doing a mix, and while that doesn’t show you a whole city, it brings you pretty close. But I’ll defer to those I know better. I’ll call this “my Austin,” recognizing how much cities are things upon which we project ourselves, or in some cases are things from which we reject ourselves. The city I describe here is, as far as I know, nobody’s Austin but mine. But it’s the best description I can offer, to myself and to you.

It was three years ago this weekend that we came down for Emma’s accepted students day for the social work master’s program at UT. She and her mom stayed down by Congress and 2nd. I stayed up on 11th or so, still downtown, but in that stretch between the ARCH and the hospital where it’s hilly and not actively under construction but it feels like it’s under construction. The Joe Kelly fight happened that week—the one against the Yankees. The first Joe Kelly blog post was written in that hotel room—a little bit of salsa on my shorts from a breakfast taco.

Six months later, Emma was down here, and I wasn’t down here yet, and I visited, and on a Thursday night we got some work done at a coffee shop just south of the river on Congress. I was trying to at least go for a fifteen-minute walk every day, so in the middle of the evening, I went out and crossed the Congress bridge in the mist, up to the lights of 2nd and back. It was the week before the boil-water week, and that part of town was quiet in the damp. Joe Kelly was about to win the World Series, and I didn’t know what winter held in store, and I thought this would be the town where I’d blossom, as it seemed in that moment a sleeping giant, biding its time even as the hype around it clamored on.

Winter held many things in store. It held a collision with reality that resulted in a financial scramble after whiffing completely on Christmas ornament sales targets and overspending on marketing. It held two soft, quiet nights on East 6th just before New Year’s, as I’d come down to get my apartment keys before going to see Notre Dame get bludgeoned in the Cotton Bowl, and each night I ate dinner somewhere I could walk in the warm December air. It held the move itself, tumultuous and shaking, and the aftermath, a paralyzed two months in which there was at least one day in which I gave up on even trying to do anything and sat at this desk for twelve hours straight playing online chess. We watched the Fyre Fest documentaries during that stretch. Both of them. Back to back. At points, watching them, I felt a strange sickness, because I feared I was a Billy McFarland myself, lying to everyone—myself included—saying things would work when they had no way of working.

More than two years later, here we are. They’re working. Mustard seeds, sure. But seeds.

The longer I think upon Austin, the more I think it hit the intersection of two things I desperately needed, neither of which I fully understood at the time of the move (not that it would have made any difference in the decision upon Austin if I did—our respective relocations here were pretty firmly based upon Emma’s graduate school).

The first is its practicality. In Austin, if you’ve got enough money that you own a car and enough money that you own a car that doesn’t need constant maintenance, you can semi-comfortably pay your way driving rideshare and delivering food. Gas is cheap. The city’s among the safest in the country. Rent’s not great, but it’s better than it is in the real big cities. I did not, to be abundantly clear, pay my way this way. I came with multiple generations of fiscal winds in my sails. But I did put most of those winds towards the businesses. Which meant I did, and do, rely on this flexible income that seems more feasibly attainable in Austin than elsewhere.

The second thing is harder to describe. It’s not an equation like the first. But I think the best way I can sum it up, limited to a sentence, is the following:

Austin doesn’t give a shit about you.

This is, I understand, true of a lot of cities. It’s true, I believe, of New York, and of Los Angeles, and of Chicago and San Francisco and probably Houston. I’m of the impression it’s true of Portland, though I hardly know that town. I’m sure it’s true of other cities as well—forgotten or just not known. But it’s not true of all the cities. It’s not true of all the big cities. And at least in my experience, it’s not true of a lot of the smaller ones.

To be clear on this, I mean it in the most positive of ways: Austin’s not giving a shit about you is a grand kindness. If a city cares about you, in the sense I mean right now, I mean that it cares to force you into a fit. That’s not the case in Austin.

For a lot of us, transplants in a rather transplant city, there is no pressure. There is no status. The best-off people are in Westlake, and those who even know Westlake exists mock the place without envy. There is no central industry, and the most status-prone one, the tech industry, is filled with the most transplants of all of them, many of which are laden with either the humbling insecurity of being guests in Willie Nelson’s town or an oblivious arrogance that leaves them unaware of others’ own existence, and therefore incapable of looking down on or up at anyone. It’s a college town. It’s a state capital. It’s a tech boomtown. It’s a live music stage. It’s a hippie enclave. It’s none of these things, one might say, but really it’s all of them, just squeezed together so forcedly that none can take control. Is this always what it’s been? No, I’m sure. But it’s what it is right now.

A byproduct of this is that people here, sociovocationally, are quite free. Expectations, for many, are absent, and because I am of those many, I’ve been able to feel comfortable tucked away down here delivering food and driving rideshare and hammering away at two longshot businesses in a way I couldn’t virtually anywhere else. There’s space down here. Space to figure things out. Space to try things. Space to try things that are big, or might be small but are big to you.

However this turns out for me, I will always be grateful to Austin for this freedom. I will be grateful to the city that gave me the space to figure things out. I realized Friday night, thinking ahead to this essay, that I’m probably the happiest I’ve been in five years, and I feel the most myself I’ve ever felt. That’s not all thanks to Austin. But a lot of it is.

However this turns out for Austin, I will commiserate. The truth is, when I walked across the Congress bridge in October 2018 and saw myself blossoming in Austin, I saw it the same way Austin’s ascent is portrayed: A blistering rise, triumphant and fiery and glaring. That is not, of course, what my budding has been or will be. It’s not what Austin’s ascent is either.

Austin is growing, and it’s growing painfully. Infrastructure is behind. The city disagrees over what it wants to be. Culture clashes are simmering, with the hypocrisy of New York Times liberals and the belligerence of Fox News Texans colliding with gentrification-on-amphetamines, collegiate ideologues, and pressing practical questions for a small city becoming a large city.

I do not share these specific growing pains. But I, like Austin, am growing, and I, like Austin, am growing painfully, and for that too, I feel a certain kinship with this place.

There are a few spots on highways in the city that give you a great, big, dramatic view of the skyline. The best is probably the ramp from 71 Westbound onto 35 Northbound, on your way in from the airport if you’re going the southern route. You climb this great big overpass and follow the bend and—bam—there it all is. I drove someone over that overpass on one of my earliest rideshare rides, and she talked about how she used to live in Austin, and how happy she was to be here when the bluebonnets were in bloom. It was a sunny day, and the city was pulsing under a great big open sky.

A couple miles north of that overpass, there’s another good view, on the 35 bridge as you cross the river into downtown. It’s not as spanning, but it’s more immersive, and if the traffic’s moving fast at night it’s a little surreal (this is about eight blocks south of the stretch of road Lincoln used for that Matthew McConaughey commercial). The towers of Rainey Street come up first on your left, surrounded by the cranes birthing their newest siblings. Beyond them rises downtown, with more towers aloft and more being built by the quarter. There’s the capitol, lit up lifelessly, and I’d guess if you look hard enough you can catch a glimpse of the university tower, a bit more artistry in its illumination.

If I’m coming home from the south, I often come up this way, right through the meat of the city. To my right, East 6th slides on into the night, smooth and unconcerned. To my left, Rainey and Dirty 6th rage. Past them, West 6th tries to impress somebody that doesn’t exist, and West 2nd, small and proper, charms and delights. Beyond those and behind me are the comfortable holes of South Lamar, and beyond those and before me are the dueling ethe of West Campus. Around it all, homes of all sorts, from tents to mansions: homes of a million different people with a million different lives.

This clip probably won’t make it into the montage when we shut down The Barking Crow. Well, maybe the montage, but I feel like if we use a drone shot of Austin in the intro, we’ll want it during the day. But this Austin—the nighttime one, packed with trucks and spiraling incoherently, pulled in a thousand different directions, oblivious to your existence and embracing that existence with all its being…this is the Austin I’ll think about when we’re off somewhere the leaves change color in the fall. This is the town I’ll remember, telling my eldest—God willing—about the place they were born, about their Mom and Dad’s first house, about what exactly The Barking Crow was. This will be the town where it happened. It might not be the only town where it could have happened. But it will be the one where it did. I’ll love Austin forever for that. I’ll thank Austin forever for that.

Next week’s essay: On April, the Cruellest Month

Editor. Occasional blogger. Seen on Twitter, often in bursts: @StuartNMcGrath
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