I’d been to Austin four times before I came to Austin. Somehow, I’d managed to drive on two of the trips. I was familiar, then, with the stretch of open land south of Temple, and at the hints of suburbs the country sprouts as you approach and finally enter what is often the fastest-growing city in the United States.
I had not, however, entered town on the Upper Level of I-35 at the hour of sunset.
This is important.
We’d come from Kansas, and before that, we’d come from Minnesota. My belongings were mostly with the movers, still in the Midwest. Emma and I were on I-35 South. Two days of it. 75% of its 1,569 miles. We’d left Minneapolis the preceding morning, having slept on an air mattress at my brother’s place after turning my own keys in around noon. I am not a Minnesotan, but I lived there for two years, which meant Emma visited there for two years. For the final four months of those two years, my reciprocating visits were to Austin rather than Washington, D.C., her life on Capitol Hill exchanged for a master’s program at UT and a promise that I would join her when my lease was up. Our lives after college had been defined by our long-distance relationship. I was the guy with the long-distance girlfriend. She was the girl with the long-distance boyfriend. It was not a happy identifier. She flew to Minneapolis one last time to make the drive at my side, and I wonder now if she was really there to make sure with finality the era was done. There’s an old joke about attending your enemy’s funeral.
We were together, then, through the snow down by Albert Lea, and past Des Moines into that stretch of Missouri where the road turns a little redder, where there’s a little more iron in the asphalt. Could we see the red road? No. It was white and gray. It matched the walls of the Conoco on the Iowa state line. But somewhere beyond Clear Lake, the snow had stopped, and somewhere before Kansas City, the car thermometer rose to 33 degrees, and we’d checked the radar at enough rest stops to know we were home free from there to the Holiday Inn Express.
I had never lived outside the Midwest, and while I was ready for Austin, it’s odd how comfortable those Minnesota memories are. I wasn’t always happy—far from it, a truth that can break through even the most tenacious nostalgic glaze—but it was comfortable. As it was in Indiana, my Illinoisan self met no surprises in Minneapolis. The winters had their differences—I’d recommend giving up temperature in exchange for sunshine if you ever have to make a trade—and the towns were distinct, but they were different sizes and patterns cut from the same cloth. Texas would be the first new place.
We ate at Ziggy’s Pizza—the recommendation of a college friend who’d tragically (comically from a distance) taken a job in Wichita after school, been laid off before it began, and spent the next year or two coaching swimming in Kansas twelve hundred miles from his Delaware roots. I have no idea how he maintained his sanity, in hindsight, and having not seen him for a while, I’m hoping now that he did. When we emerged from the restaurant, where the pizza was rectangular but I do not think Detroit-style, we were greeted by a few inches of fluffy white snow. The storm had caught us. But Kansas still has snowplows, and the Jeep Compass—five years younger then—rode high enough to slide through the places those plows hadn’t yet found. We slept well in that economy hotel, on an island in a blizzard, tucked far from our lives in the little in-between place. We were at the midpoint, halfway between our lives up to that point and our lives from that point on.
There was ice and snow on the car in the morning, so we let the car run a bit before we climbed inside, and there was ice and snow blown hard onto the speed limit signs but it gave up by the time we were any distance into Oklahoma. We exited the Waffle House in Norman to brilliant sunshine over a warm wind and dead grass. It was the middle of January, and somehow the first day of spring.
Six hours later, still on I-35, we entered Austin, and we went right at the fork—taking the Upper Level into downtown, not the Lower. The skyline, which was thinner then, opened up before us. The Capitol glowed ruddy in the middle of it.
Something wonderful about the Upper Level of Interstate 35 approaching downtown Austin at the hour of sunset in the wintertime—provided there’s enough traffic that you can slow a bit, but not so much that you must focus entirely on the task at hand—is that because the sun is setting more southward than it will until December, the light is directly opposite you as you gaze down into the city. There are a number of places in Austin to stare out across this town, and there are plenty of spots to have a good look up at it. Rare, though, is the place where you are set apart from the city and still at a vantage point to enjoy the perspective of looking down. On the upper level of Interstate 35 approaching downtown…that’s a special angle. It’s what Jacob might have seen, preparing to cross the Jordan, if he saw it from a bluff in a small SUV coasting at 45 miles per hour.
Why is it so important to be looking down into the city at this appointed time in this appointed season? Well, that perspective, in part. Cities look best when there’s a little foreground. More crucially, because the light is opposite you at this moment, its source sinking behind buildings and river and hills, the golden orange Texas sunset it produces does not only waft over the city or glimmer past its glass. The burning redness—the fiery end of a fire-fueled winter day—comes up through the city, rising from its streets, burning rapturously on the undersides of its lazy growing bones, as though Austin itself is the source of the star which gives life to earth.
I told Emma we’d tell our kids about the moment.
It has been my privilege to catch that sunset from that stretch of roadway dozens of times in the five years since, and every now and then, usually in the winter, it hits with the same aura it inspired back then. I knew at the time it was a moment for myself and Emma. It was the culmination of the fifth year of our relationship, the moment when our futures finally reached alignment. But I didn’t realize until later what that moment was for myself and Austin. I moved to this city for what would one day be my marriage. But I already loved Emma. That moment—that look at the burning city center—was the start of a courtship I did not anticipate. It would be another month before my face was on a Texas driver’s license or there were Texas license plates upon my car. But I was on the verge of falling in love with a place in a way I’d never considered. I was on my way to a home more home than any other I’ve ever known.
You’re going to catch the sunset at the minute you get down there. You won’t intend it that way. It’ll just work like that. It will look like fire, and it will look like magic, and because it’s the sun, it will be exactly those things it looks to be. It won’t be the only time you catch that sunset, and later skies will inspire just like the first. But as it goes with your wife’s face, there will always be something special about the first time you saw Austin. Your Austin. Swallowing the sun back into its burning streets.
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This is the second essay of a 52-essay series: The Courier’s Guide to Austin.
