It’s easier to give someone the respect you should when you’re delivering them a Sonic corndog.
I had never set foot inside a trailer park until I came to Austin. Not that it’s any rite of passage. You could spend your life mainly in trailer parks or spend your life entirely outside of trailer parks, and you could have a full life either way. But there’s an idea about trailer parks in my corners of the world, and it’s inaccurate. I have felt unsafe a dozen-odd times in this gig economy, on the steps of deteriorating apartment complexes and under the flickering lights of dilapidated motels and in my own driver’s seat, some passenger giving unstable impressions behind my ears, talking of their death or reeking of their drinks or asking a few more questions than I would like to answer. I’ve never felt unsafe in a trailer park.
Trailer parks, in my experience, are not the bottom rung of the housing ladder. They can be that for some, but they’re different. They’re freer. They’re looser. They aren’t on the housing ladder. They’re somewhere else. For many, the trailer park is a choice. Trailer parks are disconnected, their names often a disguise and their entrances almost always tucked away. They’re also communities in a way other neighborhoods aren’t. You feel it when you step inside their bounds. You know that you are in a Place.
When your foot goes through a rotten step on the way to some slumlord’s eighth building’s third floor, balconies hunched over the frontage road and gates rusted open, you are in public. You might as well be on a sidewalk downtown. But the second you pull past that first trailer, number in the double digits, creative wiring supporting a light or a speaker on a makeshift porch, you are in a private space. Invited though you are, you feel yourself an intruder, an infidel in the temple. You wear it on your car, on your clothes, on your face. Not because you look different from anyone there, or because your hail-pelted SUV is at all out of place, but because you are not of the trailer park. Because the trailer park is not your home. I finally entered a trailer park under a soft spring twilight in 2020. It was somewhere near the airport. It happened after a big rain. The community was wooded. Some of its single-wides were painted a dark blue.
As my third year began in Austin, nearly a year into the pandemic, having delivered enough Jack in the Box to enough trailer parks that I no longer felt uncomfortable driving in, but not to so many that I didn’t notice where I was…
As my third year began in Austin, it snowed.
Snow works a few ways in Central Texas, and the most common is a flurry with dreams of becoming a squall. There’s a wonder to it our northern countrymen lose. People step outside for a flurry, and the photographers do their work with it, and the college students run around in the lights by the fountain, and we cheer the flakes on as they whirl, giving these crystals the same adoring audience families eagerly grant the first beloved grandchild.
Every now and then, the snow is more than a flurry. Anticipation usually accompanies this. As I believe it is most everywhere in this country, and as is certainly the case in my native Midwest, the news never underestimates a snowstorm. A rainstorm might catch us unaware. But snow? We share the highest estimates for that. ONE TO EIGHT INCHES, the headlines blare, and eight gets more attention, as it should, for reasons of safety and preparation. But boy. When the snow lives up to its potential? What a moment that is. Much as it goes with man.
It was a Sunday, and the dog was still a newborn up in Missouri, and the duplex was the kind of place where the windows were prone to steaming up. I don’t know if this was due to the impending storm or if it was an effort to incentivize those with financial New Year’s resolutions, but Uber had some promotion that week where if I delivered one hundred-odd deliveries between Monday morning and Sunday night, I’d earn two hundred-odd extra dollars in the form of a bonus. Two hundred-odd was, as it is today, a lot of dollars. I’d driven off and on all week, and I’d captured some of the Taco Bell hour the night before, cycling between the drive-through on Burnet and various stoned homes. I had ten deliveries to go.
I woke a little late, because it was still early enough in the year that I was focused on getting enough sleep. I “attended” church virtually, because it was still early enough in the vaccine distribution process that my church’s services were remote. I sat down at the table in the living room while my wife ate her breakfast. I needed to post an essay I’d yet to write. We saw the snow begin, and I went outside to take a video of it beginning to stick around the old oak in the front yard. It became a funny video as the day went on. The snow falls clumpily in the video, a fraction of it rain. It was sticking, sure, but in the patchy, wet way. The ugly way. Where the grass shows up once you take a step. It was not to be an ugly, patchy snow.
By the time I finished the writing work and ate a lunch and came around to the driving work, the snow was piling up. Positively piling. That shit was coming down fast. Its flakes were no longer associating themselves with raindrops.
There are a few things to know about snow in Texas, at least outside the Panhandle.
The first is that it makes no economic sense for municipalities to own snowplows, or to invest in the process of salting all roads. Investing in snow removal equipment would be a boondoggle too far. Most of the time—and this was the case this time—the snow all melts the next day. It pauses things, but it passes quickly, and in the meantime you’re smartest to simply stay home.
The second is that there’s an unfortunate current of thought down here which equates slow driving with bad driving. As Midwesterners know, the safe way to drive in the snow is to drive slowly and brake even slower and turn as gently as you can. If the road isn’t plowed, you drive as though there’s an infant perched on your roof. Texans? Not all Texans, but…we over-index on little vain idiots driving big vain trucks.
There were busted-up cars everywhere.
Cars in the ditches. Cars face-first against street-signs. Cars smashed into the decorative stone walls outside subdivisions and industrial parks, their drivers stepping over their detached bumpers, bare hands in the pockets of skinny little coats. On the roads themselves? There was generally one lane where the snow had been melted by traffic. Only one, though. This temptation, as you might expect, was irresistible to the truck guys, who one by one were taken by an evolutionary craving to vigorously pass using the un-melted left-hand lane. The funniest F-150 is one that’s fishtailing on a snowy Sunday afternoon. Delivering food was not the safest thing that day, but the surge combined with the bonus to constitute some sort of hazard pay. It’s easier to take on risk when you’re delivering someone a Sonic corndog.
There’s a third thing to know about snow in Texas, at least outside the Panhandle, and it gets back to that magic when the flurries become a squall.
When it snows in Texas, people do the snow things.
Midway through the afternoon, on maybe the third or fourth delivery of the day, well before I slipped on a slick patch of sidewalk at an apartment complex near Round Rock and soaked my pants crash-landing in a puddle (the plastic bowl of Ramen, mercifully, did not pop open), I got an order to a trailer park over by Dessau Road, just a little ways north of 183. It was an older trailer park. More established. More settled into its earth.
I’ve seen a big snow in Central Park, and I’ve seen a big snow in Washington, D.C., and I’ve seen big snows on the frozen lakes and the flowing woody creeks of Illinois and Wisconsin. I recently saw a big snow in Portland, two days before its clouds gave way to a fire of a sunrise around Mt. Hood. I’ve seen snow at football games in the fall and snow at baseball games in the spring, and I’ve seen snow many times out the corner windows of a Minneapolis skyscraper, blowing strong and fast, carrying you instantly to the prow of a ship in some timeless, far-off sea.
I’ve seen a big snow, too, in a quiet trailer park in Texas. I’ve seen two children chase one another with snowballs with nobody else around. I’ve seen a snowman adorn the trunk of an old man’s car, a pyramid as its base, perky ears upon its head.
I made it back to Hyde Park later that day, back to that older, established neighborhood, settled into its gridded streets and loaded with NPR tote bags. I made it home, and I peeled off my soaking pants, and I thawed in the shower while the windows steamed up. There was a snowman there, too, at the house on the corner where the oldest of the three kids still might play catch by himself with a football in the fall. It was a three-part snowman, big and glorious and spherical. A real Frosty of a creature.
It could have used a perky pair of ears.
Snow can make us all children, if it hits us at the right time. It makes our world a different world, a prettier world, one with more starlight and cushions on the edges. You won’t get snow too much in Austin. That means it will hardly ever get old.
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This is the fourth essay of a 52-essay series: The Courier’s Guide to Austin.
