Blame It All on My Roots...
How Austin called to me, like it does for so many others
…I showed up in boots.
Doc Martens, actually, to accompany my ex-boyfriend’s baggy, torn up Hugo Boss jeans and a flannel shirt over a Stone Temple Pilots tee-shirt. That outfit, as un-Texan as it was, may have ruined a black tie affair of two, if I’d ever been invited to one. How I got there, poised to move into an Austin dorm just shy of my eighteenth birthday, is a story.
I was sitting in band, spring semester of my senior year in high school. While the director worked with another section, my thoughts drifted. I was thinking nothing in particular when an unmistakable declarative sentence popped into my brain, fully formed.
“I’m going to Texas.”
I was already IN Texas, seeing as I grew up in a suburb of Dallas. Despite my decidedly un-stereotypical-Texas fashion sense, my roots in this state go back four generations down some branches of my family tree. No, this “Texas” my brain or muse or whatever, spoke to me about was Austin, specifically THE University of Texas.
I’d planned to go to the University of North Texas in Denton, but that day in the band hall — call it divine inspiration, call it intuition — I was told I belonged in Austin.
Since 1993, when I first set foot as a student on the Forty Acres, I have lived all over the city.
I holed up in dorms my first two years, and without a car or expendable cash, spent most of my time in the proximity of campus. Then, my best friend and I moved to the cheapest apartment complex on the shuttle bus route, an area (lovingly? derisively?) called “the student ghetto.”
When I got my first job out of college at the Texas Association of School Boards, I commuted, during rush hour, from Riverside across the river to Lamar and 183 in fifteen minutes. That drive probably takes an hour today, not that I would know; I haven’t driven through that slow-oozing lava sludge stretch of downtown I35 since 1998.
IN 2000, I bought my first house near Duval Road, a stone’s throw from the future Domain campus. It cost $125,000. We played intramural softball nearby on a field that now supports a labyrinth of restaurants and retail stores. My ex-husband sold that house for close to $200,000. It’s probably worth four times that today, just for it’s proximal location.
I remember when Mopac’s south end stopped at William Cannon.
I remember when night life was confined to 6th street, when you could park downtown for free, when there were no scooters or pedicabs. I remember when there was nothing out here where I live now, in Steiner Ranch, but actual ranch land; when driving out to the Oasis for a mediocre meal and stunning sunset view was a pilgrimage into the wild. Now I live ten minutes and two stoplights away from it — that is, unless 620 is backed up because of a wreck or rush hour or because it’s lunchtime on a Tuesday.
Things used to be easier in Austin.
In the late 90s, the Trail of Lights with its iconic light-strand tree and kitschy installments, was something you visited on a whim. We’d stuff ourselves full of barbecue at Green Mesquite and walk over to spin underneath the tree and enjoy the bonfire. We had no inkling that 25 years later, people would be purchasing shuttle tickets just to get there and press themselves into throngs of human beings.
In working for various local publications, I’ve met people who have been here longer than I have — people who remember Brodie Lane as a dirt road and Austin when it was nothing more than a college town with a lot of smart kids and no jobs to be had once they got out of school. (Did I say easier?)
Austin was growing when I got here and had already changed rather dramatically from its founding days in the mid-1800s when floodwaters periodically ravaged downtown dirt streets before the dams were built to create the Highland Lakes.
In 1993, the population of Austin was 655,000. This year, it’s over 2 million. There is more traffic, less affordable housing and more people everywhere I go. Yes, I grumble about it. But I clomped into town in my combat boots all those years ago because I felt called to be here; can I really blame anyone else?
When I get sad or annoyed at all of the things Austin has lost — iconic restaurants like Shady Grove, unique and affordable shopping on South Congress, South Park Meadows as a concert venue that was really just a field with a stage instead of another massive shopping center — I think of a quote from Shawshank Redemption:
“Get busy living or get busy dying.”
All you have to do is drive across West Texas to see what happens when a town stagnates and falls into economic decline — the boarded up shops, defunct gas stations, the houses with their caved-in roofs and rotting siding. You can feel the desolation wafting up from the cracked, weedy pavement of Main Street. No matter how introverted you are, it’s not a fate you’d wish on your town. Where are you gonna buy groceries?
Austin is economically flourishing.
And with that growth, we’ve gained some things. Diversity is not just an old, old wooden ship in this town anymore. The percentage of Hispanic and Asian people has grown significantly in the past 20 years. We have better public transportation, more job opportunities and more chances to rake in tourism dollars via Air BnB. There’s just more shit to do around here — more concerts, museums, festivals, a Formula One track for chrissakes.
Fun Fact: My first ACL Festival ticket was $35 for the whole weekend.
All of this is spreading rapidly outward. What used to be the outskirts — neighborhoods like River Place and Steiner Ranch, little burg cities like Lakeway — now don’t seem so far away from the bustle of city life. Spicewood, 35 miles outside of Austin and a community of no more than 100 residents up until 1990, now boasts a population of over 9,000.
Austin is definitely on the “get busy living” side of the equation.
We can wax nostalgic for all that it used to be when “Keep Austin Weird” truly meant something. We can cherish the things that remain from that time like the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar, and Austin’s own snarky Instagram sign sensation, El Arroyo. We can complain about traffic, crowding, rising prices and the urban sprawl that is not-so-slowly encroaching on the Hill Country proper.
AND
We can appreciate the economic, social and cultural advantages it has brought us. We can work toward fixing the glaring issues, like that shortage of affordable housing and social programs for people who, without it, become the ones scraping by on the side of the road and in tents under the bridges.
We can welcome new people to our city from all parts of the globe (even California) and all corners of the socio-economic spectrum, boots or not. I, native 47-year-old Texan that I am, just acquired my first pair of cowboy boots a month ago.
We can accept or even embrace that the winds of change will continue to blow our way, and for the foreseeable future, that wind is blowing toward growth. The question is, how in Central Texas will we adjust the sails?