Good bye Austin tour...

Now that we have almost finished packing, I have had some quiet time for my departure from Austin, Texas to start to sink in. I started to actually realize that there are some places that I will not see or visit for a long time, maybe never, and if I ever come back, chances are that the city will be so changed that these places may be obliterated.

So I decided to list places that I want to visit one last time, my favorite places in Austin, Texas. Places where I had a grand time, truly enjoyed and made living in dreadful, suffocating humid heat bearable.

Such popular, hyped places like 6th Street, Downtown, Zilker Park, Town Lake, and SoCo are not in my list, nor any of the excellent ever growing list of local restaurants or popular parks.
Instead, the list is composed of places where I got away from the popular places, in a way you could say, places that made me forget that I was in Austin, Texas.

Curiously, when I completed the list, I realized that some of these places have been vanishing from some time now, and others are actually gone. This gave the sense that my departure came in some weird synchronicity, like saying "there is nothing here for me to see or do anymore".

I've run around Town Lake since back in the 80's and I toured and raced my bikes all over the place, until there was no new roads or trails to get exited about.

So, on this note, I start my list with the last stretch of road heaven for us, old bike hammers (pre-Lance, please) Texas 45

The Road of Life,
a metaphor and the signs that we encounter on our path.
Riding a bicycle on Texas 45, life is all it is supposed to be.
But all things must come to an end...
This day, this ride, Texas 45....all good things.

For:
Charlie, "The 35 mph Beast"
Bob, "Bones On A Merlin"
John, "Let Him Burn"
Javier, "Broke Another Fuji Frame"
Rick, "Oh! Shit Buddy..."

.....

"The Tulip",
"The He Whale"
"The Pirate Mocho"

And to all the Pre-Lance Austin Cyclists,
The good'ol days.

Close to making the list, were the "Tuesday Night-er" nine mile loop in south east Austin, where every Tuesday for years we trained and raced until the loop was swallowed by sub-divisions. And the Velo-Way, before it became the Roller-Blade-Way / Baby-Stroller-Way, and got filled with people that do not know how to ride a pace-line.

Next on the list is the Green Belt.
Truly a jewel stretch of land. I biked the Belt for the first time in 1987, and kept doing it for years. I ran the back paths and swam there when it used to have water year around. One of my favorite things to do was to sit behind the many waterfalls on the Belt and see the world through the falling water and let the roar of the water lull me into a trance. Now, it is dry all year around.

Barton Creek Greenbelt, Austin, Texas. After a bone dry summer, we got some much needed rain in Austin, Texas. Here is a mildly cold October morning at Barton Creek Green belt...with running water! Sadly, a rare view since most of the year is dry.

Next entry, is another creek, and although it is not a good location for biking or running, it was a wonderful swimming hole, and some of my best local landscape photography took place here, in Bull Creek:








But perhaps the places where I had the most fun and the time that I spent there reached that idyllic state, were a series of water drainage ditches around South Austin. I used these ditches for skateboarding, two in particular were perfect for this purpose: "The Turkey Bowl" and "The Alexandria Ditch".

"Turkey Bowl"

"Alexandria Ditch"

For skateboarders, these types of places are a treasure of sorts. The main appeal is the thrill of the find, the find of something that is perfect for an unintended use. A place to paint outside the lines. These two places survived the onslaught on suburban intolerance for years. Neighbors of the Alexandria Ditch poured tar and gravel on the ditch (the sk8ers cleaned the mess) and eventually called the police to patrol the area and mark it as "off limits."

The "Turkey Bowl" survived for years because it was out in a field far away from any mortified suburbanite loosing peace of mind under the threat that someone nearby may be having fun.
But in my last visit to say "good bye" and have a couple of runs, I discovered that the city finally made an effort to ruin the place. They painted the walls with a slippery paint and peppered them with concrete rivets. This is a fairly big surface...probably it took a crew of 4 a day or two to perform this idiotic task. Our taxes working hard.

This graffiti over the paint and rivets seems to ask the question "Why?" or "WTF?" Why spend money and effort on a ditch out of anyone's view or concern?

Grey slippery paint, and rivets (eye) making the bowl hard to skate. The free spirit that refuses to obey the "play only on the designated areas" tacit threat, frames the rivet to lift a tacit middle finger in the air.

On my last visit to the Turkey Bowl I left as an anthropological find for posterity one of the decks that I used to skate and broke there. The handwriting on the bottom reads: "2001-2003 Austin golden ditch days"

Anthropological clue for posterity

Every time I leave a place that I want to return to, I have tried to leave behind a physical object that I may come back to retrieve. When I left Los Angeles, I buried a bicycle fork in Griffith Park (one of my favorite places in LA).

The last place made it on my favorites list due to chronology, not preference. This is the place where I went to seek refuge and, unknowingly at the time, I started to slowly "close shop" in Austin. In the last years, here is where I ran and biked trails. This is where I took on long photography projects.

Stephenson Natural Preserve

Here I did the Longview Project documenting temporal clandestine sculptures



and eventually, the project culminated in this book:

Longview Sculptor

Sculptures by Jeff...

By Photography by Ado...

Book Preview

Also, in this place I developed the "Gethsemane" project.

In the end, even this refuge started to dwindle. People started to miss use and destroy the place and the art in it.

Well, that is it. The places to freely seek shrunk, and the designated areas to do this or that expanded. We are all victims of our own design, I guess. I will carry these places in my memory as happy precious places.

Now, all that is left is to find new ones, and this time keep them secret as long as possible.

Adios Austin, thanks for all the fish!