Page Two

Sometime in the early Seventies, I ended up living on the Gulf Coast of Florida. I was staying in a house that was bracketed by shuttered porches. I lived in the one on the east side; its opened wooden shutters looked out onto the banks of the Peace River that flowed out back. We were in a town called Charlotte Harbor across the river from Punta Gorda, 50 miles or so south of Sarasota. How I ended up there would take too long to explain and is almost devoid of meaning. Needless to say, it involved a five-month road trip through the South, living out of my '64 Volkswagen Beetle.

Essentially, I was doing nothing while living there. I made a little money working at a warehouse and bummed some more off my sister in Massachusetts (we're talking $25 a time here), though after the second hit my brother-in-law forbade me to call collect any more. ("If he's going to borrow money he should at least pay for the call.") Every few days I would go out the front door and pick a few bags of oranges and grapefruit off the trees in the yard. I would spend the morning hand squeezing a couple of half-gallons of each to store in the refrigerator.

Living there, I befriended a journalist (God, he would snort at that - he was a "newspaperman"), who ran the area bureau for the St. Petersburg Times. He was classic. Loving newspapers, he'd cut his teeth careening through the treacherous coal mining country of the Appalachians working for one of the area's most famous journalists. Late at night, we'd sit out right by the river on lawn chairs passing a bottle back and forth. He would recite Vachel Lindsay poetry. I'm not making this up. Imagine the quiet of the night, the smooth movement of the river, the rich smells mixing water with vegetation, and a voice booming out "Boomalay, Boomalay, Boomalay, Boom/Then I had religion, Then I had a vision." from The Congo or the opening of General William Booth Enters Into Heaven. I doubt I'm quoting correctly, but I will always remember hearing those lines chanted against the dewy stillness of the slow drunken night.

Some days he would take me driving in the Florida interior. This mysterious country between the coasts was, at least then, a different world. (Ever been to a Swamp Cabbage Festival?) Other days we would go look at abandoned developments. There were lots of them. Since the 1920s Florida had been through regular boom and bust cycles (and its been through several since) and the development remains were everywhere. Some were houses in ruins, some were just moldy signs pointing the way to what were still empty fields. On a morning I'll always remember, we went driving to a development just off the Gulf Highway. There, in the middle of the swamp, was a development without houses. Streets had been paved, curbs and sidewalks poured, but in-between, where the houses were supposed to be, was just swamp. This went on for blocks. It was the eeriest thing, imagine a suburban grid laid over swamp, which is exactly what it was. What if you built a development and nobody came?

As we enter 1998, the most important issues facing this town, as they have been for the last two decades, are the issues related to growth. There was once talk of no-growth or restricted growth, but the surrounding house-heavy Hill Country mocks those ideas. The issue now is, how do we control and direct growth to best protect and preserve the environment and the cultural and social identity of the city?

The main issue we are dealing with is not evil developers raping the land (irresponsible development is certainly a crucial side issue), though it is easy to cast it in those terms. The feeling is often expressed that if only we could drive these evil developers from the walls of our fair city everything would be all right.

As Pogo so perceptibly pointed out, we have met the enemy and they is us. Back to Florida for a second - developers built developments up and down the Gulf Coast (many as irresponsibly as developments have ever been built), but when I was there many of them sat in ruins because the people didn't come (though I'll bet that isn't the case now). Developers are building all over this area because people want to come here. People like central Texas. There are houses everywhere we drive, everywhere that used to be just empty, just the rolling Hill Country stretched towards the sky, just Texas.

Those houses, unfortunately, don't just represent developer greed, as some would have it, they also represent people's dreams. People like you and me. Developers don't drive growth, they accommodate it. People drive growth.

We should begin to plan from that - that the residents of Austin, the angry folks in the soon-to-be-annexed areas, the suburban and still rural occupants are all just people with some commonly shared concerns. Essentially, we do not have different priorities. The issues of the environment, of water, of growth, of roads affect us all. The biggest problem seems to be that over the next few decades a lot more people just like us are headed this way and what are we, as a community, going to do about it? It is not a case at its core of bad developers and good environmentalists, of roads and infrastructure, of support services and everyone's taxes, it is really just a story about people. If we start from that premise, we can maybe work together to try and figure all this out.

Monday, February 9 is the deadline for the Austin Music Poll; we run the ballot for one last time in this issue. This time of year, we talk a lot about voting but what we really want is feedback from the readers. For 17 years we have asked Austin's clubgoing and record-buying community to tell us what they think in the Music Poll, and over those years, it's been a reliable indicator of the times. As always, the results are published in the Chronicle in the SXSW issue, which always ends up finding its way, hand to hand, across the nation and the world.