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My first taste of the neighborhood ambience came two years ago while I was looking for a place to rent. The rental houses I checked out from my car, as I drove the neighborhood, were a little roughed-up, and on one block a guy drank a midday beer as he leaned on his truck parked in the street. Not my idea of suburban refuge. Then a jet thundered overhead. Definitely not my idea of suburban refuge.
Shortly before moving in, I had my little joke about the neighborhood: What’s this week’s real estate ad oxymoron? Crestview Charmer. But now I’ve secured my own little green corner here, and I’m a convert. I’m a few blocks north of my first encounter with the area and farther from the flight pattern. My place is on a block with oft-mowed St. Augustine grass and hardly a peeling piece of paint in sight.
“Charm” is a strong word for my (or any) part of Crestview, but “comfortable” fits it well. As do “unpretentious,” “friendly,” and “real.” There’s no neighborhood Starbucks or upscale clothing store in Crestview. But the neighborhood Minimax still gives Green Stamps. You can sit at a booth were the Crestview Pharmacy formerly maintained a soda fountain, and Mr. Harper, the pharmacist-owner, will notarize your document, sometimes free of charge. Good Eats serves home-style fare on one side of the neighborhood, and Threadgill’s serves home-style fare on the other. The district’s most familiar geographical landmark is a ditch. It runs down the middle of Arroyo Seco, a major neighborhood thoroughfare. I can see it out the window of my converted carport, now a home office.
And as Austin’s new airport opens, I realize that I’m going to miss the planes that used to fly over the neighborhood. I know it’s stupid. But I found you can have nostalgic feelings even for once-ubiquitous passenger jets. And I’m sure the sentiment comes, at least in part, from knowing the planes are now gone. If there were no Austin-Bergstrom Airport well south of here, I may still be wishing that Robert Mueller Airport in East Austin would close. But there is, and I’m not.
The day we moved into Crestview I got my first dose of flight pattern noise when an outbound plane muffled the sound of the football game I was watching. I was surprised at how loud it was. And elated. “Yes,” I exalted, “when that baby moves, real estate here’s gonna go through the roof.” But the airport noise here still wasn’t anything like the deafening roars residents a bit south and east of me had to endure. In Crestview it was more like distant, rising and falling white noise.
Imagined overnight real estate riches aside, I miss the jets’ predawn signal that let me know it wasn’t the middle of the night, that it’s past 6am, and there’s no sense trying to sleep any more.
They were my winged wake-up calls.
And I miss the jets that floated down from northwest of my house and gently banked left to head for their landings. And the ones that came from due west with lights blinking and seat backs and tray tables in upright positions. Or the outbound planes, getting smaller and quieter as they trailed off northwest.
I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because they looked so big and unreal up there, all those tons of metal slowly descending, balloon-like, guided in smoothly and capably.
I used to think about the passengers; who’s up there and where they’re off to. Were they looking down on our grid of streets and houses, ordering tomato juice, reading novels, nodding off? Were they settling in for a pleasant ride on a long-anticipated journey, happy to pile up ample mileage between themselves and their lives down here?
Back in the Sixties, when I was a kid growing up in Dallas, my Unitarian Sunday school teacher once got bored with “bull sessions” about ethics and took the whole class, mostly pre-adolescent boys, to Love Field. We parked outside a runway fence and watched jets take off as an alternative to our scheduled hour of semi-spiritual higher thinking. It provided an amusing alternative to Unitarian religious angst. Our teacher, too close to middle age to be a hippie but too close to Bohemianism to be “establishment,” probably knew boys our age were touched more by the power of the machine than by the vagaries of the search for spiritual meaning. Whatever his thinking, 30 years later, flying machines can still intrigue.
And now what? We’re still in the line of fire in Crestview. An outbound flight pattern from Austin-Bergstrom directs planes overhead. But they are so high up you can’t even identify the airline. Yes, this little Crestview “charmer” may bring a few more dollars now that the new airport is open. But the skies over my part of Austin will be, if quieter, a lot less interesting.
This article appears in June 4 • 1999 and June 4 • 1999 (Cover).