The little tan seat has an S on it. S for Schwinn. My big brother holds the back of the seat as I climb on, a little wobbly, and touch my feet to the pedals. The stretch of road in front of us seems impossibly long and I just know I’m going to disappoint him and fall over immediately. “Just look down at the road under the bike,” he says, sensing my terror. “Count the number of pebbles going by. Don’t worry, I’ll steer.” I trust him implicitly and start pedaling. “How many pebbles is that?” he says. “100, 200, okay, speed up now 500, 700, 1000, 2000, 5000 good! good! Now, look up!” I look up and he is far behind me, waving and jumping and cheering me on. I have made it to the end of the road, and all on my own.
I learned to ride a bicycle in Northwest Hills during the slow and easy days of my mid-Seventies Austin childhood. As far as I knew at the time, the whole universe lay between 2222 and Far West Boulevard. Many of the routes I took then remain relatively unscathed by the growth that has since swallowed the rest of Austin. Entering from Northland, usually accompanied by a herd of suburban children, we would follow the leader down winding Highland Hills Drive until the big hill which ends at Tumbling Circle.
Only hot shots like my older brother could brave the big hill without brakes; I usually walked down. But coasting down would usually build up enough speed to push us up to Hillbrook Drive. Then it was down and around Laurel Ledge Lane, up Moutainclimb, and on to Greystone. Greystone was the King of the Northwest Mountain and from up there, anything was possible. A kid could bike right out to Cat Mountain, only at that time it was still just a twinkling in some rich guy’s eyeball. It’s still a nice ride – out through the mansions, along roads cut into the sides of the caliche rock – but the view is a little more pock-marked, a little less green these days. Sometimes, our suburban herd headed in the other direction out to Mesa Drive, which is blessedly flat and leads to an older part of the area with gridded streets and more shade trees.
By the time my teenage years rolled around, the days of Northwest wine & roses were long gone. My family moved to another state, and I was too rebellious to follow. Instead, I got a quick lesson in economics: Being poor is hard work. I realized that a bicycle was going to be my only means of transportation until I got enough money together for a car (and someday, I just might do that). At first, like the poor little rich girl that I was, I resented having to travel by bike all over the place. Eventually,though, I had to secretly admit that I loved riding, and after finding the hidden bike routes all over town, it got a lot easier to bear.
For example, every Austin cyclist knows that Shoal Creek Boulevard will get them from 12th Street way up to North Austin in a shaded bike lane and without the roaring traffic of Lamar Boulevard. In fact, avoiding Lamar is the catalyst of most of the creative route-making around town. West Boulevard is the widest and most pleasant avoidance while downtown. Woodrow Avenue is top pick from Koenig all the way north to Braker Lane. Down South is a different story because the neighborhoods are older and they all run together. Anyone riding on South Lamar can’t possibly be from around here, since just two blocks on either side lies sleepy little neighborhood streets that’ll get you wherever you’re trying to go. The real trick is stringing all these routes together and creating easy-going crosstown rides that aren’t too tough. Most of the worthwhile bike rides in Austin require tackling some hills, but what goes up must come down, and it’s the coming down that matters.
Hot-dogging
The best and cheapest high available is to tap into one of Austin’s perfect summer afternoons – not too hot, with a little breeze working up and head out alone on your bike and find the hill of your choice. There’s one in every neighborhood – whether it’s 12th Street coming down out of Clarksville or Crestview Road heading to The Ravine overlooking downtown. Crest the top of the hill at maximum speed, stand up on the pedals, close your eyes, tilt your head back and hold your arms out like you’re flying – because you are. Hair and caution thrown to the wind, you feel truly alive. I have learned to love the hilly streets of Austin for the zoom down as well as the trudge up.
Dating Dynamics
A leisurely bike ride through town is the perfect first date. The happy couple doesn’t have to do a lot of talking or even spend a lot of time looking at each other and they can stop somewhere along the way for lunch. Besides, a person’s bike says a lot about them. (Only showoffs have scratch-free bikes. Baskets and fenders are for the true believers, the lifers. People with mountain bikes who stick to the streets must have money to burn.) Most appealing about the bike date, though, is the spontaneity. Two young lovers could get lost, get tired, or decide to stop to watch a street performance along the way, none of which would be nearly so romantic from behind the wheel of a Chevy.
One of my fondest teenage memories is taking a ride through Austin one summer day with someone else’s boyfriend (who just happened to be sweet on me at the time). He was on a vintage cruiser – obviously a tinkerer – and I rode a lightning-fast 15-speed decked out with knobby tires for trails – I meant business. We started at 45th Street in the Rosedale neighborhood, biked around Ramsey Park, down Medical Parkway (another great hill), and then onto the trail which begins at 31st Street and runs through Pease Park like a midtown bike highway. Once that trail dumped us out near 12th Street, it was only a short, though slightly perilous, jaunt down Lamar to the river where we picked up the Town Lake trail and took it all the way to Zilker Park. By that time, I was overheated and ready to stop for a swim at Barton Springs but he insisted we press on. So, we picked up the greenbelt trail just past the pool which leads all the way out to the Gus Fruh Greenbelt Access and beyond. It was the same time of year as now, early summer, and the fields on either side were soaked with bluebonnets and buttercups. It was bumpy going and by the time we made it to Campbell’s Hole, I had popped a tire, but, boy, was it worth the trouble. The normally dry swimming hole had a raging current and we jumped in with all our clothes on. The entire afternoon whiled away as we floated downstream and hiked back to jump in over and over again. That evening, walking my bike home, a summer storm suddenly rolled in and drenched us, but what did it matter? We were young and we lived in Austin. What could be better than that?
Slow Down
“You get to know things better when they go by slow.” – Poi Dog Pondering
It’s not just that the roses smell sweeter at bike speed, the city is also a lot more interesting. All my favorite secret spots in Austin were stumbled upon by bike. Just south of 34th Street is an old neighborhood hunkering down against the roar of Lamar. There, tucked away on a giant lot, is a squatty, red board-&-batten house with a limestone walk. Outlined in pebbles near the front door, it reads “Mirabeau B. Lamar.” Now Texas transplants might not know, but Lamar was the first president of the Republic of Texas and he built that little red house with his own hands. Even though I went to Lamar Junior High and drove down Lamar Boulevard my entire life, I had to bike past this little gem to find out about it.
I can’t count on my fingers and toes the number of fabulous, abandoned houses I’ve found the same way, and usually they’re full of things like turn-of-the-century textbooks and discarded furniture. It may look like Hyde Park and Travis Heights are completely lived-in neighborhoods, but I guarantee that at bike speed it becomes plain that time is standing still inside the walls of many of those old homes. For over 10 years, out of curiousity, I’ve been coming back to peek in the windows of a certain hidden treasure that is not only full of antiques, but where even the 50-year old newspaper by the bedside has not moved an inch in all this time. At car speed, I would have seen a beige Victorian with a mowed lawn, but after biking past a few times it became obvious that the house was engulfed in stillness.
Political Poetics
|
|
The only thing better than catching a 2am swim in the thick heat of an Austin Summer is biking on the way to the pool. The late hour means cheating the punishing sun and zipping along through the season’s only available crisp air. Unless you’re rich, any swimming you’re doing at 2am is probably off-limits, exclusive, or illegal, which, in my book, only adds to the thrill of being out having adventures in the first place. There are two ways of going about such risky undertakings – en masse and solo – and I recommend the latter. The last time I trekked over the fence of my neighborhood pool with a group, I ended up standing shoulder to shoulder with my dripping partners in crime with a flashlight beam in my face and a cop behind it. The $155 ticket really took the wind out of my pool pirating sails for a while. Still, I can’t wait for the summer swelter to roll in and the pools all over town to be filled, so I can return to the solitude of swimming by moonlight. And this time I ain’t telling anyone where.
Any reasonable person, especially a woman, should be scared to be out on the streets alone at night. But there is a triumphant rush to weaving through the double yellow lines on Fifth Street or Red River while the driving public rests snug in their beds. I first gained this love of night cycling while hurrying home from an evening of club-hopping. The darkness and quiet of the city were already a little creepy and then a fat rain drop plunked on my head.
“Oh, great,” I thought, pumping even harder toward home. One giant rip of thunder later and the sky tore open like a bloated sack. At first, I was rabidly focused on getting home, but as my jeans hung heavier and stuck to me and the rain began streaming off my eyelashes and elbows, I realized I couldn’t get any wetter than I already was and that, hell, I was having the time of my life. That’s the hour I moved off the sorry sidewalks and bike paths of this car-loving town and took possession of the late night’s empty middle lane, singing and laughing at the top of my lungs. After my initiation by deluge, I began regularly waking up in the wee hours to sneak out and take back the night, in my very own way.
This article appears in May 23 • 1997 and May 23 • 1997 (Cover).