If one drives south down I-35 from the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, one notices that the scenery gets sparser, the trees get shorter, &, if it's at all possible, the sun gets brighter.
What could make the sun noticeably brighter just a few lines of latitude south? Perhaps the same thing that makes the sky seem larger once one drives away from the hills of Appalachia into the more open areas in central & western Kentucky: perspective.
But at this point I don't want to write about that particular stray observation I made during a brief visit to Austin this weekend; I have another one in mind. I want to mention that, since I lived in Austin for over twenty years, I made the trip up & down I-35 numerous times. I waited through countless construction projects, I groaned when the city filled up for SXSW & ACL & other capital letters that aren't really acronyms since they don't spell anything. I watched helplessly as NAFTA turned a sleepy artery that lazily connected Dallas with the town of Laredo - where the art of the siesta is all you wanted to cultivate during the summer which lasted from March to November - into a choked vein of Wal-Mart semis & U-Haul trailers & car, SUVs, cars, trucks, SUVs, & cars (& trucks). & it didn't seem like it could ever get much worse.
But it's much, much worse.
There's a fuzzy memory - alcohol was involved, I'm sure - of me on a warm summer's night, it's very late, I'm with a girl, neither of us have cars, the buses are no longer running, we're going to a place called Star Seeds, an all-night diner where the ex-junkie fry cooks in the back listen to death metal at a deafening volume, & it's on the other side of the highway. We happen to be somewhere between 26th Street (now called Dean Keaton) & 38th Street, & I suppose we could just walk down to 32nd street, where we could cross over & under the highway simultaneously - at this point I-35 has split into a "lower level," where you can exit at the streets I've just mentioned, & an "upper level," which bypasses those exits in a hopefully "express" manner - but instead, feeling frisky, we simply clamber onto the lower level, walk to the median (which has a concrete barrier we also have to climb over) & then walk to the other side, where we find a way up, & stumble, laughing, onto the frontage road.*
It's after 3am I'm sure. There are no cars on the road. No trucks, nothing. Well, maybe on the upper level.
That doesn't happen anymore. There's no way you could do that now. It's a harrowing game of real-life Frogger if you try. & think of this: if that's the case all night long in Austin, what is it like during the day, when most people are awake?
It's a nightmare.
A three-hour drive in 2007 is now a four-hour drive. Without any sign of workers, or accidents, or anything but obvious construction - always, always the widening of the highway - traffic just stops. Stops for a half-hour or more. I was told it was worse on the way to Austin than on the way from, but if anything, today, it was worse coming back to Fort Worth.
Nothing said here is a revelation, & anyone who lives in Texas knows this. In fact, it's almost as bad here in DFW, but, perhaps as my wife says, the highways are better here. Nor do I have any solutions - I am certainly not a civil engineer nor any kind of city planner sort.
But sort of like how badly we think our government is run, & yet continue to return the same desperately terrible congresspeople back again & again, it's a wonder we endure the exhausting awfulness of our highway system.
Well, some of us. My friends in Austin tell me this: "We just don't go out very much anymore."
It's not, I assume, because the sun is much brighter there. Or maybe it is, since they've had to cut down more trees to both build & to make room for bigger highways.
*Austinites can feel free to call bullshit on this story, as I'm pretty sure it didn't happen this way. We either crossed below 26th street or I am conflating that story with one when I cross just north of 51st street from the Cameron Road side to the sleazy hotels & massage parlors on the west frontage road. The point is, I made this crossing more than once, & with at least two different women. Anyway. It doesn't matter exactly how it happened. In one case, we were definitely going to Star Seeds. In both cases, there were almost no cars - or no cars - on the road.
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