The Edge of the City

In the search for a place I had never been, I traveled to the Capitol. I caught the first bus to arrive that I had never been on before, and this was number thirty. I soon discovered by the several turns that this was the beginning of the route. I watched out the window as first downtown went by and then the river. Now out of downtown, I watched the patterns of the city move by. Endless series of stores led to houses, which eventually led to the constant alternation between the two. I arrived at the end of the route at somewhere essentially unremarkable, Barton Creek Square. I had never been there, and still have never been inside, for the mall itself is just a mall. Other than the names of the stores it looks like the standard mall found everywhere. I instead focused on the parking lot, which was eerily quiet. I could see people hurrying to park, to walk in, to return to their cars, or to exit, but they were few and far between. I walked through the parking lot and eventually found the section labeled B-5. This is an entirely useless parking lot, so it was understandably deserted. It is isolated, and if enough people are at the mall to need to use it, it would be almost impossible to make the two immediate left turns required to enter with so much traffic.

This lot is interesting not for its uselessness in performing its primary function but for the strange serenity found in being isolated in the city. Car alarms can be heard from the other side of the mall, but the peaceful view from the edge of the parking lot is quite picturesque. The parking lot is on top of a hill which overlooks the mostly undisturbed hills of the surrounding landscape. Reading Calvino while overlooking some much less developed part of Texas is strange for me. I begin to realize that the city of Austin is as much about these distant reaches as it is about downtown. When in downtown, it is assumed that there will be large structures obscuring anything but city. People do not tend to want to live downtown because of the strong desire to see what was here before the city. I find that just as in Thekla, Austin is almost always under construction. While this mall is fairly isolated, in five or ten years the ability to see nature will be gone, and one will have to travel that much further to get there. And just as in Esmeralda, it will probably be a zigzagging obscure path to get there, much like the path of the bus I took to get here.