Heritage Church

While walking around in my new hood of Zilker, I came across a stark block building in the middle of a huge lot.  It's an odd sight in a part of town where every square inch of land is at a premium and new mcmansions occupy entire footprints of land, interspersed among the modest 1940s bungalows that came before. 

This desirable and expensive zipcode (04) was once "nothing," according to a middle aged native Austinite I flew home from Phoenix next to recently.  "We liked it, but it was a poor area."

It's beautiful, though.  The neighborhood abuts Zilker Park, the Central Park of Austin, and is filled with old, old oak trees and big shading magnolias.  Vines and weeds and flowering plants tangle all over each other here, in the Austinian style.  All of the old, gracious parts of the city are full of overgrowth - plants spill onto the sidewalks and streets and grow big and wild.  Pastel paint peels from old houses and fences lean on properties that, as values have skyrocketed, you'd never imagine are worth high six figures.  You cannot tell a home value by its appearance around here.  This is nothing like Phoenix, where properties are pathologically groomed and clipped and repainted and edged, and leafblowers rage at all hours of the day.

But the church.  This is what the sign said:

I have some comments about the sign.  1. Is it that noteworthy that some of the people buried here beginning in 1866 were born before 1840?  26 was that notable an age?  Or is 1840 a reference to Austin's early days that I didn't catch?  Does it simply mean to point out that they were born in the antebellum slavery period?  2. "In the 1940s, the wooden church burned."  Because this was Dixie once, I feel suspicious at the assumedly intentional ambiguity.  Why did it burn?  It's wet here.

Sealed tightly forever.  Why?  Why not a museum to early black culture and churches of this era?  Why not a space to share this completely ignored aspect of early Austin?  This city's interpretation of its own history is so whitewashed.  This building is not only significant because it's still here and the land is still safe, but it's a touchstone for a huge group of people who don't get their story told here almost ever.

Big, beautiful treeish lot.

But as the sign says, it's a church and cemetery.  Underneath the weeds in the green lot are headstones.  Incomplete headstones.  Stumps and chunks, leaning shards, mounds of local lime melding, very slowly, into the grass and networks of vines.

Someone mows it sometimes.  It's rained so much lately that it's impossible to keep the greenery down, and it shoots up in uneven patches.  I stepped gingerly in the grass, deep into the shady back area to look at the stones, praying against snakes and cursing that the foliage was so dense and moist that the big black Texas mosquitos, who normally pass on me, lighted on my bare skin with glee.  I don't know how to hike or walk in backcountry, and although this is in the middle of a dense city, it feels distinctly lonely and untrodden.  I watched the ground for those snakes.

Age 87.

Worn down stone looking like a natural occurrence and not a grave marker.

There were a lot of spots, much bigger than this, where the grass wouldn't grow.  Some of the spots were...grave-sized?  Multiple feet by multiple feet.  Why?  Why would this enthusiastic foliage not grow in certain patches?

Condos to the left, apartments to the right, encroaching right up to the edge of the protected space.  No doubt tens of developers have cruised the big empty space, populated only by that lonely box just one step above a shed, and cursed the city for setting it aside.  A lot like that?  DREAM CONDOS! With a stupid fucking name, like Zilker Commons, or Greenview, or Barton Heights.

I searched for clues about the church and cemetery and came up with little more than what's contained on that historical marker sign.  There's an inventory of the remaining stones, or what remained of them ten years ago.  I couldn't find as many as the website had.  It takes a jaded, weird fucking person, weird beyond any measure I can imagine, to steal a fucking headstone.  When I was a kid, I thought to linger too long by any old grave would tempt the spirit belonging to it to follow me home, and I worried in the car that an illicit tour of the Pioneer's Cemetery in Prescott, Arizona (it was pre-renovation and closed to the public in the 90s) might have caused some old ghost to follow us home and scare me in my bed at night.  Needless to say, even this morbid ass would not remove a memento like that from a cemetery, not to mention the fact that it's vandalism and ruins historic spaces for the rest of us.  I did take ball moss home from the Texas National Cemetery once (yep, Texas still thinks it's a country), but it died.

I mean, seriously.  Where the fuck do headstone thieves put their prizes?  In their herb gardens?  WTAF

I'll continue my researches, but this might require IRL reading in an archive.  I must say it was easier to find the dirt I wanted in Phoenix, even about the most obscure of historic properties.

I will say that Austin in this early steamy summer is pretty and charming south of the river.  The big tangle of green paired with two years of inordinate rainfall has the lightning bugs out in force, and they're at their densest in unmanaged green spaces.  Apparently the eggs lay in the earth for about a year before hatching upon us, and in heavy rainfall, they germinate wildly.  They float and twinkle in the dusk all over this area, they flow into my house when I open the door sometimes, they're so thick.  Ugly bugs in the light, but neverendingly charming outside.

Haunted by bad taste

I was pretty sure my apartment was haunted for a week.

As an introvert with strange feelings about emotional safety, I hate the idea of other people being in the place where I live.  Obviously, I don't mind friends and family, but I don't want strangers and their leavings in my place.  I don't want them looking at my things and polluting up my air with their stupid breath and their ugly and sad thoughts.  Living in the world is psychologically taxing to me, and I need a place that feels clear and safe to relax in after work.  It is a fragile ecosystem that can easily be disrupted.  I recall having a plumber in my apartment last year and looking forlornly down at the perfect dirty shoe print he had left on my vintage white crocheted bathroom rug.  Invader.

After the chaos of moving settled, I began to notice the little calling cards left by the prior owner of my apartment.  Yes, this late 60s dream palace is a condo, and rather palatial by the standards of midtown New York.  I began to piece together the clues that the prior inhabitant was a woman, and an old one.  In drawers, I noticed errant curler pins that haven't been in stores for decades, ones that looked exactly like the ones my great-grandmother would stick in her rollers in front of the tv on a Sunday night.  Once, I found a prescription pill previously lost forever under the bathroom vanity.  Worst of all was when I pulled the stopper out of the bathroom sink and found it was attached to hair.  THE HAIR OF ANOTHER PERSON.  I reeled in horror and disgust, considered complaining to my landlord, but ultimately stuffed it away with the other terrible experiences of my life.  I later poured an aggressive amount of Drano into the hole.

The hole in the sink, not the one in my sense of peace and placidity.

It was in this atmosphere of discomfort that I met my neighbors, also elderly, who expressed relief that the apartment had been rented to someone so reasonable looking as my self.  "It was a real bad situation in there," Rita said as she hooked a thumb towards my door.  I nodded in bland sympathy, Yeah, I hate bad situations too, and didn't ask questions because I didn't want to know.  "She was real sick," R continued.  "Real sick."  I looked into my darkened apartment.  "And she must've smoked three packs a day."  Fucking really?  I thought of my bathroom closet, which had been missed in the repainting that followed my landlord's recent purchase.  The dank and hideous cubbyhole smelled like a combination of mothballs and smoke, with remnants of spilled bath products staining the walls.  I had already repainted it myself in an emphatic turquoise to kill the scent and appearance.

That night, the furnace turned on by itself every two hours, from midnight to 6 am.  It was 65 degrees outside, and each time I heard the jet engine sound begin to crank into gear, I dragged my limp body from the bed and angrily held the "down" button until it said 40 degrees.

"It's her," I thought in my sleep-addled state, which is always 80% more delusional and superstitious than my waking self.  "It's the ghost of the bitch who lived here, angry that I'm inhabiting the space she died in." Oh, I had already assumed she died in here.  She was old and sick and now she's not here.  What other conclusions were there?

"Maybe she didn't die," my mom suggested hopefully.
"Oh right, she's probably just on a cruise," I sneered.

Of course she had drawn her last rattling breaths in the space now occupied by my bed.  Of course she had lain in here for days in the middle place between life and death, sweating and waxy, dreaming of her youth, alone and uncalled on and increasingly distressed, permanently staining the spiritual parcel with the confusion and ugliness of the end of an unremarkable life.

I mean, what else?

Turns out, I guess she just moved to Dallas.  That's what the landlord told me.  Maybe my mom paid him to say that, but I believe it, and the furnace doesn't act by itself anymore.  That was just a problem with the thermostat.  I've thrown out all of her old pins and hairs and pills, and I've disinfected the place to my liking, and I haven't had any dreams of half woman-half demons in curlers rocking in chairs in my bedroom or anything.  I think the place is clean.

I think I just heard a sound in my bedroom.

Austin Dispatch Part I

I don't miss Phoenix, and only the Facebook feed of Arizona Highways magazine, with its occasional grandiose photos of rugged craggy sandy-colored Saguaroed desert, is capable of inspiring a pang in me.  But I've always loved the high desert and the forested west and the canyons and peaks and plateaus - who wouldn't?  I remember driving north on the I-17 as a twelve year-old with my dad, off to see some family in Cottonwood, staring out the truck windows at the sun setting over canyons spotted with pinions and junipers and thinking, I love you! I love you, desert.

One of the most annoying things about recent transplants to new cities is their tendency to draw constant comparisons between places.  I did it every minute for months.  Fog?  Oh we don't do that.  What are all these stickers for my car?  I don't like IPAs!  Don't you guys know Four Peaks, jesus I thought the whole country loved them.  Sometimes I don't feel like having a taco for breakfast.  Toll?!

I'm finally beginning to stop as the treeish, big-little city of Austin starts to feel like home.  I think I offended my dad when I called here "home" on the phone the other day, but I can only have one home at a time and Arizona ain't it.

I love a new place because I love learning new history and new plants.  I have a thousand questions, and I feel frustrated when locals don't have the answers.

• What's the difference between an oak and a live oak?  Are they different?  Oaks here are often smaller than I expect, and twisty like an olive tree.
• Is this an acorn? Is this other thing an acorn? 
• Do you call it a crik or a creek?  
• What is cedar fever?  When will I get it?
• What's with the whitish-yellow granite?  Slabs of this locally harvested stone are EVERYWHERE.  Houses are built from it, and long rectangular hunks line freeways and parking lots all over the county.  Pieces of it are arranged artfully in front of city hall as makeshift benches that no one uses.
• Conversely, the Capitol building is built seemingly exclusively of a decidedly pink granite, which I understand to be found in the hill country.  It's everywhere in there, dusty pinky gray.  The Capitol is an expert combination of gilded era polish and 19th century rusticity.  Inside, you will find quality oil paintings of every governor of Texas since the Confederacy.  I happily took a photo of poet/ladies man/Texan president Mirabeau Lamar, but Bush II was also there.
• Where are all the references to native tribes?  Streets and areas here are named after the topological features, or early Texan politicans.  Cedar-this and lake-that, Lamar here and Houston there.  I have observed zero references to native culture.  There is a modicum of Spanish names, but nothing remotely proximal to the Mexican heritage or population.  Even crazily-racist Arizona has native names galore.  What the fuck, liberal Austin?
• Why is everyone so nice to me?  Do they want money, or sex?  I don't understand.  
• What will happen when even more people move here?  The city, small until approximately 8.5 years ago (based on a verbal Pew poll, just kidding, based on anecdotes) is bursting with obnoxious new people who drive the rent and traffic snarls up up up!  How dare they?!

I don't know if I'll stay here forever, probably not, but this is the only place I've ever been where I can eavesdrop on the conversations of construction workers and find they're talking about how to blanch kale, and where I can chat with a bus driver about the premier bat caverns of the world (hint: they're here!) and where the best Detroit pizza is (yes this is a thing), and where people on the street smile at me for no reason in a non-sexual way, and where twenty-somethings who elect to be homeless sit on Congress and bang on overturned buckets next to dogs lazily blinking in the sun.  Those guys aren't unusual in a city, but the ones who hang out around my office are clever even by my asshole standards, and when someone can call something to me in a street and I don't get offended and possibly even laugh openly, then magic has happened.  

The end.