Current Littourati Map

Neil Gaiman's
American Gods

Click on Image for Current Map

Littourari Cartography
  • On the Road
    On the Road
    by Jack Kerouac
  • Blue Highways: A Journey into America
    Blue Highways: A Journey into America
    by William Least Heat-Moon

Search Littourati
Enjoy Littourati? Recommend it!

 

Littourati is powered by
Powered by Squarespace

 

Get a hit of these blue crystal bath salts, created by Albuquerque's Great Face and Body, based on the smash TV series Breaking Bad.  Or learn about other Bathing Bad products.  You'll feel so dirty while you get so clean.  Guaranteed to help you get high...on life.

Go here to get Bathing Bad bath products!

Entries in Austin (2)

Tuesday
Jun072011

Blue Highways: Austin, Nevada

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapMy three weeks in Turkey are over, and I'm back in the saddle again riding along with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) as he continues across America.  If you want to see some pictures and posts about my Turkey excursion, go to my Muse Gumbo site.  In this post it's Austin, Nevada, a sleepy hillside ghost mining town that I happened to pass through myself a couple of years ago.  It'll take me a couple of posts to get my Littourati chops up to speed again, but at least we've started!  Click on the map thumbnail to locate Austin.

Book Quote

"On three sides of town, prospect holes riddled the mountains and dripped out mine tailings like ulcerated wounds; to the west, several hundred feet down, lay a flat desert valley disappearing into the Shoshone Mountains on the horizon. Main Street, also U.S. 50, made a straight and steep run through Austin, then down the mountain and off across the desert. The side streets were hard-packed, oily sand, some with gradients that would test a donkey, and the rutted sidewalks, washing down the slope, still had their Old West canopies. Because Austin is without level land, many of the houses had been built into terraced cutouts so that from their porches people looked down onto the roofs of buildings along Main Street."

Blue Highways:  Part 5, Chapter 7


Photo by Chris Ralph at The Rock Hound's Corner Click on photo to go to site.Austin, Nevada

On our trip out through Nevada, we drove through Austin.  I remember driving up from a plain into some mountains, cresting, and then a steep drop on Hwy 50 through town as we looked out on the flat plain below stretching toward the next set of mountains.  Austin seemed unremarkable to me then, and because we were on a schedule we didn't stop but kept moving right along.

However, it was remarkable in one way in which LHM also finds of interest.  Before I visited Hazard, Kentucky in the Appalachians, I had never seen cities or towns laid out along a steep hillside before.  I thought it extremely cool that towns could have streets overlooking other streets, and porches of normal houses overlooking other houses' rooftops.  To lay a city out in that way really fascinated me, even though I could see the logic of the layout.  The only other way to lay a town out in a deep valley with steep hillsides is to follow the valley, which could lead a town to stretch for miles and miles.  In the day of the car, that would not be such a problem, but in the days before cars when many of these towns were being laid out, that would have made it very difficult for people to go to do basic tasks such as get supplies and food.  Keeping the town compact would have been much more important.

You find a lot of these types of towns in the mining areas of the west.  On a trip into Arizona, my wife and I visited Jerome, a small mining town perched high on a mountainside.  The town was built into a mountainside so steep that one of the buildings actually, over the course of time, slid from one street down to the next.  Another mining town in Arizona that we visited, Bisbee, where a certain color of turquoise is found, had a similar layout.  Walking the main street meant walking uphill as the street followed what used to be a gulch.  Taking side streets up from the main street often meant a steep climb.  If one lived in Bisbee and didn't have a car, one would be in really good shape from the daily workout!

On our trip through Nevada, the only other place we visited that had a similar layout was Virginia City.  But if you want to eschew the tourist areas, you probably won't go to Virginia City because it's whole purpose now is to cater to tourists.  The main street was full of all kinds of kitsch, but we did find a very cool little museum on a back street, steeply downhill from the main drag.

Living in a town like that, I can only imagine, would cause a rethinking of privacy.  Presumably, one would want to live higher up, because that would preserve privacy.  If you lived farther downhill, you could be observed by uphill neighbors as well as the people who lived to either side.  In a town that is flat, you wouldn't necessarily have that kind of problem.

But, the perspective engendered with such a town would also be changed.  How one viewed the world would have to be affected by whether they lived up the gulch or down the gulch, up higher on the valley walls or lower on the valley walls.  The light would last longer in the evening the higher one resided, and would arrive earlier in the morning.  Noise from below might be muted, but I can also imagine that echoes from below would be more discernible.  Would a person who lived higher up be more removed and aloof from the town?  Would a person who lived below be more active and sociable by necessity?

I don't have answers to these questions, I just pose them as thought exercises.  However, one thing is clear to me through all my travels.  If humans choose to live somewhere, well, they find a way to make it work whether it's temporary or permanent.  Certainly, there are examples of abandoned towns and cities all over America and the rest of the world.  However, most of those places enjoyed, even for a few evenings in the case of the shortest lived, the human activities that attempt to build a community.  Austin, Nevada is but one place, in the middle of a naturally arid and harsh landscape, where people succeeded. in building something long-lasting.  Obviously, we succeed more often than we don't.

Musical Interlude

It isn't that I loved O Brother Where Art Thou (I really did), but I really like the song In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.  It shows that everyone in their situation hopes for better things, even if the utopia is completely rooted in their own experience.  We used to joke that our dog, who was rescued, hit the big rock candy mountain when she came to our house.  But I too would like to reach the big rock candy mountain.  Who wouldn't?

 

If you want to know more about Austin

Austin, Nevada
Ghosttowns.com: Austin
The Historical Society of Austin, Nevada
TravelNevada.com: Austin
Wikipedia: Austin

Next up: New Pass Station, Nevada

Tuesday
Feb012011

Blue Highways: Austin, Texas

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapNon-Texans may not agree, but there is a little bit of heaven perched on the edge of the desert in Texas - Austin (and San Antonio, where I lived).  William Least Heat-Moon notes Austin on his way past, since he doesn't want to spend time in the urban areas.  But we'll take a little stop so I can reminisce about Austin and traveling up there a few times a year to do and see interesting things.  Click on the map thumbnail at right and see just how far we are across Texas, and how far we have to go.

Book Quote

"At Austin, on a hill west of the Colorado River - not the Colorado River, but the one flowing from near the New Mexico line to the Gulf - the desert began. Desert as in dry, rocky, vast. There was nothing gradual about the change - it was sudden and clear. Within a mile or so, the bluebonnets vanished as if evaporated, the soil turned tan and granular, and squatty trees got squattier with each mile as if reluctant to reach too far from their deep, wet taproots."

Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 5


Austin, Texas. Photo by Rhea Thomas at uptake.com. Click on photo to go to host site.

Austin, Texas

Every so often, my wife and I would leave San Antonio in the early evening and head up to Austin.  It was about an hour and a half drive up I-35 to downtown Austin, but usually we would hit some traffic on the outskirts of Austin just before we crossed Town Lake into the downtown.  After leaving the downtown skyline of San Antonio, muted in the fading light, the lights of the buildings of Austin reflecting off of the waters made for an interesting contrast with San Antonio.

Perhaps our goal was to have an evening at one of Austin's many good restaurants.  Perhaps there was an event, like a concert, that we wanted to see.  Sometimes it was the opera that beckoned us.  We had season tickets to the Austin Opera and only missed one - when it was too icy to drive and we had to turn back because, even though we were used to plows and salt and sand trucks in the Midwest, they had few of these in the South and even worse, people did not know how to drive in icy conditions.

Once we went to Austin to see the bats fly out from the Congress Avenue Bridge.  Austin, if I remember correctly, has the largest urban Mexican red-tailed bat population in the United States  They roost under the Congress Avenue Bridge for a certain amount of months each year, and quite a crowd gathers when they fly out in the evenings to look for a meal.  We stood under the bridge, listening to the barely audible squeaks of the bats, and soon, a few flew out, followed by an ever increasing torrent.  They made a cloud over town lake as they flew and swooped chasing down mosquitoes and other insects.

But to us, the jewel of Austin was located in Zilker Park - Barton Springs.  Barton Springs is a spring-fed pool straight from the aquifer below the city.  The water remains at a constant temperature, around 68 degrees.  In the summer, there was no better place to swim.  Well, at least I thought so.  One could always go up to Lake Travis and the beaches there, including a clothing-optional beach called Hippie Hollow.  I never went to any of those places, though.  Barton Springs was just my speed.

One of my best memories, though, was leaving Austin late, usually after the opera.  We'd drive back to San Antonio usually around midnight.  A wonderful public radio show, Blues Before Sunrise, usually came on and went into the wee hours of the morning.  At those moments, after having enjoyed a good time in the capital of Texas, driving through the night down I-35, it was easy to forget that we literally sat perched on the edge of the semi-arid desert just to the west.  West of Austin and San Antonio one could drive for hours before coming to a city of any consequence - it was 10 hours to El Paso, probably 12 or so to Albuquerque.  In between lay a lot of flat scrubland, gradually giving way to Chihuahuan desert to the southwest.  But we raced down the interstate, knowing that at the end lay our home in the Mahncke Park area of San Antonio, and our wonderful white dog waiting for us.  As the blues played, and my wife slept, sometimes it seemed like a slice of heaven.

For your listening and viewing pleasure, a band from Austin that unfortunately will not be touring any more - the Asylum Street Spankers.  Another Austin treasure to be remembered.

If you want to know more about Austin

Austinist (blog)
austinwebpage.com
Austin American-Statesman (newspaper)
Austin Bloggers Metablog
Austin Chronicle (alternative newspaper)
Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau
Austin Daily Photo (blog)
Austin Food Carts
Austin Food Reviews
Austin History Center
Daughters of the Republic of Texas
Slow Food Austin
University of Texas at Austin
Wikipedia: Austin
Wikipedia: History of Austin
Wikitravel: Austin

Next up: Johnson City, Texas