Barton Springs
Couple minutes ago, I thought “oh, it’s Monday! Rachel Maddow night!” and then for a few seconds, I thought it might be fun to listen to that middle-aged lesbian superstar discuss the news and connect the dots and make it all make sense, and then I thought, nope, nope, actually it’s not any fun at all.
Instead I’m going to write about Barton Springs.
Summer of 1991, I worked at Kerbey Lane Cafe, the original one. On Kerbey Lane. I was mostly a bus person doing bus person things, like re-filling coffee, clearing dishes, wiping down tables, not overly taxing nor overly lucrative. Being irritated by ladies who wanted more hot water in their teapot. My knees were giving me a bad time then. I had been playing tennis with Daddy, who was pushing 80 at that point, and had blown my ACL. The sound that it made was so loud that Daddy, who was mostly deaf, heard it across the court. It puffed up right away and I headed into a period of time that involved a lot of pain and limping.
At the end of my shift at Kerbey Lane, however, I made a bee-line for Barton Springs. After I while, it felt like my car would just drive there on its own. I think the cold water felt good on my knee, but my main purpose was to improve my swimming, which is a funny thing for a gal who had spent two summers in college working as a lifeguard. But I wanted to graduate beyond swimming that was just a notch beyond avoiding drowning.
Swimming wasn’t an activity growing up. We were never members of the country club, and although we did waterski out at the Camp Pickett reservoir, the only swimming involved there was if you fell while skiing and then your number one concern was to get your ass back up on those skis and hope you hadn’t fallen in or near a water moccasin nest.
Barton Springs is about an eighth of a mile long so four round trips is a mile. My roomie at the time at a duplex we called the Red River Motel was Donna Stevens, and she was a little mermaid despite growing up in Wichita Falls. She had the goggles and the swim cap, flippers, the whole nine yards. She could do the American crawl all the way down and back. She could actually swim a mile. I was not in that league.
I started with the breast stroke at just the eighth of a mile. I swallowed a lot of water. The water seemed so shockingly cold to me then I had to just throw myself in to get it over with. I hate to say it, but the water there now doesn’t feel nearly as cold. Too many damn people in it. The last time I took the girls there for a dip before the Zilker Summer Musical, you couldn’t swim five feet without running into a gaggle of folks. But I digress.
I stuck with it. By the end of that summer, I had worked my way up to a mile. Still the breast stroke, but a mile. My body couldn’t wait to get in that water. It felt like a living being, a cold substance that you had to really pull against to get through; I could feel it strengthening me inside and out. The waters felt magical, as people have known them to be for generations. It felt regenerative, enlivening, sacred. I can distinctly remember the feeling of getting out of the pool after swimming a mile. My body felt so compact, like I was a water animal myself.
The New Year’s Day after we got Emi, though, we took her there for the traditional Barton Springs plunge and she loved it. She laughed at the cold water and when we picked her up to leave, she squirmed like crazy to get out of our arms and throw herself back in the water! Like it was a magnet. She is indeed a water creature.
I have walked down to Barton Springs a few times in the evening from my apartment where I live now and caught the nighttime scene, teenagers (and perhaps their parents) smoking dope, people just enjoying darkness and the night air, and I wondered why in the world I had never walked down to be part of that from my house just up the hill.
There’s no telling. Things to do. All that. But I know it’s there now and it’s coming on the season for nights at the Springs. And I plan to drop in.
Barton Springs is a touch of heaven on earth, not just a place to cool off but a place to heal. And we all could use some of that.