by Harold McMillan

We're back!

I don't know how many of you noticed, but Austin Downtown Arts takes the month of July off. So, if you did look for us last month and thought we had gone the way of most of Austin's short-lived, non-mainstream (I hate to use the word "alternative") publications, rest assured, we're still here. We just need a little break in the summer.

At this point we remain a 10 issue per year publication -- June and July, December and January are combined issues. Keep reading us. And tell your business-owning friends to keep advertising with us. We like what we do and want to be here for a long time.

Just how hot is it?

Summer in Austin has always been hot. This, after all, is Central Texas. It's suppose to be hot. But this thing that's going on now is really amazing. It's hot everyday, all day, all night. So hot that even doing activities to cool off are just too much trouble. It's too hot to go swimming. It's too hot to get in the car to go to the movies or the library. It's too hot to take a nap and dream of being up in the mountains of New Mexico. It's hot!

You just gotta sit there in the air conditioning ( and I hope you got it) and be cool. Don't move around too much. Don't go outside. Just stay closed up inside and miss out on the natural world that surrounds us. After all, the great out-of-doors can be dangerous to your health.

As hot as it is, breaking temperature records and all, it's still hard for me to accept that it's some kind of strange occurrence going on here. Hasn't it always been hot in Austin in the summer? Once it gets to be 95 degrees, does it really matter if its five degrees hotter? These days it seems to matter. But that hasn't always been the case.

One of the things that I once liked about Austin, believe it or not, was being here in the summer. I've come to realize, during our recent heat wave, that I don't deal with the summer heat like I used to. Maybe it's just my imagination, but it seems like Austinites (perhaps this was only true in the olden days) at one time just got out there and had a good sweat. Summer heat or not, folks were always outside in the parks -- listening to and playing music, throwing the frisbee, swimming and tubing. And for those folks who had the time -- and there seemed to be a lot of us -- summer in Austin meant going to the lake several times a week. You know, tripping to the lake, just hanging out, reading, drinking, napping, smoking, swimming, boating, camping. That was part of what living in Austin was all about, finding the right spot on Lake Travis and forming a little party community for the summer.

My first regular swimming spot on Travis was down the cliffs behind Teck Cemetery, on RR 620. It was one of those places that had the "No Trespassing" signs, some barbed wire, and huge rocks placed in the road to keep you from going there. Of course, all of this meant that we had to park, grab the ice chest, blankets and inner tube, and hike a quarter-mile to get to the water. It was quite a hike down a steep hill, through the mesquite and cedar, over big limestone boulders, and finally you got to a really nice little cove. Oh, but once you got there...nice clean water, a jagged, rocky beach with big flat limestone rocks semi-submerged in the water, shade trees, about thirty yards out a little island to swim to, friendly folks just hanging out enjoying the water, nature.

It was "cool." A peace-love-dove atmosphere where everyone took their clothes off, tolerated each other's weirdness, shared their beer and smokes, and felt like we were among the chosen few who knew about this great secret place for talking to God, swimming nekked, and only rarely getting hassled by the lake police (or owners of the property).

It was hot at Lake Travis in 1980, too. But we didn't notice so much. We thought we were so cool.

Well, you know what happened next, right? As it turned out, we were not the only ones who knew about Teck Cemetery. It got more crowded, it got trashed. It got snatched up for development and the fence got very tall and scary looking. We had to find a new swimming hole.

Now, I could repeat variations of this story for a whole handful of other nice secluded spots on Lake Travis. The same basic story works for Windy Point, Marshall Ford, Hippy Hollow, and a bunch of others that I don't know about. It wasn't always private development that took these little treasures away. Unruly partiers gawking at skinny dippers, drunks who trashed the beaches, and the county's rules, admission fees, and parking lots with curfews and gates all contributed to the disappearance of some of the nicest mostly-natural swimming spots on the lake.

Now, I realize that part of what I am doing here is just some personal reminiscing of the old days in Austin. And this is not really about the weather as much as it is about how some things change, and others stay very much the same. There is still an underground scene of "lake snakes," I'm sure, who don't worry about the heat wave as much as they worry about the heat from the cops. There are still thousands of Austinites who, like me in 1980, don't have kids or straight jobs, don't have any problem hanging at the lake three days a week, and don't understand why folks are making such a big deal of it being hot in the summer in Central Texas.

The thing I'm really thinking about is that, just like I'll never be 20-something again, Lake Travis will never again be as beautiful and clean as it was in 1980. Austin will never again be the hip, big college town it was 15 years ago. But you know what, Lake Travis nor Austin proper never will again be as clean and beautiful and cozy as they are right now. That's the part that stays the same, the fact that our Little City is gone forever. This is just another coming of age story.

This is not a lament about the hot weather or the passing of the old days. What I'm really thinking about is how important it is for us, at least to some extent, to live in the moment. Those of us who are not 25 any more probably don't want to go back there. But you guys who are 25, please remember: this is your only shot at it.

It's damn hot out there? So what. Do something...Sweat. If you've found your own Teck Cemetery swimming hole, get on out there, take your clothes off and jump in.

Believe me, 15 years from now, it won't be there for you.