What Makes Austin Weird

Austin's city motto is "Keep Austin Weird." We see this motto everywhere: emblazoned on mugs, tie-dyed tee shirts, bumper stickers, posters, shotglasses. Perhaps like you, we wondered, "What makes Austin weird?"

Perhaps the place to start is with the obvious, the three B's of Austin weirdness: bars, bats and BBQ. Austin is the self-proclaimed live music capital of the country, which seems a fair boast. We hear live music at the grocery store on summer weekends and at many restaurants year round, including small beer and hamburger joints (called ice houses here); even the elementary school's main fundraiser is a live music concert. And then, of course, there are the bars. Austin's 6th Street is renown, but not someplace I like to go because I don't enjoy venues where the volume is so loud I cannot hear myself think. Our first bar foray was instead to a classic venue, the Continental Club. Sushil and I went for an early show (7 pm) and between the two of us had five shots of tequila and an evening's worth of great live music for the tidy sum of $17. That's good living.

As for the bats, Austin is the proud home of the largest urban colony of bats in North America. These are Mexican free-tailed bats and over a million of them hang out underneath one of the several bridges that span the river that runs through downtown Austin. People gather in the twilight to see them take flight, a spectacle that lasts several minutes. The bats are definitely cool.

Austin's food scene is not all what one might hope, but apparently for lovers of BBQ this place is heaven. We don't eat beef or pork, so we're missing something like 90% of the fun (some places don't even serve any BBQ chicken or turkey; this is the state where pork really is the other white meat). Nonetheless, we try to be good sports and take our visitors out and about to the various BBQ joints to partake the local fare.

But talking about bars, bats and BBQ when trying to describe what makes Austin unique is missing some of the really striking differences between Austin and the rest of the country.Take, for example, tattoos.

I would argue that Austin is the tattoo capital of the country. We came in summer, which is the prime tattoo-viewing season. Think people splashing around in the swimming pool and you get the picture. Now you might think I am just talking about some old men sporting reminders of wild times during some war or the other, but you would be wrong. I am talking women: young women, middle-aged women, old women. You might be thinking little roses on the ankle or, coyly, on the hip. You would be wrong. I am talking tattoos that fully cover the arms, the back, and the legs, sometimes all three of those places on a single woman! I've lived in places like Portland and Berkeley and San Francisco, all of which have reputations for being a bit weird or hip, but none of them has a female population with such highly adorned skin as does Austin. Now THAT makes a place weird! And I mean that in a good way.

Another facet of Austin weirdness is its anti-corporate stance. Austin is determined not to allow itself to simply become the locale of store #5438 of national chains like Gap, Chili's, and Starbucks. Austin residents really celebrate local, independent businesses. A prime example is the independent bookstore, Bookpeople, a deep, full space with quirky exhibits like one on Texas history. There are plenty of other examples, including Allens Boots, which has an astounding array of cowboy boots with prices that go up to the thousands, and Toy Joy, a place arguably more for stoned college students and baby boomers looking to relive the past than it is for kids, but our child gets silly there right along with us. The anti-corporate movement keeps Austin weird through the creation and distribution of the "Go Local" card, which gets you small discounts or bonus treats at lots of funky, small establishments.

Finally, Austin is certainly weird for Texas: it is liberal and heavily Democratic in a state that most of the nation associates with W. And thank goodness for that; Austin's political weirdness is for many its saving grace. There's no doubt more to Austin weirdness than just what I have recounted, so I might have to write about this topic again some day. But suffice it to say, this place is different. And that difference, that weirdness, certainly made our move easier and makes us happy to call ourselves brand-new Austinites. This is the kind of city you can proudly tell someone you are from, the kind of place that sheds a good light on your image of yourself and the identity you show the world. At least for those of us, like me, who value place.

Hot, Hot Austin

Arguably, moving to a new town in time for its biggest heat wave since 1860 is not the best way to settle in to a new place. Especially when the kind of record temperatures we are talking about are the kind with three digits. Even more so if one is conducting this move with a nine-year-old Californian who is accustomed to playing outside every day for hours on end. And playing, mind you, with humans her own size and age, not, as it were, with mosquitoes, and multitudes of them at that, to which she is dreadfully allergic. Which is all to say that our first few weeks, make that months, of life in Austin were difficult, which is why I had to wait six months to even begin to write about them.

It is not that we are California softies unaccustomed to heat. We are California softies with relatives in India who we visit often and almost always in the summer, so we *know* what heat is. Painfully so. Trust me. But that is another story for another blog (a book perchance?). I jokingly called Austin "Delhi with A/C." That was right up until the night, about two weeks in, when the power went out. Power outages are endemic to Delhi; I recall one hot day in particular, when the still fans were taunting my very sanity, as they were too often wont to do, having a conversation with my father-in-law in which I informed him, with a haughty tilt of my head, that power outages are very rare in the States. (And then that summer we had rolling blackouts in California, which no one but the two of us recognized as God paying me back for my bad manners.) But power outages were not what I expected in Austin. We sat in our family room for hours, feeling the cool air slowly seep out of the house as the vicious hot air forced its way inside. Don't ask me why we didn't simply pack up and head out to a restaurant or a mall. Maybe we didn't really know where to go yet in our new town. But more likely we simply fashioned ourselves martyrs, or possibly morons - it never occurred to us to escape. We sat there and took it, watching the clock tick the minutes off to the time when the woman on the phone had informed my husband Sushil that the power would be restored. Austin has some number you just call to find out these matters. I didn't believe her, but sitting there getting hotter and hotter, and naturally more and more irritable, I needed to believe her, desperately. I was, therefore, livid when the appointed time came and went. Then, ten minutes past, the lights came on and the A/C kicked in. I sat on the couch, rejoicing at the sound of the refrigerator back to its important work of keeping the beer cold, and marveling at the psychic powers of the woman on the phone. For weeks afterward, I was wary that another outage was right around the corner, that Austin was simply Delhi after all. Thankfully, that was the only one. The A/C kept working right up until the day we switched it over to heat, fairly certain that the temperature had dropped some forty or fifty degrees in the span of 24 hours.

How does one entertain a child who cannot function in heat in the middle of summer? How does one go about enjoying the wide front porch of one's home-owning dreams when mosquitoes come in large family groups to feast on one's ripe, untouched California skin? We had changed our license plates over to Texas ones just as fast as we could so that the local folks would more readily accept us as their own, but the flying bloodsuckers of our yard knew better: this was virgin territory and they alighted with ferocity. There was only one answer to our dilemma: the local swimming pool. The pool is but a handful of blocks away, but might I remind you of the triple-digit heat, so that you and Al Gore might together forgive us for the regrettable sin of actually driving that distance each afternoon, where we spent a couple of hours playing and trying to be nice, well-mannered people again, the kind who know that heat and mosquitoes can only last so long and that better days must surely be ahead.

Farewell, California...

Back in June 2009, my husband, daughter, dog and I completed the Great Migration in reverse, leaving the San Francisco Bay Area for, of all places, Texas. Having lived in California for over a quarter-century, I never imagined that I would someday leave the adopted state I loved so dearly to head off for what I, like so many others, dismissed as flyover country. My hope is that this blog will prove a good forum for sorting out my feelings, reflections and experiences occasioned by my family's monumental geographic shift, and that in the course of writing it I might come to understand a bit more the role that place plays in my identity. Additionally, the blog should help me share these ideas with my friends and family and whoever else might happen upon this page and perhaps to hear their thoughts.