“For most Austinites, East Riverside Drive – from I-35 to Texas 71 – is primarily a road from somewhere to somewhere else…”
1
Among endless traffic, I saw three people on horses trotting along the sidewalk. I mean that three people on horses passed in front of me on Riverside as I drove to the airport to gather family. They continued along a retaining wall covered with graffiti, headed west.
2
Also covered with graffiti is the Bazaar, or what was the Bazaar, before it boarded its windows and moved to Wimberley. Everyone is moving to Wimberley—the musicians who can’t afford Austin anymore and the musicians who can. Ray Wylie Hubbard lives in Wimberley. Paul Simon lives in Wimberley. His house has a barn for jamming.
Stench, says the graffiti plastered over the old Bazaar, signless on Riverside Drive. Stench.
3
I spent an hour at the bus stop at Riverside and Summit, just watching. My house was 500 feet away. I counted the cigarette butts under the bench. I clocked the people who traveled past. Eight walking, two running, seven on bicycles, four on scooters. Only one pedestrian crossed the street.
Cars went by went by went by. No one met my eye.
4
The retaining wall holds up the hill that I live on. Without it, Riverside would be part of the hill, the hill would be part of Riverside.
5
Across from the boarded-up Bazaar is an Asian Fusion restaurant where you can order a cocktail called Bramble Lush and whole red snapper served with tamarind sauce and lemongrass. When Elon Musk ate there, he snapped a photo with the owner.
6
Do you imagine a river? Better to imagine the 54,000 cars that pass through every day. If you could spread them across the hours, which of course you can’t, that’s a car every 1.6 seconds
7
One Saturday I saw a woman standing on the side of Riverside with a sign, selling brisket to raise money for a funeral. The photo on the sign was of a dark-haired girl, not yet a woman. On a folding table in the parking lot, her family spread out the food.
8
Sometimes I see a flash behind my backyard fence and think a bird is taking flight. But no. It’s just another car cruising down Riverside.
9
A woman moved into my neighborhood. Her girlfriend bought a duplex that faced the road through a bank of trees. They unpacked and hung pictures, but all that woman could hear was Riverside, its ambulances and mufflers and beeping buses. Her eyes grew dark with the rings of the sleepless. She and her girlfriend broke up, and she moved away.
10
In 2010, the city published the East Riverside Corridor Master Plan. It stretched 194 pages, imagined tree-lined streets, bike lanes, a light rail. It conjured public plazas, pedestrian-scale buildings, pocket parks, natural buffers. In 2023 I wrote about my hour at the bus stop. Riverside, I said, remains unfriendly by design.
11
It was once a two-lane street, Riverside, stretching between farms to the east of downtown and on towards Bergstrom Air Force Base. At an estate sale for Mac MacGregor, our late neighbor, a real flight suit was listed for $50. What would anyone do with it now?
12
The river is moving somewhere on the other side of Riverside. It is the Colorado River, but not that Colorado River, and here it is dammed to become a lake. On Saturday afternoons it is dotted with kayaks and paddleboards, its trails thick with walkers.
There is no place along Riverside Drive where you can see the river.
13
I turned east and saw the Tesla truck, all sci-fi and sharp angles. That truck drove past the horses trotting along the retaining wall. It drove past the place where a woman sold brisket to pay for a funeral. It drove past the fancy fusion restaurant and the used-to-be Bazaar and the corner where public plazas were dreamt of but never built. That truck drove past me on the way to the airport to pick up family, part of Riverside and not part of it, just like everything else.
This is the poem that inspired this piece. And this is the flight suit we did not buy.