one of the things i'm learning in my leica year is the serendipity of always having your stupid camera with you. recently, i went out to dinner with a friend. i was, for once, 30 minutes early. so, before going to eat, i parked at one end of the lamar st bridge, got out my camera and went for a little walkie.
the lamar st bridge has next to it a very new and groovy pedestrian and bike bridge. this is austin, after all, and bikers need their own bridge. in all seriousness, it keeps a lot of bikes off a very narrow, no-shoulder lamar st bridge. plus, it's pretty. when it's eight billion degrees out, like it has been all summer here, there's still some psycho who gets out and jogs. usually it's a lot of someones. go figure.
at the end of bridge where i parked, the bridge leaves town lake, crosses cesar chavez st and then slopes gently down to earth well on the other side of cesar chavez. downtown austin is at the slope-down end, but town lake (now called lady bird lake) is about 30 feet below the bridge, and the hike-and-bike trail - a long and pretty series of trails that runs around town lake, connecting over all the four or five bridges in central austin - is at the bottom of a spiral staircase that runs down from the bridge. in the summer, there's a whole scene underneath the bridge, some of which is very well viewed from that spiral staircase.
i was rather surprised to see so many people out kayaking in the 100+ degree heat, but i'm told that it's 10 degrees cooler on the lake. i was reminded of taking the circle line around manhattan when i was a kid and watching city kids jumping off of footings of the george washington bridge, clowning for the gawkers on the boat. i would never in my life have swam out or climbed down to a place like that - because i was kind of a chicken at that age, not because i was horrified - but it looked urban-exotic and summer-in-the-city cool. later in my life, i read the basketball diaries, and jim carroll described an episode swimming there and, just as i saw, clowning for the tourists.
the lamar st bridge is just a few steps away. you can see the fancy new bridge up in the top right corner. i was fascinated by the kayak docking. every piling gets regular traffic. sometimes people stay for a while, sometimes it's on and off. i'm pretty sure it's illegal but no one enforces any law about it. people kayak all over town lake and on a hot summer day, they take shade wherever they can find it.
kids - mostly - pull up, get out, rest, swim, do whatever. i don't know that i'd swim in town lake but i'm an old coot. also, i don't know that i'd hang out there in the first place. there are tons of pigeons who roost in the beams above. there's a lot of pigeon crap. maybe austinites are all cool about bird poop, but i'm an ex-new yorker and pigeons are just plain nasty. still, you can understand why the birds would be drawn to the cooling shade and the protective heights.
sometimes it's for lovers, sometimes it's merely bromantic.
on the way back, there were still people on the first piling, one swimming around the concrete. i realized after seeing the photographs that this person must have been swimming around at the start of my walk. there are pretty clearly three kayaks in the first two spiral-staircase photos. in retrospect, i like the mystery that two people and three kayaks projects, and the sort of distant body-language i see in the two people sitting down.
i had pretty low expectations for this set of pictures. at the time, i thought it was kind of an indulgence (as is, i suppose, film photography in general). then it took me a couple weeks to send them in for developing. one of the joys of film is, as many of you know, the time between shoot and seeing. when i got these back, i was struck by how strong the bridge lines were, and how pretty the water textures. i know i saw some of the lines. the first couple pictures were all about the lines, and i do remember positioning myself a few times to get the concrete in certain places, but i was trying to photograph people. in the romance/bromace photos (the bromance one is cropped a bunch; they were taken from the same spot), i had this silly idea that i'd actually get some resolution on figures that far away. instead, the bridge dominates the image and in a pretty cool way. this turned out to be more than an indulgence.
oh, dinner was fantastic. thanks for asking.
