Back in the fall of 2013 and in 2014, there were floods that made many of the 70’s era homes in the Onion Creek neighborhood of Austin unlivable. The city bought out many of them and they were demolished. Visiting these abandoned streets now feels quite odd. You can tell there used to be homes and people living there, but the traces are left merely to rows of useless driveways leading only to grassy fields and trees, strewn garbage, and other artifacts of some distant human presence. It’s striking that it is so easy to wipe almost clean a place lived in for decades.
After discovering that McKinney Falls was not accepting any more visitors because of limited capacity in the park, a friend and I decided to visit the Onion Creek Greenbelt. Neither of us had ever explored it. The GPS directed us to a spot at the back of this abandoned neighborhood. There was no obvious entrance to the greenbelt, so we walked down the eerie house-less streets in search of a way onto the trails. Eventually, we just pushed our way through a wall of spiny overgrowth at the back of someone’s former back yard and meandered for a while along many unused paths. When we started seeing people and dogs we knew we had found the main trail system.
What we were not expecting to find was a huge collection of old abandoned metal and concrete pipes strewn about the landscape in one area. They look quite old and possibly dislodged from underground during a flood some years ago. The discovery and timing were perfect, as the sun was starting to set, entering the golden hour. The shadows were getting longer, with the sun approaching the horizon, and the light quality was becoming somewhat softer and warmer. My friend and I both love ruins photography, abstraction, and composing the chaos and melding of nature and the man-made. Some of the collections of pipes and their intriguing accessory parts seemed to be like the ruins of an ancient temple. The kid in me felt kind of like an archeologist, finding a lost civilization in the jungle. But also like an artist attempting to create something new from what is at hand. A playful act of looking and seeking something visually appealing or interesting in the often overlooked. Here are some of my favorites from the hike. Nothing mind-blowing, but a fun exercise in a new creative environment full of potential.
