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Every once in a while, I wake up restless and wander down to Barton Springs before dawn. The moon is sinking behind the hills, and the eastern sky is only beginning to surrender to daylight. The whole place hangs somewhere between yesterday and tomorrow. It is one of those rare hours when the world has not yet remembered to be noisy.
Floating in that cold water, I find it impossible not to think about the long parade of people who found their way here before me: the Indigenous peoples who knew these springs long before Austin had a name, the cedar choppers clearing the Barton and Bee Creek cedar brakes, and the hunters, travelers, and laborers, the lovers and the infirm, and all the other amphibious souls who came for whatever reasons people seek good water.
I am something of an aficionado of cedar chopper lore, so my imagination inevitably settles on one fellow in particular: a poor old half-drunk cedar chopper easing into the spring waters on a moonlit August night well over a century ago. He hobbles his mule in the pecan grove above where Barton Springs is now, shuffles down to the water’s edge, peels off his sweat-stiffened clothes, drops his hat, and lowers himself into that miraculous cold water. After a day of cedar dust, mosquitoes, and enough cussin’ to sour fresh milk—all washed down with a couple of healthy pulls off his jug of homemade—he must have felt like the Almighty had tucked a piece of heaven into the limestone just for tired fools like him.
Then a twig snaps.
Another follows.
His imagination churns. He remembers hearing about John Willbarger, scalped by Comanches and left for dead on Onion Creek, not so far from here. In an instant he is no longer taking an evening swim. He is starring in a frontier catastrophe of his own invention. Every shadow grows eyes. Every stump conceals an ambush. Every rustle carries murderous intent. The heavy breathing he hears drifting through the darkness is exhalations of a stealthy raiding party.
Or is it the contented snorting of his own jackass grazing uphill, blissfully unaware that it has become an accessory to imagined history?
Grabbing his hat, our hero erupts from the spring and disappears into the darkness naked as a whistling frog on a shovel, entirely convinced that Texas history has selected him for its next chapter.
I laugh because we really are not so different.
When I was younger, “Jaws” had me convinced a great white shark was sizing up my dangling feet for lunch every time I bobbed around waiting for the next ocean wave. My cedar chopper sees a Comanche on the bank. I see election returns, medical reports, unfinished stories and paintings, the uncertain future of Barton Springs, and the faint embarrassing hope that 50 years from now somebody might still remember me.
Different centuries.
Same imagination.
Meanwhile, the springs go quietly about their business. The turtles are unimpressed. The fish refuse to participate in human’s anxieties. Even the cormorants’ dignity proves civilization and all its worries are not their problem. The water keeps rising from the aquifer exactly as it did for the first people who knew this place, for the cedar choppers, and for every swimmer who has floated here since.
Maybe that’s why I keep coming back.
Barton Springs is one of the few places I know where the world grows quiet enough to remind me that fear is an extraordinary storyteller and that what sounds like the end of the world is usually a jackass making perfectly ordinary noises in the dark.
Austin artist and songwriter Ben Livingston and writer/editor Dana Frank are daily Barton Springs swimmers and creators of Barton Springs Currents, formerly known as The Barton Springs Underwater Gossip Column. They are known for their amphibious reporting of goings-on at the pool.
