Barton Springs Pool in the Dark Is Its Own World
Swimming before sunrise became a necessary ritual for novelist Elizabeth McCracken during an uncertain time. And then came the strangers.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/travel/...efore-sunrise/
I was never indifferent to Barton Springs Pool, but like many Austinites, I had a mostly summer relationship with it. The beloved landmark is both artificial and ancient, a man-made pool fed by natural springs, three acres of water in the middle of the city. I am a stout, middle-aged woman endowed with both buoyancy and insulation against the cold. Moreover, I’m originally from Massachusetts. During my first summers here, I liked to stand up to my New England waist in Barton Springs and openly mock Texans inching their way into the water, which hovers at 68 to 70 degrees year-round. “Come on in!” I’d tell big men cuddling their own torsos mid-August. “It’s not so bad when you get used to it.”
I didn’t really swim in Barton Springs until the fall of 2020, after our national summer of nothing. A couple of times I went with my daughter, Matilda, before Zoom middle school. The weather was cold, and most of the swimmers who showed up wore wet suits. They could not be mocked. Sometimes a dozen wet-suit wearers arrived to take a dip together, including one guy with a loud voice who liked to set up a speaker by the pool to play music. We called him Foghorn Larry. “When I showed up, there was no party, but when I left, there was a party!” he bellowed one day.
“Maybe they threw it to celebrate you leaving,” my daughter said quietly, to me.
For Matilda the allure of the springs wore off. Not for me.
I decided that autumn to embrace the outdoors by swimming in Barton Springs almost every day. I live about a fifteen-minute drive away, in Hyde Park—just north of the University of Texas campus, where I teach—in a converted bungalow with three human beings I love and one cat with whom I have a decent working relationship. I began arriving earlier and earlier. Generally, there were others there, but the pool is so large that I sometimes wasn’t aware of them at all.
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