Changing Behind a Subaru, a Field Method

The towel slipped at 7:42 a.m., right as a CapMetro bus came around the curve on Barton Springs Road. For about a second and a half I was a public art installation. Nobody applauded. A man walking a heeler gave me the nod you give a fellow citizen when you both understand the bathhouse is still closed.

This is how a lot of us get into the pool now. You pull into the lot, angle the car so the passenger door makes a privacy screen, and perform a small, tense ballet: one foot out of the jeans, one foot on the floor mat, one eye on the hill. The springs are still 68 degrees and still perfect. Getting dressed for them has become a contact sport.

KUT reported yesterday that the bathhouse renovation now costs $22 million. It was first estimated at $9.3 million. The rotunda, the round front entrance generations of us have shuffled through barefoot, is still closed. It won't reopen before December, and the city is still in a dispute with the contractor. So the building is fenced off, the bill has more than doubled, and somebody's lawyer is presumably on the clock, also in a dry building.

I've done the math, which in this town now counts as a hobby. Going from $9.3 million to $22 million is an increase of about 137 percent. If my rent did that, I'd be living in the rotunda.

Equipment

You'll want a towel big enough to be load-bearing. The thin souvenir kind with a guitar printed on it won't hold up. You want something that shows up in your will, the faded striped beach towel your aunt left at your house in 1994 and never came back for.

You'll also want a car with doors that open wide. Two-door coupes are out. Pickups are tempting but put you up on a stage. The ideal vehicle is a mid-2000s Subaru Outback with a dent in the rear quarter panel, which in the 78704 zip code covers roughly forty percent of the fleet and works as a sort of municipal changing stall the city didn't have to bid out.

Flip-flops matter too. The asphalt in that lot in late summer will reach a temperature the Barton Springs salamander would call unconstitutional.

Technique

The classic move is the Towel Skirt. You wrap the towel around your waist, tuck it like a burrito, and pull your shorts off underneath with the confidence of a stage magician who has done this trick drunk. The flaw in the Towel Skirt is that it depends on a tuck, and the tuck depends on a promise, and promises in this town have a way of costing $22 million.

The advanced move is the Back Seat Contortion. You climb in, lie across the bench, and change like you're doing it in a submarine. It's very private, and it's also how I learned I can't get my left leg past my own ear anymore. My chiropractor bills by the visit, which is more than I can say for some projects.

Then there's the Pre-Game. You put your suit on at home under your clothes and drive over already committed. It's efficient. It's also how every one of us ends up driving home in wet trunks on a cloth seat, which means the car smells like the springs until Thanksgiving. Some people consider that a feature. I'm one of them, but I'm not proud of it.

What the Building Used To Do

I want to say something about the bathhouse that has nothing to do with the budget.

It was never fancy. That was the appeal. You came in through the rotunda in whatever you'd worn to work, paid a couple bucks to someone sitting behind a window, and went into a concrete room that smelled like cold water, sunscreen, and a hundred years of wet feet. The lockers had personalities. The showers had two settings: glacial and "a rumor of warmth." You'd see a state senator's aide, a guy with a band nobody had heard of, and a retired schoolteacher who'd been swimming laps since before the guy with the band was born, all hopping on one foot to get their socks off.

It was the most democratic room in Austin. Everybody looked ridiculous in it at the same rate.

That's what's actually closed. It's not the square footage. It's that one shared, slightly embarrassing threshold between the city and the water.

On the Matter of the Dispute

I don't know the details of the contractor dispute, and I won't pretend I do. Neither does anybody shivering in the lot. What I do know is how these things look from out here, which is a fence with a banner on it.

Every city project in Austin seems to go through the same three phases. First comes the Rendering, where everyone is smiling and the sky is a color the sky has never been. Then comes the Revised Estimate, delivered in a tone usually reserved for telling a dog about the vet. Then comes the Dispute, which happens indoors, in air conditioning, and runs on the calendar of people who aren't trying to change out of jeans behind a hatchback.

Somewhere in the middle there's always a public meeting where three people speak with great feeling about historic preservation, and a fourth person asks about the parking, and everyone's right.

The building deserved to be fixed. Old buildings near springs take on water, and that's practically a job description. Nobody out here wanted it left to crumble. We just figured the renovation would show up before the second estimate. Instead the estimate got there first, and in a nicer car.

Etiquette in the Interim

A few house rules have grown up on their own, the way they do when a city leaves a gap and the people fill it.

You don't stare at someone mid-change. You look at the pecan trees. The pecan trees have seen everything and have no opinions.

You don't park so close that your neighbor can't open their door, because their door is their wall now.

If somebody's towel drops, you do the heeler-walker nod and nothing else. Commentary is for City Council.

And if a tourist asks where the changing rooms are, you tell them the truth: "December, maybe." Then you point at the Subarus.

A Modest Accounting

For $22 million you could buy a lot of things in Austin. Okay, not a lot of houses. You could probably buy enough beach towels to wrap every swimmer from here to Bastrop. You could put a folding privacy screen in every parking space at Zilker and still have money left over for a consultant to study the screens.

I don't want any of that. I want the rotunda open. I want to hand money to a person at a window and walk barefoot into a cold, echoing room that smells like the 1950s and a bar of soap. I want to complain about the showers from inside the building, which is the only proper place to complain about showers.

The springs don't care about any of this. They kept coming up out of the limestone the whole time, at the same temperature, at no charge to the general fund. The water has never once asked for a revised estimate.

Somebody should put the water in charge of the construction.