Former Pasture, Now With Lap Bars

The heifer on the other side of the fence had been chewing the same mouthful for four minutes, and she still had more patience than anybody I'd seen in Austin all year.

It was Sunday afternoon, out past the airport toward Elroy. I was parked on the gravel shoulder with a gas-station kolache going soft in its wax paper. Every so often a group shriek drifted over from the direction of the big red observation tower, the sound of people paying to be briefly terrified. The heifer didn't react. She has been briefly terrified for free her whole life, mostly by grackles and a guy named Royce who drives a feed truck with no muffler.

COTALAND held its opening events this weekend, Saturday the 26th and Sunday the 27th, at Circuit of the Americas. It covers thirty acres and has more than thirty attractions. That works out to better than one attraction per acre, a density the land out here has never been asked to support. For most of its history, the going rate in southeast Travis County was about one attraction per four hundred acres, and the attraction was a windmill.

The brief I keep coming back to is simple: that land was pasture once. I'm not going to invent a ranch history or put words in anybody's mouth. Any Texan who has driven FM roads with the windows down knows how this goes. First it's grass. Then it's a fence. Then the fence gets a sign announcing a "future destination." Then the destination arrives and wants you to download an app.

The Original Lineup

Fairness requires a comparison, so here is my best accounting of what that kind of land offered before anybody installed a turnstile.

The Stock Tank. It was a water feature with no lifeguard, no splash zone, and a muddy margin that took your left boot as a toll. You could see a heron, a snapping turtle, or the reflection of a thunderhead coming in from Bastrop, all for zero dollars. It had no height requirement. There was a depth requirement, and nobody knew what it was.

The Cattle Guard. This was the original thrill ride. You crossed it at fifteen miles an hour in a 1987 F-150, and your whole skeleton found out what it was made of. Kids loved it. Grown men loved it and wouldn't say so. Wait time: none, unless a cow was standing on the far side thinking about it, which could take most of an afternoon.

The Lone Mesquite. This was the shade structure. It was not engineered, ADA-compliant, or misted. It gave you about eleven square feet of shadow that moved around the trunk like a sundial, so you had to scoot every forty minutes. Getting a seat required no reservation, but you had to negotiate with fire ants.

The Night Sky. I can't overstate this one. Before the glow crept out from downtown and the track lights came on, a person could lie in the bed of a truck out here and see the Milky Way like it had been spilled. My composite friend Delbert, who ran a few head on leased land somewhere east of 183, used to say the sky was the only thing in the county the tax appraisal district couldn't get at. He was wrong in spirit and right in practice for about another fifteen years.

Silence. This was technically not an attraction but the absence of one, which is what made it so valuable. It's now fully booked.

The Business Model of the Hill Country Fun Zone

Theme parks are fine. I want that on the record before the comment section shows up in matching lanyards. People like spinning. Kids should get to scream on something with a safety inspection sticker. The families who drove out this weekend aren't the problem. They're doing what families do when a city runs out of free places to take children: they pay.

What gets me is the pattern. Austin keeps taking the thing that was out here for free, ripping it out, and reinstalling it as a ticketed simulation of itself. We had open space, so now we have curated outdoor experiences. We had swimming holes, so now we have reservation windows. We had a pasture where you could stand at a fence and feel small under a sky the size of a weather map, so now we have rides engineered to make you feel small under a sky, with a photo kiosk at the exit.

Every development out this way gets announced in a language I think of as Brochure Texan. Nothing is built anymore. It's "activated." Land isn't empty, it's "underutilized." Grass isn't grass, it's "a canvas." I have seen a lot of canvases in southeast Travis County over the years, and I'm sorry to report that the cows were painting on them the whole time.

The math always runs one direction. Thirty acres of pasture produces some beef, a few hawks, a flood-control service nobody bills for, and a guy like Delbert sitting on a tailgate doing nothing in a deeply restorative way. Thirty acres of theme park produces revenue, a parking situation, and a reason for the next thirty acres to rezone. Pasture doesn't come back. I've never seen a roller coaster quietly revert to native grassland because the market softened.

Meanwhile, at the Fence

The heifer finally swallowed.

Another shriek came over the trees, a big one, with maybe forty people in it. She turned one ear toward it and then, with the authority of a creature whose family has stood on this ground since before anybody thought to charge for it, she turned the other ear away.

I have known a lot of Austinites who came out here over the decades with nothing to do. They watched hawks hunt and rode the cattle guard for a cheap jolt. They lay in a truck bed and named stars wrong on purpose. None of them would have called it an attraction. That's the part the brochure can't reproduce. The best thing about a pasture was that nobody had designed your fun in advance. You brought it yourself or you went without, and going without was half the point.

By 2040 I expect the remaining pasture out here to be listed as an attraction in somebody's app, with a timed-entry window, a QR code on the gate, and a "Heritage Heifer Encounter" for an extra fourteen dollars.

The heifer, I'm confident, will still refuse to look at the camera.