You Can See It From the Dentist's Chair

The hygienist cranked the chair back, said "open wide," and there it was, framed in the window over her shoulder. A thousand feet of glass stood at the far end of Burnet Road like a man who walks into your party and goes straight to the thermostat.

"Oh, that's the new one," she said, while I had a suction hose hooked over my lip. "It opened today."

I said "aaghh." She took it as a question.

It was a question. Today is the official opening of Waterline, which is now the tallest building in Texas. It's roughly 1,000 feet of offices, residences, a hotel and restaurants, stacked downtown like someone was told Austin needed "more of everything" and took it literally. According to KUT, it finished two months early.

Two months early. In Austin. I have waited longer than that for a callback from the guy who quoted me on a fence. I know frontage roads that have been "temporary" since my last good knee. Somewhere a permit reviewer is staring at a calendar and quietly reevaluating the whole profession. Nothing in this city arrives early except rent increases and the first 100-degree day, and now, apparently, the single biggest object any of us will ever see from a dental chair.

So I made a project of it. If the thing was going to follow me around, I figured I'd write down where it showed up.

Mount Bonnell, 10:40 a.m.

I climbed the stairs the way I always have, which these days involves a rest on the landing and a conversation with my own lungs. At the top, the old deal held. You get the river, the cliffs, the boats, the big houses on the far bank that everybody resents a little.

Then you turn your head toward downtown and Waterline is already looking back at you.

For decades the joke from up here was that downtown looked like a small handful of somebody else's Legos. Now it looks like a small handful of somebody else's Legos plus one tall piece that came from a more expensive set. A couple from out of town asked me to take their picture. I framed it so the tower stood directly behind the husband's head, like a halo he'd have to finance.

Zilker Hillside, 1:15 p.m.

This is where you go to lie on dead grass, look at the skyline, and feel briefly superior to it. I have done that on this slope through drought years, Trail of Lights traffic, and one festival weekend I won't discuss without a lawyer present.

The skyline used to be something you watched. This afternoon it felt like the skyline was watching me. A kid near me with a kite pointed and said, "Is that where the rich people live?" His dad said, "Some of them work there too." That was a better summary of mixed-use development than anything I've read in a brochure.

One sentence for the record: the kite did not get as high as the 40th floor, and neither will anyone in my family.

A taco trailer on the east side, 3:30 p.m.

The line was nine people deep, which on a Monday afternoon tells you either the tacos are excellent or the trailer is the only shade for half a mile. Both were true. Waterline was in plain view over the rooftops, flashing the sun back at us like a cop with a flashlight.

The guy ahead of me, a man in work boots with drywall dust up to the elbow, studied it the way a mechanic studies someone else's engine.

"Two months early," he said. "You know what that means."

"Somebody got a bonus," I said.

"Somebody got a lot of Saturdays," he said.

That's the part the ribbon-cutting won't cover. Buildings don't finish early because a rendering got excited. They finish early because people in boots poured concrete at hours when the rest of us were asleep with the AC on. I'd like to see their names lit up on the crown at night. I am not optimistic.

The South Congress bridge, 7:50 p.m.

Bat hour. The rail was packed: tourists, locals pretending they're not there for the bats, and one guy explaining echolocation to a woman who visibly already understood echolocation.

The bats came out the way they always do, a long smoky ribbon unspooling down the river, and for a full minute nobody looked at anything else. Then the ribbon drifted toward downtown, the light changed, and every phone on the bridge swung in one motion toward the tower, which had chosen that moment to start glowing.

I'm not saying the building upstaged the bats on purpose. I'm saying a million Mexican free-tailed bats have performed here for free every summer evening of my adult life, and tonight they were the opening act.

How we used to find our way

Here's the real damage, and it isn't the height.

Old Austin navigated by a short list of landmarks that each meant something. The Capitol meant government, and you were supposed to be able to see it, which is the whole point of the dome. The UT Tower meant somebody won a game, or a graduation, depending on what color it was lit. The moonlight towers meant somebody in the 1890s had a slightly unhinged idea about streetlights, and we kept it because unhinged ideas were our main export. Even the Frost Bank Tower got adopted once we all agreed it looked like an owl. You can't buy that kind of affection. You earn it by standing around long enough to get a nickname.

Waterline has offices, residences, a hotel and restaurants. That's four kinds of "for you, if you can afford it" in one vertical shaft. It's an impressive building in the way a very large invoice is impressive. It will be the first thing every visitor sees and the first thing every ad agency puts behind a "Live Here" banner. It's the new needle on the compass, and the compass now points at money, which, to be fair, is the direction this town has been walking for a while.

I'll give it a decade before somebody gives it a nickname. I've got a few drafts. None of them are printable on a site my sister reads.

Back in the chair

I went back to the dentist's office at the end of the day because I'd left my sunglasses there, which at my age counts as cardio. The hygienist was locking up. The tower was lit behind her, enormous and smug, every window the color of a high-end espresso machine.

"Your gums are receding a little," she said, as if she'd been saving it.

"Everything's receding," I said. "The hills, the swimming holes, the rent I used to pay. The only thing in this town that keeps going up is the skyline."

She handed me my sunglasses and told me to floss.

I will. It's the last thing in Austin I can still stop from building up.