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Rollercoaster Road
When my family moved to Texas in 1974, my mother became the youngest
person in the state to get a real estate license, and after successes in
the Fort Hood area, she began selling recreational property at Horseshoe
Bay and Lago Vista.
In the late seventies my folks bought a small lot, allowing us access to
the recreational facilities in the area, and every so often we'd go car
camping out in the "wilderness" with water spigots and electric utility
hook-ups. With small kids, that's probably the safest kind of camping.
Whenever we'd take the drive out we would end up on a twisting two-lane
highway with steep inclines and declines. Our family deemed it the
rollercoaster road, and it was always a fun beginning and ending to our
outdoor adventures.
After the stomach-dropping ride on the rollercoaster road, we'd end up
at the campsite. Before even unpacking the car I was jumping and tugging
at shirttails for permission to go to the best low-water crossing in the
world (at least I thought so at the time). I didn't know that it was
unintentionally wonderful--the construction was utilitarian, but the
road was almost always covered with a thin sheet of water that flowed
over its entire surface. A beautiful, vibrant green moss always covered
the roadway and clung to the small, square blocks that lined the edges
of the small bridge-like roadway.
Since the moss was inevitably slick, I'd go scuttling out, carefully at
first, holding a parent's hand, becoming bolder as my feet remembered
how to grip the soft moss for traction.
Joyful cries and burbles filled the air as I splashed in the shallow
water and reached over the side to try to catch leaves, bugs, and twigs
as they chased across the shimmering surface and flowed off the roadway
into the stream below. I was always so amazed and happy that the natural
stream and this man-made road worked so well together; as though it were
intentional.
We returned to the same area every summer for the next few years. It was
around the time that I turned ten or eleven that the stream dried up,
the moss died, and the roadway became just another stretch of road over
a dry creek bed.
At the time I didn't know why the water had disappeared. It turned out
to be a combination of overuse (the golf course at the country club
needs a lot of water) and drought, but as far as I know the little
stream never did recover.
The last time I was there I didn't drive as fast on the rollercoaster
road as my dad had in our custom Chevy van (it was the seventies, after
all), but I did get that stomach-dropping feeling when I stood by the
little forgotten stream in the worn-out campground.
Charlene Zvolanek
Austin, Texas
Published:
November 14,
2005
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