A random internet news headline search two months ago led to an unsettling discovery: the night swim hours for an old haunt of mine, Barton Springs Pool, had narrowly avoided elimination. The last time I’d gone swimming there had been in 2018. The news shouldn’t have mattered to me but it dd. Another of the certainties undergirding my world had almost come undone.
I didn’t read the article that followed the headline until just before I returned to the pool in mid-August. My thought had been that the proposed cut had to do with the drought, which had ended after the floods of May and June. Budgets were being re-evaluated; Austin was chasing pennies. Ending the night swim hours would have forced dismissal of staff—and particularly the lifeguards—who worked at the pool. But citizen complaints prevailed and the city temporarily backed off.
Suddenly it seemed imperative that I not only return to Barton Springs but do it at night night. If I had learned anything during 2025, windows of opportunity seemed smaller now and their closure more imminent. I had loved going to the pool. Yet somehow, I’d never made time for more visits. Now the planet was burning, storming, flooding or erupting in change. Everything was upside down; former rules no longer applied.
I planned to go an hour or so before Barton Springs officially became free entry at 9PM. That way I would get to see nightfall over a downtown area I don’t visit often and enjoy the pool—which I’d only ever visited during the day—at night. August seemed the best month to go. Austin would feel like hell’s front porch by then and a dip in 68-degree water like a blessed antidote.
Barton Springs itself is a small wonder tucked between green, oak-covered hills that was sold to Austin by the springs’ last owner in 1917. Native people like the Coahuiltecans had known about it for millennia and made it part of their creation myth: to them, Barton Springs was sacred ground. Knowing this, the night I drove in and saw construction and chain-link fencing everywhere, I winced. What would the Natives have thought about all of this and of the pool itself, which had been built around the springs?
I walked to the entrance tent and offered a printed version my ticket to a pool staffer. She looked at it skeptically then tried to turn me away. I’d not activated the ticket online: was I trying to use a single purchase for two visits? Eventually she relented. Pay attention next time. The distrust unsettled me. It felt like yet another disquieting sign of the times.
The pool—all three acres of it—was as I remembered it. But because it was a weekday and because it was early evening, there weren’t quite the numbers of people I’d remembered. Once I’d climbed up a hill and deposited my things in the grass, I ventured into the water and let out a yell. The water shocked my senses awake: I had been there many times before, but hadn’t remembered the cold. Other swimmers grinned at my discomfort and assured me I’d enjoy it once in. And of course, I did.
The contrast between the warm air above my head and the cooler water below became one of the great pleasures of that afternoon. Drifting lazily on the water, I imagined myself at the juncture of heaven and earth and began swimming in large circles that traced the outline of the pool. Patches of underwater grasses made me yelp as I felt them whip around my legs. It’s just the carpet, another swimmer said, laughing. The pool was inviting me to enjoy it as home.
Even as I moved in steady breast-stroke rhythm, time slowed. All that seemed to exist was the darkening fluidity through which my arms and legs moved. Electric pole lights cast reflections that rippled across the face of the water and cast a strange glow on the small groups of bathers clustered on the edge of the pool. They could have come from this time; they could have come from a time 50, 60 or 70 years past.
For a moment, time had lost meaning; and if I could have stayed in that space, I would have. But a tiring body and the placement of hands of a now-dim-faced pool clock broke the spell. Momentarily purged of worry for the things I could not control, I climbed up out of the pool, gathered my things and walked into the waiting embrace of a hot summer night.