Vertigo in Austin

a head-spinning visit

I was only supposed to be in Austin for twenty-four hours, so I didn’t see much. But there were a few notable moments. The sign above the book shop was done in those old-style movie-house black letters on a white background signs, the letters slid along rows. They had a quote from Rory Gilmore. As with the incessantly old-fashioned music I hear everywhere I go, here was an instance of the American love of nostalgia. Inside there was a monitor live-streaming a bear in a river in Alaska for “Fat Bear Week”. This is the week they hunt salmon and fatten-up. They are filmed so people can vote for the fattest bear. This is just so American.

The houses are low and flat here, with gently sloped roofs. Frank Lloyd Wright made prairie homes that followed the long horizonal lines of the Wisconsin landscape, and something of that principle seems to be at work in the long-low houses of Austin. Apparently there are no basements, which seems un-American. Some people believe this is because of the soil quality. The trucks here are ridiculously large, and all quite clean. They are city slickers in farmer pick-ups. I asked my companion (who took me for really excellent pizza) about this and he told me about a man he knows who arrives at church every week in the sort of truck that is big enough to haul itself. This chap is a product manager in an office downtown. I’m told a lot of the live music closed during covid, but they had a live band in the airport when I arrived. These were my experiences on the evening I landed.

Alas, today I woke up with vertigo. The room was spinning. I exaggerate not. I had assumed that when they do this in the movies, it was a fake, a trope to convey what was happening. No. It turns out that pretty much is what happens. There were two or three rooms and they were rocking around quite freely. Even when I closed my eyes, the inside of my head was rotating and throbbing. I did the technique I found online, and it made me feel horrific. Later on, I avoided throwing up in Jared Henderson’s car by a matter of seconds. Some Wheat Squares from Whole Foods settled me and I got through the podcast recording by simply not moving very much. (Though I felt dizzy in the middle.)

Cue several hours of trying to find a clinic with an appointment that was in network, various futile prolonged exchanges of details, and a few hours later I have taken some medication, redone the technique, and everything is subsiding.

I hope never to have vertigo again. It was dreadful. But it did give me a sense of what life must have been like for Jonathan Swift, who was struck with bouts of it throughout his life. That knowledge is (almost) worth having. (No, it’s definitely worth having. This is Swift after all.) Whenever something like this happens to me, I think of what it must be like to be old and subject to the whims of ill health. That’s what inspired Howl’s Moving Castle, when Diana Wynne Jones suffered terrible pain from lactose intolerance and had to use two walking sticks all of a sudden.

Still, I saw a little of Austin. I took a Waymo, far less nausea-inducing that human Uber drivers. And much nicer. I am appalled at the way Americans drive with one hand on the wheel. They are so casual about safe driving. Waymo was much more reassuring. The architecture downtown and just over the river wasn’t worth seeing, but I did see it. I saw one nice old tower, but I’m told the old town was leveled to make way for the new.

Once the medicine kicked in, I went for a walk. On the street I passed a man whose clothes were ragged, talking loudly as if someone was listening, about how he sometimes finds things he is looking for in his hands. A lonely moment, and worse in its way than vertigo perhaps. Two men walking home from work (in their semi-formal shirts, but otherwise looking scruffy) were sharing a huge spliff. I saw an Uber delivery robot. It was cautious about crossing the road.

The skateboarders didn’t look as young up close as they had from a distance. On one street I saw two men in a dreadful condition living on benches, a third swaggering all over the street while his dog barked, and a fourth, topless man, being arrested. I didn’t feel unsafe, but I cannot see why people sit outside to drink in that atmosphere. At “Gus’s Fried Chicken, World Famous”¹, (under the skin, fried chicken is plain and friendly), I finally heard some real good ol’ fashioned Texan accents, from the older people. I’m told the plain, flat “acceptable” Midwestern accent has dominated everywhere now thanks to television. In the UK, we have the opposite. BBC English has fallen out of favour as regional accents became the norm on TV, noting that they are relatively neutral regional accents. If they weren’t, no-one would know what was going on. I say this not as an insult, but a fact. Many people in England cannot understand the accents in the North, or parts of the West. Even in a place like Bedfordshire you will find old boys who still mumble in impenetrable rustic tones.

Gus’s was interesting in other ways. It seems to be that fried chicken is to a certain part of America what Fish & Chips are to England. Half the men wore caps. Plenty of long fluffy beards were on show. Plastic cutlery (forks only, naturally) and paper plates. The young pretty waitress had scruffy sneakers and a neat cardigan (complete with a tooth-pick in her mouth, which the man next to me commented on) while her slightly older associate was busier among the tables in her Gus’s T-shirt. The young one was clearly hired to fit an all-American archetype and the fact that she makes conversation everywhere she goes—the kitchen, the bar, the table in the corner—is what is expected. A little delay (just a little) is tolerated for a little atmosphere. And the pace is still kept up. While I saw more than enough of my waitress, the others really did wish to order more sides, get a refill, have some pie. Nothing is too much for American hospitality. It never stops. The films did not lie to me: America is busy even while it eats.

Let’s hope that when I wake up, the world has stopped spinning and the shutdown doesn’t mean I can’t get home…

The Wheat Squares, by the way, have cane sugar in. Obviously.

1. There is a whole genre of marketing that could be known as the WORLD’S BEST CHICKEN genre.