Dandelion Knight

A warm winter run, parkour and bridge people

The heat kills in Austin in the summer, and in the winter, it's the allergies. I've not hit 20,000 steps a day since I returned from Japan, preferring instead to mole in a corner of the couch, reading PG Wodehouse, and watching Lord of the Rings again. When I feel cloistered, I attempt to go on runs instead of lighting the usual meditative cigarette. I take the same route every day, and I've become weary of its contours – I know the exact location where my muscles start to ache and the precise time at which I would burp. Since I was dropping my girlfriend off somewhere downtown, I decided to change things up.

I planned to run the trail from the central library downtown up to Pease Park. If you don't know Austin, the central library is parallel to Ladybird Lake, alongside which runs the busiest trail in town. The trail to Pease Park, which I took, goes away from downtown, running alongside a swampy little creek with several underpasses that have become dwellings for the city's unhoused. If downtown Austin is Middle Earth, the Pease Park trail is the mines of Moria.

As I reached the first of the underpasses, I saw three homeless guys with sleeve tattoos huddled underneath. They were inspecting something that one of the guys held. As I slowed down my approach and contemplated running through or away, the three men turned to me at the same time and stared vacantly, mouth agape and all that. Sensing this as a "thou shalt not pass," I gently turned around mid-jog and took the way around the underpass. The other tunnels were less treacherous, only occupied by shopping carts, tents, and other paraphernalia – their owners missing or evicted by the cops. The only other folks on the trail were cyclists speeding by me on the narrow trail.

Pease Park, on the other hand, is a veritable oasis. There was serenity in the air, along with mold and Cedar pollen that made my nose drool. I took a fine lap around the green field of joy filled with people soaking in the 70-degree sun in the middle of Texas winter. In the middle of my lap, I noticed that a young woman lying in the grass sideways was tracking me with her eyes. I wondered if I was running weirdly, lugging around my 200 pounds like a little hippo, so I picked up my pace.

The way back was uneventful – of course, I avoided the underpass with the three trolls. I ran by the library and noticed several people standing by one of those large water pipes that jut out of the ground at an acute angle. The members of the crowd seemed to be practicing some elevated form of Parkour, utilizing just the large pipe. One of them flipped over the pipe onto the other side, landing on the dusty ground like Simon Biles dismounting off the beam at the Olympics. Another followed. The others were mimicking the rolling motion as they waited for their turn. There was one woman in the crowd who, once again, closely watched me as I ran by. Maybe this green corporate t-shirt I was wearing made me look good. I confidently strode into a Juiceland, and a woman looked up from her smoothie and looked away.

After slurping the last drop of the smoothie and possibly inhaling some microplastics in the process, I walked to my car. I brushed my hair back out of habit and was startled when something dropped out of my hair onto the concrete. Before I left the house, my girlfriend handed me a bright yellow dandelion, which I had kept between my right ear. I had forgotten about its existence even after I joked to her, "Wouldn't it be funny if I ran around town with this flower on my ear?"