Life on Waller Creek: A palaver about history as pure and applied education

by Joseph Jay Jones

331 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1982

Reviews

[Tristan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jones writes eloquently and on a wide variety of topics all interspersed with lovely musings on Waller Creek, which alternatively is Austin’s trash repository and Austin’s outdoor classroom. But perhaps the take away at the end, is that it is both! As someone who grew up in the Waller Creek watershed and went to the University of Texas on its banks, Jones expertly captures the muddled state of this much loved and abused waterway, which has surprisingly changed little since the publication of Life on Waller Creek. Things are stirring in both the headwaters and the urban core nowadays, efforts which seem to align with Jones’ philosophy of a the creek as a crucial natural respite and restoring the ecology (or letting it well alone). The musings into literature and history can sometimes wax a little long, but this is no trifling book to be picked up and read on a days notice. Life on Waller Creek starts at the beginning of time, and ends sometime in the distant future, and that the author may go out on a limb here and there is not out of order in that scale. It shows that some things in Austin never change: the ever tugging / never balanced tug of development and environment, the complaints about traffic without considering the car, the University polluting the stream with one hand while studying it with another. It does leave me wishing that every long winded book gave little interstices of sifting through the leaves and litter that flow down the urban stream, but not every author can claim to be the “codger on the rocks”. Well deserving a read!