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Saturday, December 10, 2005Trail of Lights
Several thousand gathered at the top of the hill. It was dark, but the flood lights and the spiralling colors of the Zilker tree lit the scene. We were there to run. Five kilometers thru the Austin Trail of Lights.
Santa spoke to us from an elevated platform over the starting line. The mayor spoke from an extended fire truck platform. A huge flag 30 feet in vertical dimension hung suspended in the air from a crane before us.
It was dark. A half moon was overhead, with Mars alongside. Venus was descending to the treetops. They played the national anthem, and then the horn went off, first for the wheel chairs and two minutes later for the runners. But all were not running.
The walkers and the baby-joggers and the bedazzled kids and the sweatered dogs on leashes kept the pace slow. We weaved in and out, left and right, around and between. It wasn't really until mile 1 that we got any breathing room. And after that we had to slow down to look at the lights.
Slow down to look at the lights. We had to do that.
When I was a boy, we used to go to a place in Jackson, Michigan called, The Cascades. It was built in a park on the side of a hill with walkways going up and down on either side of a series of pools of water that flowed and fell in gradual steps from the top of the hill to the bottom.
You only went there at night, because the thing about the place was how they lit the water. Not only did it flow and fall, but it glowed in gradually shifting colors. And there was music piped in, an eerie, dreamy kind of music, as I recall.
My grandparents and parents and aunts and uncles and cousins would go there on warm summer nights and gaze at the shifting hues and listen to the rush of the falling water. We'd slowly walk up the right side, across the sidewalk at the top, and back down the other side.
The Trail of Lights here is something like the Cascades were. There are colored lights strung over the road. There are strings of lights wrapping the trunks and reaching into the far reaches of the branches of 50-foot Pecans and Oaks. And on normal (non-race) nights there is even a place to get hot drinks and sit beside a burning yule log (quite a treat for Texans). And there is music piped in.
You start at the entrance to the Zilker soccer fields, walk thru a tunnel of color at the beginning, wander by the displays, listen to the music, and exit thru a tunnel of stars into a field of trees decorated with exotic colored lights -- lavenders, and deep cobalt blues, and golden yellows. And you end up at the far side of the park.
That's what we did this evening. Thanks to the fair and industrious Trudy, who braved long lines and grumpy runners waiting to pick up their running packets, we registered for the Trail of Lights 5K and ran it this evening.
In the dark. Under the moon. Beneath the stars.
And we slowed down to look at the lights.
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2005 Trail of Lights
Austin, TX
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2008 david hasan
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