Austin had never seen a two-wheeler like this before.
The frame was three bikes, really: the front half of a Schwinn that had hung for twenty years in the rafters of the Yellow Bike Project, the back half of a cargo trike somebody had abandoned on the hike-and-bike trail, and a long steel spine between them welded by a woman named Dot who had learned welding at seventy and charged for it in tomatoes. The crate on the front was built from the floorboards of a house on Holly Street that had been taken down board by board and given away. Someone at ReLeaf had painted flowers on it, badly and with great enthusiasm. People called it the Greenspeed. Remy called it the bike.
On a Thursday in April he loaded it with two dozen Strawbactus starts in quart pots, each one wrapped in wet newspaper against the heat, and set out from the nursery behind Central for a new wall garden on East Twelfth.
It was a slow ride. The bike weighed what a small car weighed and steered like an argument. People stopped him at every light. A man outside the Driskill asked what the plants were and then asked if they bit. A girl on a scooter rode alongside for six blocks just to look. At the bottom of the hill on Congress a retired mail carrier flagged him down to tell him that the crank on the left side was going to fail by June and here was how to fix it, and stood in the sun drawing it on the back of an envelope until Remy understood.
He arrived at noon with sweat in his eyes and every pot intact. The wall was four stories of cedar slats on the side of a laundromat, half planted, with a ladder leaning on it and two kids sitting at the top eating paletas. The woman who ran the laundromat came out wiping her hands and counted the starts twice and said there were supposed to be twenty-five.
There were twenty-four. Remy had counted them that morning. He looked in the crate. There, in the corner, in a pot he hadn't packed, sat a twenty-fifth Strawbactus, a little bigger than the others, its pads furred bright green, its newspaper wrapping dry as if it had never been wet at all.
He didn't say anything. He handed it up to the kids on the ladder with the rest. It was only later, riding home empty in the long light, the bike suddenly light and quick under him, that he realized the newspaper around it had been dated next week.
🚮 W.A.S.T.E.: Words Assisting Sustainable Transformation & Ecology
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Bryce | He is in most of these, and not always the same one. At Lady Bird Lake he holds a folded paper like a hymn book. By the creek he carries a paper bag of spent tea leaves, and calls himself a lowercase artist. |
| Cane of Blossoms | The elder’s staff, carved with flowers as if the wood had grown them. When it strikes the boardwalk twice, the next thing she says is for the child you were. |
| Creekback | The tap at your ankles when the ripple comes back upstream, like someone knocking from another room. You knock back by standing still. |
| Creekside Testament | A postcard tucked into a paperback about trains and distance, in a Little Free Library on the way to Clarksville. On the back, in faint writing: The creek remembers. |
| Eli | He kept the light at Port Aransas for thirty-one years, until the storms took the dune. He brought the lens inland and writes only in a bird log, between a cardinal and a red-shouldered hawk. He walked to Central because he had only ever heard it. |
| Ephemeral Art | Made to be gone: a ring of leaves on the creek, a wall of cardboard cubes that will not see the winter. Andy Goldsworthy’s trade, and the city’s for an afternoon. |
| Greenspeed | The cargo bike someone at ReLeaf painted with flowers, badly and with great enthusiasm. It weighs what a small car weighs and steers like an argument. Remy calls it the bike. |
| Organic Media and Fiction | Stories and songs made to be copied by hand, repaired, and let go. Each one is tied to a planter, a wall or a bench somewhere in the city. |
| Public Art | An owl cut from endless bands of metal stands across from the Central Library, a sculpture made from all the leftover hours. People pass it carrying something they would rather set down. |
| Railbloom | The light rail with the living walls on its flanks. It passes overhead and the shade structures adjust for the late afternoon, and neighbors greet one another without looking up. |
| ReLeaf | The cooperative that keeps the gardens, the stories and the van. Nora Sanchez started it, and whoever tends it owns a share. The name is a leaf turned over. |
| Ruellia simplex | Mexican petunia. Purple trumpet flowers that open in the morning and are gone by dark, replaced the next day by new ones. It spreads wherever there is water, and in Florida it is a problem. Here it is allowed one bed. |
| Strawbactus | Green as a prickly pear pad and furred like a peach. Inside it is red and wet, and it tastes like a strawberry that spent a summer in the desert and came back changed. Mrs. Delgado eats the first one every year in her driveway and says it is not as good as last year’s. |
| Sunspine | The ridges of the Strawbactus beds, warm at dusk because they spent the day collecting the sun. Put your palm on one after dark and it tells you how hot July was. |
| Urban Delivery | Two dozen Strawbactus starts in quart pots, on a cargo bike painted with flowers, down Congress on a Thursday in April. A man outside the Driskill asks what they are and then whether they bite. |
| Vintage Memoryfield | The building is not remembering; the building is memory, pooled and shelved by time. Ask Jean whether you will forget this, and she says you won’t, not entirely. |
| Waste Integration | Nothing is sent away. Crushed glass goes to the trellis shop on Aldrich, bike tubes to the woman who makes them into hinges, cardboard to the cube makers. The van goes that way anyway. |