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Pursuits

Austin’s Moon Towers, Beyond ‘Dazed and Confused’

A moon tower glows near the Texas State Capitol in Austin.Credit...Ben Sklar for The New York Times

There are two kinds of people who think it would be cool to move to Austin.

The first kind, which includes everyone from corporate suits to aspiring counterculturalists, is drawn to the new Austin, the Austin of the South by Southwest festival, of Dell computers, of fields of food trucks. The other kind of Austin aspirant is drawn to the old Austin, a lost Austin. We’ll call him Moon Tower Man.

As the name suggests, he’s usually a man, and he’s loved Austin ever since, in his salad days, he was entranced by Richard Linklater’s classic “Dazed and Confused.” That 1993 movie, set in Austin on the last day of school in 1976, stars gas-guzzlers and classic trucks, cruising to a soundtrack of Aerosmith and Lynyrd Skynyrd and Foghat. It represents the old, eight-track Austin, and if you feel rushed by today’s sped-up, broadband world, this romanticized Austin of the 1970s seems like an antidote. Every time I see the movie, I want to move there.

That Austin is, of course, mostly gone, replaced in part by the new Austin. But the moon towers remain. As fans of the movie know, that night in 1976 is pretty lame until somebody — it seems to be Wooderson, played by Matthew McConaughey — pulls together a “beer bust” at “the moon tower.” Word spreads, and everyone assembles in the woods, under the bright glow of a tall tower with lights at the top. They drink, smoke weed, flirt, fight. A few teens even climb the moon tower. Of course they don’t fall. How could they? It’s a perfect night.

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The towers are about 150 feet tall.Credit...Ben Sklar for The New York Times

In real life, there aren’t many parties at the moon towers. None of them are in an isolated, woodsy, teen-party-friendly spot as in the movie. About 150 feet tall each, erected in 1895, the towers were an early urban illumination scheme. They used arc lights, six globes enclosing sustained sparks between two carbon rods. Arc lights are efficient, and beautiful, but so bright they must be placed high above the city, hence “moon tower.” When Detroit, an early adopter, decommissioned some of its towers in 1894, Austin bought 31 and put them to use.

In time, Austin replaced the arc lights with newer bulbs and eventually took down half of the original towers. But the ones that remain are an essential part of the native lore, a reminder of an Austin even older than Linklater’s.

As a confirmed Moon Tower Man, I came to Austin in the fall to see the towers for myself. The first one I saw was at the corner of Martin Luther King and Chicon, a boring, unpeopled intersection, where a moon tower stands at the far end of a parking lot and leers down at a convenience store. I was joined at the corner by Wiley Wiggins, who as a 15-year-old played Mitch Kramer, who dares to climb the moon tower in “Dazed and Confused.”

Mr. Wiggins, now 37, grew up in Austin. He still acts, and also works in software. As a townie employed by two of Austin’s growth industries, film and computers, he is a living link between the old Austin and the new. I asked what he remembered of the moon towers, and he said that in his childhood they functioned mostly as legend.

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An Austin Energy employee works on one of the towers.Credit...Ben Sklar for The New York Times

“My knowledge of the moon towers comes from one or two near the University of Texas campus,” Mr. Wiggins said. “There’s a stretch of Guadalupe Street across from the university where all the punk rock kids panhandled. There were coffee shops, record stores, quasi-bondage leather-goods stores. You’d get a lot of kids hanging out nearby on acid, talking about a friend of a friend who decided to talk to God and fell to his death. I don’t think any of those stories is substantiated.”

That night, after dark, I took a drive around Austin to look at whatever moon towers I could find. The extant towers cluster mostly north of the Colorado River, in residential areas that are hilly with plenty of trees; you can drive around these neighborhoods and, if you keep your eyes up, allow the moon towers to surprise you. Distance will play its tricks, however. You might figure that a moon tower is a quarter-mile in the distance, only to find it’s twice that far.

When you come upon one, it is like a street lamp, but much taller, and statelier, with a structured, metallic grace, like a miniature Eiffel Tower. If the moon towers are not, as it turns out, beacons for late-night keggers, they are something better. They are dignified yet homey: authoritative watchmen who, in their settings, are quite modest, with no airs. They are proud to light streets where families eat, sleep and play. They refuse to be monuments; they are like antique chairs that people actually sit on.

The moon tower at the corner of 11th and Lydia shines its light on the Quickie Pickie, which is open until midnight and has provisions for all hours: It’s a general store that advertises beer, wine, coffee, rotisserie and ice cream. Inside, a woman working at the counter seemed unsurprised that I had come down from the North for the moon towers. “They’re beautiful,” she said.

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Wiley Wiggins, now 37, starred in "Dazed and Confused."Credit...Ben Sklar for The New York Times

She gave me directions (bad ones, but I had nowhere to be) to a moon tower at Pennsylvania Avenue and Leona Street. As I passed that moon tower on my left, I looked right and saw a small park. The park was adjacent, I saw, to Kealing Middle School, which made me think how fortunate it would be to attend school next to a moon tower.

Yet school is out for the day by the time it is lit. Do the children even know what’s right there? The old-timers sure know, and there is even a Moontower Saloon on the south side of Austin (it’s not near any moon towers). But I mentioned the moon towers to two friends who arrived in the city about five years ago — and who live near moon towers — and they had no idea what I was talking about. Bruce Hunt, a historian of energy at the University of Texas, has written about the moon towers, and he was used to the towers’ low profile, as it were.

“They go on every night, but people don’t notice them, because there’s so much other light around,” Dr. Hunt said.

It’s one thing to know about the towers, quite another to climb them. I managed to track down one native Austinian who had actually done the deed: Kivett Bednar, 32, a musician and artist who now lives in Portland, Ore., but who graduated from McCallum High School in Austin.

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A scene from "Dazed and Confused."Credit...Photofest

“A lot of the kids would just get drunk in the neighborhood and end up climbing it,” Mr. Bednar recalled of a moon tower in the Hyde Park area. “I climbed it three or four times, and twice naked. I think I tied a McCallum T-shirt there. It was total ridiculousness.”

Climbing one could not be easy. The metal lattice of the towers, the part that one could scale, begins 15 feet off the ground. Richard Linklater had to build a special, more climbable tower for “Dazed and Confused,” Wiley Wiggins told me when we met that afternoon at the tower. “In the movie, there’s a staircase,” Mr. Wiggins said. “In the movie, there’s a much more centralized ladder.”

I asked Mr. Wiggins if, growing up, he ever thought to climb one of the real towers.

“God no,” he said. “I’m utterly terrified of heights. I never saw anyone climb one. It was just something always talked about.”

So Mr. Wiggins declined when I offered to take him up with me. I had arranged with Austin Energy, the utility that operates the moon towers, to go up in a cherry picker with two of the company’s men, who had to change some bulbs. They gave me a hard hat, strapped me into a harness that clipped to the crane, and up we went.

By the time we pulled up alongside the moon tower, I was afraid to look over the side. The wind was shivering our little basket, the temperature was around freezing, and even though I was clipped in, and knew I was safe, I could summon none of the pluck that Mitch, Pickford, Slater and “Pink” Floyd display in the movie, as they casually work their way up the inside of their moon tower. I crouched and huddled near the slatted floor of the metal basket.

To do otherwise, I thought, you’d have to be very drunk, very stupid or very high. Or maybe just very young, with the courage that descends on the last day of school.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section TR, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Bright Reminders of Lost Youth and Bygone Days. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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