MARFA, TEXAS | WEDNESDAY, APRIL 14, 2010 - Well, Marfa was Adrienne's idea. It totally panned out. Wonderful. Maybe I heard of Marfa once. But we'd have missed it if I'd been navigating. Who knows where we'd have gone, which way. Would have been a different adventure.
We didn't miss it though. We ran right into Marfa. Artist town of twenty-one hundred people. Resuscitated by minimalist artist Donald Judd in the 1970s. Still nowhere now, not near anywhere, even if people come here from France, and bring their cute French kids in pigtails. Still more backwater than anything, all ranch homes desaturated by all the sun, one new pickup and one 20-year-old sedan per ranch, parked out front of each little thirsty homestead, at least one with a life-size plastic turtle on the porch. Another with an old gas station pump on the porch. Dogs barking, coming to greet you, sniffing at the bottom of the fence. But friendly dogs. Wagging their tails also. The houses peetering out into parched desert after a handful of blocks. Trains blowing through. But here, different, with a taco truck, new in town, the Food Shark. Guy serving food accepting out-of-state personal checks no problem. And here, slightly unexpected, pastel art galleries, one with the name Galleri Urbane, tucked next to dessicated gas stations. The Get Go Grocery, super cheery next to also cheery Liberty Hall. Then this giant cut-out sign, six feet tall, half a block long - "What you see is not what it is." There must be a few Communists in this town, hiding out, grouping up, wanting to further change the definition of things. But at this point, they're just adding. It's additive now. Marfa is already something, is yet another weird, slightly off place. Just very small, very remote. Offering anchorage, a small amount of relief.
We came into town from the east, on this same 90 West we've been driving for days now. We bargained a bit, got ourselves into an old hotel, the Paisano, with a fountain in the outdoor courtyard. People out sitting, minding their own business, but alert enough, and of interest enough, visually anyway, so that you might have been a little conscious of appearing composed, of making it to your seat without falling down. Breezy, pleasant. Here we were in Marfa. The first two motels we'd tried had been too expensive. We were thinking we'd have to drive twenty-odd miles to another town, find a cheap place there, and then come back in the morning. Instead, we were here, in the town Adrienne had wanted to see, maybe more than any other. While she had waited outside, tired, we'd driven a good 240 miles, a lot for us, I went in. And the hotel clerk turned out to be an angel. The room price dropped by half.
So Marfa in the afternoon was ours. We went around snapping pictures, making movies with our little movie-cam. The light was clear, without weight, late sun against fresh mullions, rounding curves to full half, water towers and buttes, dirt alleys and cafes with stout-legged chairs upside down on the table tops.
Adrienne was giddy, happy. So was I, without knowing exactly why. Yes, friends of hers, they also know this place. Even if they haven't been, they've drunk the lore. Know it is hallowed. It's not easy to get here. Outer West Texas, no airport for hundreds of miles. But here we were. Just walking around. Nothing really to see, to go to. But just to walk around and take it in, whatever passed by, whatever we happened to pass by. American Idol on in an hour.
We'd eaten lunch in Comstock at a hole-in-the-wall. We only stopped because we saw bicycles outside, touring bicycles. And with the five bicyclists inside, everything was fine. And the woman who ran the place, she was tall, big shouldered, but shy under her baseball hat, her long thin hair and her heavy eyeliner, her one small griddle we never saw, that she mentioned, that barely gave her room for preparing more than one meal at a time. I had tamales over fritos, called tamale pie. Adrienne had eggs and bacon, and the serving was about five pieces of bacon, delicious, thick.
We talked to the bicyclists. They'd left from St. Augustine Florida. Were headed to San Diego. Five of them. Four men and one woman. Probably from 55 to 65 years old. We were from Washington. What part? Seattle. They were from Oregon. We didn't ask what city. I worried we should have, to be polite. Was the Toyota really a diesel? they wanted to know. Had we been through the hill country, seen the wildflowers? Yes, we had, the wildflowers. They told us, There's a couple of newlyweds, on recumbents, up ahead. They're going across country too. Their honeymoon.
"I hope they make it," the one guy, the leader, Roger said. "Their marriage. And the trip."
Later, outside, Roger came out while I was checking out the bikes, just to see what they were riding. I said to him, I don't even have the right bike. Because already I was seeing a cross-country bike trip somewhere in my future.
What do you have? he said. Cannondale, mid-80s, I said, a track bike really.
Same one I have, he said. And so it was. The red one. Repainted, no labels. Third time going across, he said.
So strange, how it all works. They left. I got a picture of him heading off. We passed them down the road a bit. Much later, we passed the newlyweds, stopped by the side of the road looking at a map. We should have honked or shouted congratulations we said, but already they were gone, fluorescent specks in the rear view mirror.
Marfa. Such a good town. For instance, Donald Judd renovated a military barracks and two giant sheds, along with several other buildings in the town. One alone, out in a field, he filled with 100 milled aluminum boxes, each big enough to sit in, all of them the same exterior dimension and all of them precisely different, laid out in a grid of rows, so stubborn, so persistent, so rigorous, the boxes held there in the desert between glass walls with brick ends, on the old concrete floors under a quonset roof, the boxes shimmering and reflecting the light, hovering, and containing black nothingness in places; as silver, as overexposed as platinum in others, a dull brightness that blinded without searing my eyes. They went on, room after room. They were incredible.
No comments:
Post a Comment