Plans have changed. Negotiations have been made. Hill country has been eschewed, and
Marfa is now, officially, our favorite place ever. We’re staying an extra night here. Also, maybe we’re never leaving. After the morning we had, who would have thought today would
have turned out so great? Not us,
I tell you.
At the cold, dawn-dark
Days Inn in Van Horn, TX—after a breakfast of egg-like disks on stale
mini-bagels and NO WAFFLES because some mean lady took the last one and, adding
insult to injury, said “too bad because these are so good— we almost got busted for not reporting our pet to the front
desk. (Yes, we lied. But Special is so good! He would never cause any damage!) Anyway, by then we were certainly
enthused to speed our way merrily along Highway 90 toward better, artsier days. “Speed” being the pivotal word there,
as somewhere down the road we got pulled over for going 84 in a 75 mph
zone. (Really? I mean, that’s not that fast.) Thankfully, I have a system for getting
out of speeding tickets, especially in Texas. I banter. You think
this wouldn’t work, but it does.
The guy (aviators, five o’clock shadow first thing in the morning, pure
Texas Highway Patrol) looked at my New York license and my Cali plates and asked
“where exactly ARE you from, anyway?”
From the way he said it, neither answer was better—obnoxious Yank or
ditzy LA rich girl—so I just told the truth, which is that I'm from both places.
I then went on to make a fool of
myself. “But I went to school at
UT, so I’d never root for the Trojans, I’m all ‘hook ‘em, Horns!’ you know!” “I hate UT,” he
deadpanned. Josh couldn’t help
it. He snorted. Quietly, but still. Anyway, the point is,
he may hate the Longhorns (and I may have been lying, since I care about
football a lot less than, say, getting a waffle at the free breakfast bar at a
bad motel), we still got off with a warning only. Which was fabulous.
We drove away (at a reasonable speed), blasting Wu-Tang (the cop would
have loved that, I bet) and giggling.
Shortly after, we
reached Prada Marfa, an art installation just on the border of Valentine,
TX. For those of you who don’t
know it, Prada Marfa is an art installation, a free-standing building on the
side of the highway, lit from the inside and surrounded only by desert, where
several Prada bags and (all right foot) shoes are starkly displayed. It’s pretty incredible. The rumor is it’s partially funded by
Prada and that they select the merchandise for display themselves, but I
haven’t found confirmation of that.
Either way, it’s funny, since the whole affair is a fairly stark commentary on the ridiculousness of consumerism and “luxury” when juxtaposed with nature (the beauty of it, but also the desolation) and the everyday lives of ordinary Americans.
So, okay, we swing
into Marfa, and our room at the Thunderbird Hotel (glorified hipster motel) isn’t
ready yet. We decide to walk
around. First, we passed the
Donald Judd museum, which is only open for tours by appointment in advance, and
where a huge stone wall around the building prevents passersby from seeing
anything inside. Bitter about the
lock-down, Josh climbed a tree to see in.
He said it was the most amazing thing he’s ever seen in his life, but I
suspect that was just to make me jealous (I didn’t climb the tree.) Yes, yes—wait for it—he’s just now
admitted he couldn’t really see anything.
Pshaw. I thought not.
After that, we ended
up at the Marfa Book Co., an incredibly cool bookstore and gallery space in the
middle of town where one extremely nice Tim Johnson (the owner/proprietor) and
his partner Caitlin Murray (who is awesome, and who works at the Judd Foundation
in addition to seemingly having 300 other jobs around Marfa) became our new
best friends.
Or, were forced to be
our new best friends, is more like it, since we ran into them and their friends
about six times in the next hour and a half. Once near Frama, the cool little coffee and ice cream shop
in town where we sat down to write for awhile. Once walking down the street near the vintage shop. Once having lunch at the Food Shark
lunch truck, whose dining car is an old school bus painted gray with, umm, the
words “Dining Car” written across it. You can't see anything in the picture but the bus windows, but rest assured, it was sweet.
We joined Tim and Caitlin and some of their buddies for lunch, and over the truck's delicious sandwiches we all discussed
Marjorie Perloff, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ken Goldsmith, the interrobang (which I
drew for Tim in his notebook), moccasins and Italian army blankets (items which
friends of theirs recently received at the bookstore, since there’s no home postal
delivery of packages in Marfa), the interesting and artsy younger crowd moving
into and through town these days, and the problem with experimental poetry that
“kicks the conceptual dead dog.”
Anyway, they’ve
invited us for a drink tonight (after we eat at Marfa’s fancy restaurant
Cochineal, where Caitlin is a waitress—go figure.) We’ll see how that goes. Hopefully we’ll get to see the Marfa lights, which only,
apparently, become visible occasionally.
As the lady behind the motel desk said, “being drunk helps,” so perhaps
we’ll be in luck.
For now, all I can say
is that we heart Marfa. We’ve seen
and we’ve been seen. We’ve walked
around and met the locals and removed sticker burrs from Special’s paws. We’ve howdied. We’ve train-tracked. We’ve had our car checked (the scary
light came on) by a guy with one tooth.
(I’m not being prejudiced here.
He had one tooth.) We’ve
looked at house prices (too expensive) and imagined ourselves behind the
counters and desks of various stores and offices.
Tomorrow, Fort Davis
(where we’ll check out the Rattlesnake Museum and the fort itself). Wish us luck.
Wish us creativity. And
wish us the strength not to accidentally buy an abandoned general store and
make a forever home in the middle of nowhere.
And your query for today,
kids:
What place has inspired you (creatively or in
any other way) the most?
