A Visit to West Texas

Last week, Jeff and I headed to West Texas to visit Rachel, Jeff's daugter. She's working in Marfa this summer, a place that can be aptly described as situated in the middle of nowhere. Although to describe it as such would mean that nowhere is incredibly, starkly beautiful.

It also takes quite some effort to GET to nowhere. For us, that effort included a flight from Chicago to Dallas, where we hopped a connecting flight to Midland/Odessa, picked up a rental, and drove three solid hours at 70-80 mph (depending on the road) before we turned onto U.S. 90 and beheld this:



It turns out that Marfa is the seat of Presidio County, and it has a lovely courthouse--in fact, its courthouse is much prettier than those in nearby Fort Davis (Jeff Davis County seat) and Alpine (Brewster County seat), although those WOULD be impressive were Marfa not in the competition. I didn't take pictures of the other two, so you'll just have to take my word for it, but here is the Presidio County Courthouse:



More on the courthouse later, though. We are still discussing the trip TO Marfa.

Now, I mean no offense Dallasans or Dallasites or whatever the proper term for a denizen of Dallas is, but your airport truly sucks. Or maybe it is simply American Eagle airline that sucks. All I know is that everything coming and going to Marfa worked for us EXCEPT for making the Dallas/Midland connection. What a cavalcade of ineptitude! Four gate changes, more than an hour's delay, and then, when we tried to board, we found out that they had given our seats to stand-by passengers despite the fact that we had been duly checked in in Chicago. Sigh. I'm not sure what happened to the stand-by passengers, but we insisted we be reinstated on the flight. We had a rental car waiting and a long drive ahead of us. I didn't want to navigate such unfamiliar terrain in the dark. However, I shouldn't have worried--Marfa is near the western edge of the Central Time Zone, so the sun doesn't set until after 9:00 PM in July.

Although I had no idea what to expect Marfa to be like, I DID have a preconceived notion about what West Texas would be like. Flat. Scrubby. A clutch of bobbing pump jacks every few miles or so. Hot. This preconception was based on previous drives through Texas, although the routes were quite a ways north of our particular destination on this trip. For the first half of our drive or so, my notions of West Texas were borne out. Then we found ourselves climbing a hill, and at its crest we gazed out over a panorama of high desert with a range of craggy mountains marching through from south to north. Stark. Beautiful. And that was where we were headed.

We reached Marfa in the early evening and checked in at the Hotel Paisano. It's a historic hostelry built and opened just before the stock market crashed in 1929. It played host to the cast and crew of "Giant," which filmed in and near Marfa in 1955 and is famous for being James Dean's last movie. It fell on hard times in the late 20th century and fell into disrepair. It was even auctioned off on the courthouse steps, but the current owners have done a beautiful job of restoring it. Here is Hotel Paisano as it stands today, just to the left of the white building (which, if you squint really hard, you can see has "Texas" in relief on its facade):



Our room was nicely appointed but quite small. The size was mitigated by our shared balcony, which overlooked the courtyard and fountain of the hotel. In the evenings, guests would gather here to drink and enjoy the cool desert air.



Marfa is a small jewel of a town. It was once home to several military installations, but they closed after WWII. Since the 1970s, when artist Donald Judd bought a good portion of one of the abandoned bases and began working on and displaying his sculptures there, the town has attracted creatives: artists, musicians, filmmakers. In fact, two movies were shot there this summer. This town of just more than 2,100 has a wonderful bookstore, classy restaurants (which are priced accordingly), a cozy coffeehouse/breakfast cafe, and a host of galleries. In fact, it's sometimes hard to tell the real storefronts from the ones that are art installations.

One afternoon, as Jeff was hunkered down in the bookstore writing, Rachel and I explored the courthouse. The interior is just as nicely preserved as the exterior, with bannisters and molding of dark, carved wood; huge windows; and high ceilings. From the windows of the dome, you can take in a 360 degree view of Marfa and the surrounding countryside. Here is Highland Avenue--the main drag--looking South:



Here is the view looking east over the old jail (now offices and, as far as we could tell, storage) and past the water tower to the desert beyond:



We had a great time visiting with Rachel. She took us drinking at the lounge of the Thunderbird Motel--the cool and upscale lodging alternative to the more traditional Hotel Paisano. She introduced us to her fine colleagues at Marfa Public Radio and took us on a tour of their brand spanking new offices and studio. She helped us tell the aforementioned art installations from the aforementioned storefronts. We attended an estate sale in Alpine, where Rachel found and bought a desk small enough to fit in the trunk of our rental. We had many tasty meals. On Rachel's recommendation, we went north to Fort Davis where we visited the Fort Davis National Historic Site:



And where we ate at a real old-fashioned soda fountain:



We saw the Marfa Mystery Lights--strange orbs of light that materialize most nights near Marfa. They float in the air, wax and wane and wax again, blink out or sometimes split in two--fascinating. The state of Texas has built a nice viewing area east of Marfa on the road to Alpine. There were around twenty people there the night we came to see the lights, and it was as interesting eavesdropping on their conversations--other sightings they had made, theories as to what they were, and so on--as it was actually catching a glimpse of the mystery lights. Rachel had been out to see the lights before, but they had never appeared to her before she came out with us. Kismet, I think.

The three of us took an ambitious day trip north to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico--but that is fodder for another post.

Every day we encountered a tiny pink bike parked carefully on the sidewalks around town. The first day, it was parked in front of the Brite Building, about a block or so south of our hotel on Highland Avenue. The next day, it was parked on Texas, across the street from the courtyard entrance to Hotel Paisano. From there, it moved to the front of the local thrift store:



We decided it must be an art installation as well--a mobile one.

And speaking of art installations, the one thing we did NOT do was take the tour at the Chinati Foundation (which preserves and displays Judd's work), philistines that we are. We will have to save that for another visit. And, since Marfa has cast its spell on Rachel--i.e., she wants to stay there for now--we may well be back.

I wonder what Marfa is like in the wintertime.