On the road to Marfa
Artists’ hub in the middle of Texan desert is a great place to unplug and enjoy the vast landscape
When you escape your life at 45, as in a Thelma and Louise-level escape, you go to the desert.
My best friends of 25 years joined me. We were all leaving behind something. Beth and Miriam were leaving their young children behind. Sara had just recovered from breast cancer; her mastectomy was fresh, just under a year. I was taking a break from kids, husband and an 80-pound incessantly barking dog.
We picked Marfa, the artist hub in the middle of the west Texas desert as the destination of our road trip last winter. We had been travelling together for 15 years. The quirky art community was part of the reason we landed on Marfa.
We wanted to fade into the weirdness of the town, with our identities washing away into the artist Donald Judd’s concrete blocks, the dry landscape and the big sky. We knew it would be the kind of place where you might forget to call your family. (Indeed, it was.)
If we were lucky, we’d get some much needed refuelling, maybe a chance to scream in the middle of the road or, like Thelma and Louise, innocently flirt with a Brad Pitt type of cowboy. And even though GPS would never allow any of us to get lost, we longed for that feeling of disappearing. Just temporarily.
Beth and Miriam drove from Austin. I flew from New Jersey into El Paso to meet Sara, who came in from Los Angeles.
We wanted to separate from the reality of our lives. Leave behind not just the kids and the responsibilities, but the newspaper headlines and cable news. Was that even possible?
In our all-American SUV, I gave it my best Bruce Springsteen-Thunder-Road-I’m-pulling-out-ofhere-to-win moment and we tore out of El Paso onto 10 East doing nearly 130 km/h through the vast Chihuahuan Desert, passing through long stretches of flat landscape with puffs of sage brush for the three-hour drive ahead of us.
Past the Border Patrol checkpoint, past an abandoned truck stop, with a great old (nonworking) Art Deco-style neon sign that simply read “Truck Stop,” a 1960s relic; when Interstate 10 bypassed Sierra Blanca and it became something of a ghost town.
That’s when it sunk in. We were really, finally nowhere.
During our four-day road trip, our home base was El Cosmico, a quirky hotel and campground on 8.5 hectares, filled with vintage trailers (Beth and I stayed in a seven-metre 1950s Branstrator with a turquoisepainted top), Sioux-style teepees and yurts. Sara and Miriam holed up in a bright pink 1953 Vagabond trailer.
That first night, we reserved a wood-fired, barrel-like hot tub. We opted for moonlight and naked bodies. We’ve been friends for a quartercentury and this wasn’t our first time in a hot tub together in our birthday suits. It felt good to be together. No men.
In the morning, while everyone was asleep, I headed over to Marfa Burrito It was a little house. Inside, Mexican decorations and pictures of Matthew McConaughey covered the wood-panelled walls. A fuchsia poster board listed five burrito choices, including egg and chorizo, bean and cheese and my personal favourite, the Primo, stuffed with beans, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, salsa and cheese, for only $6.50.
Ramona Tejada, the owner, was a cute middle-aged woman with glasses and a woven sun hat. I ordered a cheese-and-egg burrito. “Huevos con queso,” I said in my survival Spanish, and she smiled.
We took the day to roam around Marfa, stopping at the Food Shark, a food truck that’s a bit of a culinary institution and a great spot for people watching. You can drive through Marfa in a blink of an eye, but you can’t miss the mix of urbanites and folks who, I’m guessing, were transplanted from hip, urban spaces; people with purple hair and hornrimmed glasses
But Marfa also had a dusty, timeworn Texas feel. Turquoise pickup trucks were parked on the street. Most buildings had mid-century Spanish facades. (Marfa is about 97 kilometres from the Mexican border.) A Union Pacific train ran through the middle of town. We strolled past cattle feeders and beat- up hardware stores with nothing in the window but a deer head and portable gas cans for sale. And if anything speaks old-school cinematic Texas history, it’s the movie Giant, starring James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor, filmed here in 1955. Life-size photos from the movie line the 1930s-era Hotel Paisano.
Marfa is an eccentric and remarkable mix of artists and cowboys. Their seemingly comfortable coexistence is most likely owed to the vision of artist Donald Judd, who died in 1994. He is the magnet of art pilgrimages to Marfa. In 1971, a successful minimalist artist, he moved to Marfa with his children to escape the New York art scene, turning abandoned offices of the U.S. army Quartermaster Corps into his home and personal work space. La Mansana de Chinati, informally known as the Block, which is part of the Judd Foundation, is a space so large it took up an entire city block and encompassed two airplane hangars.
So in the morning, we took a guided tour at the Block. Everything at the Block was symmetrical. The metal and glass doors. The endless bookshelves. The stack of woodcut yellow and blue Plexiglas installations, all isolated rectangular blocks, hung vertically on the wall. The concrete raised pool.
When you leave Marfa, it’s a deep dive into the rural framework of Texas. Back to the grasses and the yucca. The uninterrupted sky. A whole lot of space to fill. And what a sky it was! It had been so fickle, now finally we saw glimmers of bright blue patches above the long dark ribbon of a road ahead with nothing on it.
“This would be a good time to stand in the middle of the road,” Beth said. And she was the family therapist. The reasonable one! It was a spur-ofthe-moment suggestion. We might be getting older, but in Texas, in the desert, you can still pull over, jump in the middle of the road and not a soul will know about it. We hopped out of the car and screamed our heads off, drunk with all of the space. And it was exhilarating.
We sailed along the road, quieter, through the low tawny grass, past the sprawling ranches along U.S. 90 to a spot we’d all been talking about visiting: the Prada Marfa.
Then there it was, a shining beacon of consumerism, nestled into the landscape, this landmark, Prada Marfa, a fake Prada store, a symbol of wealth and prosperity. Right in the middle of the desert, about 60 kilometres northwest of Marfa. It’s a small building that looks like a standalone storefront with wide windows. A few purses and shoes on display, donated by Miuccia Prada. Absolutely nothing else but miles and miles of empty ranchland on each side of it.
This building is a lone rider, is as if someone had airlifted it into the desert. Or an apocalyptic relic, the only sign left of modern commercialism.
Berlin-based artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset built the cultural landmark in 2005 with the help of the Marfa art collective, Ballroom Marfa. In 2014, Beyoncé did a split jump in front of the structure, posting it to her Instagram and sealing the Prada Marfa’s cultural fate forever.
A pink sky erupted around the building as we modelled in our most Instagrammable poses. This may sound cliché, but at sunset, it truly does feel like you’ve entered a painting. So yes, the visit to Prada Marfa was worth it.
In the morning, we hit Marfa Burrito again to fuel up before our drive out of town. We made our way up State Highway 17 to Davis Mountains State Park, which averages about 1,525 metres above sea level, for a hike. We usually hike at least once on our road trips — why not hit the highest mountain range in Texas? It was sunny and bright that morning, the Chinati Mountains in the distance popped up over the desert landscape.
“I don’t want to go home,” Sara said. A cancer survivor, she didn’t want to face followup tests. But it wasn’t just that. I knew she didn’t want to get back to work, the day-to-day routine. None of us did.
A few hours after the hike, we pulled into Blue Agate and Rocks, a small roadside crystal shop — the sign above the door simply says “Rock Shop” — in Fort Davis, about 34 kilometres from Marfa. Owner Donna Trammell was a petite, older woman, her face etched with lines, perhaps from years of crystal-hunting in the west Texas sun.
“How do you pick a crystal?” I asked her, dizzy from the dozens of glittering rocks that packed her shelves.
“You have to listen to the rocks. They talk to you,” she said, passing a row of 30-pound purple amethysts and smaller, metallic iron pyrite. “I’m serious. If you pass one spot and pick it up, it’s because the rock is talking to you.”
It was our last day in west Texas and we were determined to pack it in. Still in our sweaty hiking clothes, we drove straight to the Chinati Foundation (another decommissioned army base that Judd had turned into an art compound) to experience Judd’s 15 untitled works in concrete, which is essentially 15 giant grey rectangles settled in the middle of massive ranchland. I ran my fingers through the high yellowed grasses, relishing the open space and these architectural formations.
Our last night in the trailer, the four of us cozied up under colourful serapes, reading animal spirit cards. We were wistful about leaving Marfa and leaving each other. It would probably be another year until the four of us set out on another adventure.