Texas, Fast . . .

Sunset at the Marfa Ghost Lights Lookout. 

After visiting friends in Las Cruces, NM, and El Paso, TX, I drove toward Marfa with excitement about what I'd find there, even though I had no idea what to expect. Artist friends and others talked up Marfa as a quirky and cool artist colony everyone must visit, and it played a semi-prominent role in the best novel I've read in the past year, Ben Lerner's 10:04. From El Paso, it is only 3 hours to Marfa, which you access by cruising down the I-10, speed limit 80, passing through Sierra Blanca and Van Horn, two spots only notable for their highly-staffed Border Patrol stations. 

Twenty-four miles northwest of Marfa, on Hwy. 90, I saw people pulled over on the side of the road checking out a small building. I blew by them at 70 mph, then turned around to see what the hype was about. A small box store made to look like a Prada store front in New York––including wall displays of exorbitant high heels––sat alone on the scrub plains of west Texas. The contrast was interesting and funny, at first. I've often had imaginative moments when I'm somewhere remote or beautiful and think about the hustle and bustle, the violence, and the  rarely questioned value systems of cities. They seem unreal from distant angles. This permanent installation is called "Prada Marfa," designed by Scandinavian artists Elmgreen and Dragset, who are known for their "art work that has wit and subversive humor, and also addresses social and cultural concerns." The French-speaking couple who blocked my clear shot of the building made me realize how far people come to see such art. I immediately wanted it gone from this landscape, this place where scraping a living as a rancher is as tough as the people who risk everything to cross the nearby border. Point made, artists. But, in that moment, I thought, f*** art . . . and New York.

"Prada Marfa" with French-speaking tourists.

I drove on and cruised Marfa's cute downtown, read a travel magazine article online about Marfa to see what I should see, and did a drive-by on the famous Chinati Foundation compound, which was started by Donald Judd, the minimalist New York artist who made Marfa something other than an 1880s train water stop and a ghost town. A few wandering groups of hipsters strolled the downtown sidewalks, and older rich white patrons of the arts stood outside the Ayn Foundation building. Not my scene. While I talked on the phone to Sidney in Laredo, I walked through the famous Hotel Paisano, where they shot "The Giant," a James Dean film I never saw, and then decided I'd like to cut down part of the 7 hours I still had to drive to Laredo. I made a quick stop at the Marfa Ghost Lights Viewing Sight, but the spectacular sunset (pictured above) was the only light I saw.

Downtown Marfa (not pictured: people with whom I don't relate).

I next stopped at a McDonald's in Alpine to use the bathroom and tripped out on the large white men sitting near the bathrooms and watching Fox News. I continued into the dark night down Hwy. 90, speed limit 75, but I never surpassed 65 mph because, through my windshield buttered with the guts of pale yellow moths, I kept seeing live deer standing on the side of the road. In fact, I counted twenty six deer grazing on the highway shoulder grass in the thirty miles between Alpine and Marathon. I needed to get off the highway until daylight. But Marathon, TX, only offered a gas station with several resting big rigs and a few people sleeping in their cars. It didn't seem safe, so I kept on. 

There is no way to tell what amenities the next small town on the map will have, and Sanderson, almost another hour past Marathon, offered nothing. I had some nervous energy, but was also exhausted from spending two nights urban camping in my van. Del Rio sat another two hours down the line, but it looked like an actual town. It had a Walmart. The urban camper's best friend. I made the drive, counted another dozen or more live deer on the side of the highway, and even saw a bloated buck dead in the bike lane (I'll spare you the photo). After doing urban camping reconnaissance in Del Rio, I settled on the Walmart lot and parked on the side of the building to limit the brightness of the parking lot lights. A tactical mistake.

I awoke at 3:25 a.m. to the sound of a man coughing and spitting outside my van. I sat upright. In the interior reflection of the big side window nearest me, I could see a man in the passenger side window. He was leaning against the glass, peering in, and I couldn't tell if he had a slim jim tool or not. I thrashed around on my camping mattress and reached for my pocket knife in the dark. The man jumped into the car next to me. I sat shaking for a couple minutes, trying to decide my next move. What I am thinking urban camping in a border town? I jumped shoeless into the front seat, fired up the van and pulled away. I couldn't see into the dude's car because the windows were tinted, but he definitely got a good look at me. I was way too exhausted to drive on, so I circled the parking lot, then parked close to some employee cars under the bright lights in the middle of the lot, and fell back asleep. I awoke to a full lot of bustling customers and commerce. I drove on . . .

I missed the canyon areas during my night drive, but interspersed along the plains of Hwy. 90 are low shade trees (an ideal place for a border crossing), pecan orchards, goat farms, longhorn steers, red-tailed hawks, prickly pear cacti blooming yellow, bloated rabbit carcasses, smashed skunks, and Border Patrol trucks. I stopped for a $1 soda at the Carrizo Springs's McDonald's, which also had Fox News blaring even though the workers and customers were all Latino (yes, I know there are lots of conservative Latinos––Mark Rubio, Ted Cruz, et al., but it's still surprising). Not long after Carrizo Springs, I approached one of those controversial interior border checks. The blonde woman officer asked me if I had anyone else in the van. I said no. She asked if I'd open my slider door, and as much as I wanted to vent about not crossing a border, I pushed the button to open the door. She leaned inside and saw my urban camping set-up: a box with toiletries (my "bathroom"), another filled with books ("the library"), stacks of clothes (my "closet"), and my camping mattress, blanket and sheets. She said, "Oh, I saw that shirt hanging back there [on the hooks], and was like, 'Whaaaaat?' Have a good day, sir." Adios, MF . . .