Marfa's solitary refinements
MARFA, Texas - I'm on a ranch, in bed, under dusty red wool blankets. The fire in the fireplace is smoldering. It is morning but not quite light. There are bird sounds - a dove, a phoebe. The sun comes up fast and bold. There is no softness, that will come at the end of the day when the sun takes its time going down.
Marfa is easy to fall in love with. It is a pretty place, far from everything, alone and exposed in the wild, haunted southwest corner of Texas. Probably named for Marfa Strogoff, a character in the Jules Verne novel "Michael Strogoff," it was first a railroad water stop, then a ranch town. The movie "Giant" was filmed here. In the early 1970s, minimalist artist Donald Judd moved here from Manhattan and did his best to turn the town into a living modern art installation, a theme park of simple shapes and negative space. Artists have flocked here since.
To get here I had taken a long, hot drive from Austin, seven hours through the hill country and into the empty desert on Interstate 10. I drove through endless ranches of rolling yellow grasses dry as hay, through the town of Alpine and on to Marfa. The sun set and the mountains went golden, then pink.
Marfa looks like a cowboy ghost town. It's flat and very tidy, except for the tumbleweed, a neat grid of long straight streets cut in half by railroad tracks. For so long they segregated the town: whites on the high north side, Mexicans to the south. Now they mix.
I'm headed for the Thunderbird Hotel, an idealized remix of a 1950s-style roadside motorcourt. It's 8 p.m. The office is closed, mysteriously, just a couple of cars in the parking lot. I drive around. Nothing. I have heard about this place and that place and I spot them as I drive - all closed.
I think, maybe I'll forget about Marfa, head straight for El Paso. But I take another lap around town to see the flamboyant coral-colored circus tent of a courthouse, which I have seen in photographs. Across the street is the almost 80-year-old Hotel Paisano, and it is busy. I park in front. The outdoor patio is full of people drinking, sitting next to the babbling fountain, which is loud and as deep as a swimming pool.
I have a margarita at the bar. I'm hungry for dinner and the bartender tells me to go to Cochineal. It is a restaurant good enough to thrive anywhere. The owners, Toshi Sakihara and Tom Rapp, ran the restaurant Etats-Unis in Manhattan. They came to Marfa to see Judd's work. "Something clicked and we bought a house," says Rapp. It's an 1894 adobe. The restaurant is on one side, the couple's house on the other. The house is small and spare, like a New York apartment but with gardens front and back, and chickens. There are gardens for vegetables and flowers and a drilled well so the guys can have some green grass and a couple of pear trees, and an outdoor shower. The restaurant opened a year ago. The food is beautiful. They use mesquite in the grill.
The waiter tells me that it is opening night at Padre's, a new bar and music club and a place to play shuffleboard and pool and smoke cigarettes by the chimeneas and eat cheeseburgers. I walk through the dark. It seems like the whole town is at Padre's. The Twang, a country western group from Germany, is on stage playing their hearts out for the wild West.
Full of beer and burgers I walk through the cool night, the sky full of stars, back to the Paisano, back to my room where I open the French doors and switch on the ceiling fan and fall asleep to sounds of the fountain.
In the morning I ask at the front desk to see the small spare room where James Dean slept. They hand me the keys. I walk upstairs and open the door. There it is: the iron bed, the iron desk, the tiled bathroom with a drain in the center of the floor. French doors open out to a narrow balcony, a dusty alley below, and a view of the courthouse. Dean slept here during the filming of "Giant" in the summer and early fall of 1955. That September he crashed his
It's early. Marfa is quiet. I drink coffee from Frama Coffee, and I wander. From the high point in town you can see to Big Bend National Park, almost a million acres of wildness along the Mexican border.
Mary Farley, a forensic psychologist turned realtor, lives high up on the edge of town with her chickens, parrots, and a friend's pigs. She moved here from Manhattan. Mary says that Marfa is like an island or even a cruise ship. "It's like a party cruise, a bunch of people who came here to be alone, all hanging out together."
Just before noon the Food Shark rolls into town. It's a 1974 Butter-Krust brand bread truck stripped down to galvanized aluminum and serving Mediterranean food (falafel, lamb kofta, fatoush salad). The truck parks in the center blaring classic rock and the town comes alive.
If you don't want Food Shark, another good place to eat is Pizza Foundation: East Coast-style pizza with thin crust in an old Studebaker dealership.
The Marfa Book Co. is one of many good shops to wander through and get away from the hot afternoon. I sit on the clean carpet reading. Down the block and around the corner, Moonlight Gemstones sells agates and silver jewelry galore. Lorna Leedy holds court as she sews and stitches and designs at Fancy Pony Land, her boutique on San Antonio Street. On the other side of the railroad tracks Camp Bosworth makes paintings and sculptures in an adobe church. From chunks of wood he carves beer pull tabs, six-shooter cowboy pistols, boxing gloves, tequila bottles, and bibles. Peyote is his pet, a coyote he found on a river trip through Big Bend.
In the afternoon I take the Judd Foundation tour. Judd lived in an adobe-walled compound in the center of town. You can pay $20 and see it all. There are hangar-like libraries and galleries filled with his work, and monastic beds, a two-story house where he lived with his family in the summer, a stone swimming pool - everything in its place.
Even more stylish than Judd's place is El Cosmico, a trailer park with vintage travel trailers arranged in concentric circles around a circular swimming pool. It's not open yet. But it will be soon. "Mañana," says owner Liz Lambert. Lambert is famous in Texas for converting Austin's Hotel San Jose from a place to flop and shoot up to a visionary boutique hotel. She grew up in Odessa and on a ranch just north of Marfa. These days she and her girlfriend, singer-songwriter Amy Cook, live back and forth between Austin and Marfa.
At night there are the Marfa lights, floating orbs in the desert, which are either alien spaceships or car headlights, depending on whom you are talking to. If you stroll through town you can count on being filled with bossa nova melancholy. At night Marfa glows, neon lighted and lonely.
In the morning I leave Marfa and head for Terlingua, a reinhabited ghost town for artists and outlaws and river guides on the edge of Big Bend. Leaving Marfa, heading south, yellow grasses and large holding ranches and empty roads go on and on.
Jonathan Levitt can be reached at jonathanlevitt.com. 