Marfa's solitary refinements

June 07, 2009|Jonathan Levitt, Globe Correspondent

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.