Marfa my dear

As I wait to check out of the motel, there is a couple ahead of me. The man, tall, skinny, greased black hair swept back off his face, is dressed in black tee shirt, jeans and careworn cowboy boots. His Aviators are pushed back onto his head while he puts a signature to the list of billable charges that have just chattered out of the printer. His companion, a woman of around the same age - late twenties by my reckoning – is telling the duty receptionist, Donna, that they’re heading back to San Francisco from attending the South by Southwest music festival in Austin. After detouring down here to take in Big Bend country they hope to make it home with just one more stop over, possibly Needles on the Arizona /California border. Without referring to a map, I know that leaves them some considerable way to go if they’re to do it before nightfall.

Twenty minutes later I’m on Highway 90, heading north towards Marfa. Today I’m moving on. I press the button to switch on the car radio:

One morning I woke up and I knew that you were gone.
A new day, a new way, I knew I should see it along.
Go your way, I'll go mine and carry on.

The sky is clearing and the night has gone out.
The sun, he come, the world is all full of light.
Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice but to carry on.

The road ahead is empty, stretching out as far as I can see. On mornings like this, with the sun picking out every detail in sharp golden relief, the sky bright, the air chilled and fresh, these are the days when it feels like I can drive forever, leaving all behind with only the future waiting for me someplace up ahead.

I cruise silently through Alpine and pass a train on the edge of town that is getting on for a mile long. Hauling imports in from the Pacific coast to destinations in the east, the freight containers are loaded onto flatbed wagons, the names of the shipping lines overwritten and reclaimed as their own by the nocturnal graffiti artists of the San Diego freight yards.

I take breakfast in Marfa at a small, comfortable place that looks like a regular house from the outside, with tables on the porch, a front yard, a gate and brick pathway. Inside, the homey theme continues; a kitchen to the rear with adjoining rooms laid out with mismatched tables and chairs, a sagging sofa, books on shelves to pick out and read, a rack of vintage clothing to buy. I order at the counter, fresh orange juice, pancakes with fruit and maple syrup, then take a block of wood with my order number etched into it and find a seat in the next room.

The food is some of the best I’ve had so far and I settle the check to the sound of ‘Marty Robbins Gunfighter Ballads’, the warped scratchy vinyl spinning at 33rpm on an old portable deck perched on the counter top. I leave with a slim-fit Fifties western style shirt with pearl buttons bought to celebrate the occasion, ‘The Streets of Laredo’ playing me out of the door.

The early morning town traffic soon drifts away at the perimeter and I find myself the only traveller on the road once again. It was on these flat grasslands, that in the Fifties, the location shots for the movie ‘Giant’ were filmed. Starring Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson, it has passed into folklore as being the last movie James Dean made before driving himself to death in his silver Porsche Spyder on September 30 1955, at the junction of Highway 46 and 41 in California. Dean was on his way to race meeting at Salinas airport, when on a downgrade approaching Cholame, estimated to be travelling at 85mph, he crashed head-on with a large Ford black and white coupe.

Recalling an iconic image of Dean, stretched out in the back of an open car, boots resting over the front seat, cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes, gloves in hand with a brooding Hopper style gothic mansion in the middle distance on the horizontal prairie, I catch site of a building about three miles distant. No mansion this, but a small, square construction with a flat roof; nothing remarkable to set it apart, except it being the only building in view on this vast Texas ranchland.

As I pass, I get a flash of store windows, some kind of display and a name on the façade. I check the mirror before pulling onto the verge and turn the car around. I park and get out into the quiet stillness of this remote place, the only sound my boot heels crunching in the gravel. The type on the building reads ‘PRADA MARFA’. Through the plate glass window are women’s shoes and bags perched on plinths of varying size. Is this some kind of joke? To the side is a plaque mounted on a concrete column. This replica store is an art installation, conceived and built by a gallery in Marfa: inspired and all the more unexpected given its location.

Back on the road, I approach Van Horn, an untidy truck-stop town that sprawls either side of the junction where Texas Highway 90 joins Interstate 10. With the outer city limits approaching I come up behind a motorcycle and sidecar. As I close the gap I recognize the couple from the motel lobby earlier this morning. He leans back, legs out straight in the Harley riding style, red bandana whipping in the warm breeze; she sits upright in the open sidecar, one arm draped over the bike’s passenger seat, her hand resting flat against his back. It seems to me the most romantic of images, this couple, close and touching, otherwise silent except for the steady beat of the engine, eyes fixed on the forward pathway, the tarmac passing under their wheels on the westward trail home:

Where are you going now my love?
Where will you be tomorrow?
Will you bring me happiness?
Will you bring me sorrow?
Oh, the questions of a thousand dreams,
what you do and what you see,
Lover, can you talk to me?