I’d always wanted to go to Marfa, the locus for art in West Texas, and a pandemic visit seemed like a good idea — there wouldn’t be any other tourists. I set up my tent for a few days at a psychedelic cowboy glampground named El Cosmico, at the edge of town. I chose a spot under a scrubby oak not too far from the showers, but far from the two other tents in the vast field. At the perimeter, a village of empty air-conditioned tipis and yurts and a collection of period trailers painted in the pastel shades of a B-52s video, all for nightly rent. An odd and delightful place. Across the road, at the local headquarters of the Border Patrol, the Texas flag flew higher than the American flag.
For dinner, I ate a taco salad at the Dairy Queen, which had indoor dining. All the other restaurants in Marfa were closed for quarantine, and this one was vacant except for me and a couple of high school kids. I hit my tent early and slept well in the desert air. In the morning I got a biscuit and coffee at the convenience store and went in search of the art that Marfa was famous for. I found almost none. All the museums and galleries were closed. Through one window I saw a large, beautiful John Chamberlain sculpture made from a crushed automobile.
Art! I came across this conceptual earthwork by Anonymous, above, in an alley downtown.
Not many people will experience an artless Marfa, I thought. It was a magnificent place. The absence of art might even have made it more interesting. I felt fortunate for the pandemic. There were old grain elevators, empty warehouses, general stores, and a massive coral-colored county courthouse to look at. There was an improbably green golf course for the rich art collectors, and a vast hydroponic tomato factory for the rest of us. I fell in love with the place. In a store on the main drag, just around the corner from the Instagram pink fire station, I bought a straw hat. It was a half size too small, but I wanted to will it onto my head, so I bought it. I ended up giving it to my daughter, Bolivia, in LA, who also has a big head, though not quite as big as her father.
I followed one street to its end at the edge of town and realized how artificial the boundaries that humans make really are. Directly across the street was the outback. There was no interstitial connector. It was astonishing. And the outback went on for a hundred miles. On a side street a beautiful old warehouse had been transformed into a shop and restaurant called Sentinel, geared for the Marfa art mafia.
I scanned their QR code and ordered a $7.50 latte (including an extra shot of espresso) and a 12-dollar granola parfait. The young white woman wearing white jeans at the pick-up table was dismissive and unhelpful. The young white man she worked with gave me a puzzled look when I asked for a spoon. He also wore white jeans. I was triggered by the white jeans. I’d always seen them as proclamations of privilege. Who but a wealthy person could afford to keep white jeans clean and bright in a world of dust, blood, and stains? You’d need a support staff. This culture of specialness repelled me. I was glad the art was closed, because Sentinel showed me how insufferable Marfa must be when there was no virus around to keep the white jeans away.
Dinner that night was at the Dairy Queen, again. I noticed that the Spanish speaking fry cook wore white jeans. No grease stains. No blood. I couldn’t make sense of it. Another personal theory shattered. Maybe I’ll get white jeans, I thought, deciding that the cook’s pair, with their strategic rips and bleach marks, looked cool.
In the morning I headed down a dirt road through desolate canyons towards the Mexican border. It was 114 degrees at the border, bright, dusty and bleak, and I didn’t encounter anyone besides a store clerk who sold me cold Topo Chico mineral water and some spicy peanuts. Driving along the border wall, I was grateful for my four-wheel drive truck, which could take me almost anywhere. Compared to the Best Western motels I often stayed in, or even to my single-person tent with its broken rain flap, I felt at ease, always, in my truck. It was my home, for now. I tried to keep it orderly, with only enough fetishes – a feather hanging from the rearview, a pinecone on the dash – to protect me from evil. But not so many that I became a cult.
At one point, I passed two white and green Border Patrol trucks parked on the side of the road. About a mile further down I pulled over myself, because I had to discuss a work project on Zoom with some people in New York and San Francisco. I was about 30 miles from the nearest paved road, sitting in my truck with the AC on, staring at my phone screen and answering questions about my upcoming work availability. I didn’t notice the Border Patrol officer until he rapped on my window. Fuck! I dropped my phone and fumbled for my mask.
I rolled my window down.
“Where are you headed?” he asked, his deep voice muffled by a black cloth mask.
“El Paso,” I said.
“Where you coming from?”
“Marfa, then the border and now here. I just stopped for a Zoom conference.”
“A what?
“Work call.”
“Are you an American?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He leaned in my back window and scanned the bags and cooler on the back seat.
“Ok, you’re free to go – or finish your call or whatever.”
Wow, I thought. He didn’t even ask for my ID.
I watched his truck in the rearview mirror as he pulled out. Then I saw my own face – red from sunburn, white hair, blue eyes, the wizened features of an old white guy. That’s privilege, I thought.
The road to Fort Davis crossed vast, flat pasturelands flanked in the far distance by gentle mountains. In a little canyon of live oak, I spotted a couple of austere houses made of corrugated sheet metal. Curious, I pulled into this community, which seemed empty. The dirt road wound around and around as I realized there was an astonishing number of these structures, each one a little different, 2 stories here, a screened porch there, and all completely empty. The houses and dining halls were a cross between the galvanized metal farm buildings used to store tractors, animals and supplies and the new farm vernacular architectural movement of metal homes with fake silos filled with couches from Restoration Hardware. Some were shiny new metal, others old and dirty. Clearly, the buildings were loved, and purposeful. Thousands of people could live here at one time. I got lost in the tangle of roads and driveways, sidetracked by dirt tracks that dead ended in groves of live oak. Not a person in sight. The virus, I assumed. I felt at home in the empty civilization. I thought I could live here for a good long time, reading and walking along the shady paths in the cool morning air. But this village wasn’t mine.
A sign by the road read:
BLOYS CAMP MEETING
Held each year since 1890.
Founded by Rev. W.B. Bloys, a
Presbyterian. His camp pulpit
was an Arbuckle coffee crate.
First campers, 48 people from
remote ranches and towns, slept
In tents, wagons, family groups
had chuck-box meals, sharing
with guests. Some 1,500 attend
mid-August meetings today. Still
nothing is ever sold in camp.
Baptists, disciples of Christ,
Methodists and Presbyterians
incorporated the cowboys’ camp
meeting in 1902. Site, Skillman
Grove, has been a campground
since the 1850s. Elevation is
about 6,000 feet.
(1966)
Every August for 130 years, Christians of various stripes had gathered at the camp for prayer, reflection and learning. Leaning against my truck under the shade of a big tree I poked through the camp’s digital archive on my phone. It was a remarkable collection of drawings, old school notebooks filled with scribbles, and photos of chickens recently killed for supper. Thousands of documents spanning more than a century, with one illustrating that campers sometimes got up to more than simple prayer. Old typewriter marks on yellowed scrap paper described an earthly devotion:
“On this mountain which is the south end of the Bloys Cowboy Camp Meeting grounds many of the west Texas cattlemen made love and proposed to their present wives. There is hardly a spot in west Texas where more proposals and acceptances to marry have been made.”
Unfortunately, this Christian coupling wouldn’t happen this coming August 2020, as reported in the Jeff Davis Mountain Dispatch of June 18:
“Bloys Camp Meeting bell to remain silent for first time in 131 years due to COVID-19.
The bell out at Skillman Grove will be silent for the first time in 131 years this August, as the executive committee of Bloys Camp Meeting Association met June 14 and decided to cancel the annual Christian gathering west of Fort Davis on State Highway 166.”
I’d noticed that pious people often came across well – clean cut believers, austere, especially out here. But I knew better than to trust them without consideration. Once, in 7th grade, I smoked a joint in a park in downtown Lawrence, Kansas with my friend Susan, and then we walked along Massachusetts Street, just wandering. Passing a Pentecostal church we heard chanting, and, giggling at the thought of the believers, decided to look inside. We walked down a brown carpet towards the source of the sounds. The air smelled dusty, when suddenly the doors opened to a large chamber with an altar and a crowd of ten or fifteen people in a circle surrounding a light-haired teenage girl lying on the floor with her wrists bent back like a forest fawn.
A man stood over her speaking nonsense words, sputtering and exclaiming and throwing his hands in the air! The only word I could make out was Jesus! Over and over.
Suddenly, the man caught sight of us and a group of them came over and pulled us in close. Jesus, I thought, and not in a good way.
“Do you know Christ?” someone said.
We didn’t answer. Susan gave me a look that said “Run!” But they shoved us to the ground and surrounded us, many of the believers sputtering and splashing us with droplets of spit as they called the Devil out and the Angels in.
I was terrified.
What if they were right? What if I had the Devil living in me?
Only seconds passed and I looked at Susan and she looked at me and nodded and we jumped up and ran out of that church as fast as we could and down the block and by the time, we reached the Safeway where we could buy some cigarettes we were laughing and mocking and feeling very free.
I never told my mom about the afternoon at the church. Sharing it didn’t cross my mind. I tried to imagine all the situations my own kids had been in, growing up in New York City, that I knew nothing about. So many. The ones I knew about were sometimes perilous enough. In a way, I was glad they had kept their own counsel.
Up one of the dirt lanes in the distance I saw the Camp Bloys maintenance truck, and a guy doing something with a barrel. I didn’t want to talk to him, not even for a second. The wind had picked up and last year’s live oak leaves swirled in a little twister in front of my truck as I hit the asphalt and continued on my way. In Fort Davis, an exquisite, small mountain town filled with flowers and bright colors, The Fort Davis Water Corporation had a pro-gun sign on its front door. The sign read:
We support the 2nd Amendment and the constitutional right to carry arms.
We encourage people to carry concealed weapons.
We encourage people to carry concealed weapons when they come inside our offices.
As I read the sign, masked people who might have been carrying concealed weapons walked up to the door and into the office. This peaceful town was the last place in the world I could imagine needing to carry a gun. At least they wore masks. I got in my truck and continued into West Texas.
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