The Minnow has landed!
Texas is so vast it makes New Mexico feel as crowded as wall-to-wall suburbs back in Jersey. Two hours after leaving Truth or Consequences, we crossed the state line north of El Paso and saw a sign: 鈥淏eaumont: 831 miles.鈥� How is it even possible that a single state could be so wide? Just across the highway, the cramped houses of Juarez, Mexico, seemed to sag into the ground beneath lopsided tin roofs.
We had 150 miles to go until Marfa, and soon we left El Paso behind and were engulfed by an austere landscape, lonely ranch gates the only sign of life.听Miraculously, the Airstream tires were holding, the door hadn't blown open since we crossed into Texas, and the only thing broken besides the back window was the ancient AM radio antenna, now bent over and nearly dragging on the highway. Compared to the previous day's ordeal, this ranked as a huge success.
With 30 miles to go, we blasted through the outskirts of Valentine, a town of about 100, if that. 鈥淭here was the Prada鈥揗arfa store!鈥� Steve said as the fashion icon鈥檚 black-and-white logo whizzed past my window. The store鈥檚 not actually a store, but a wry art installation and cultural commentary on the stylization of an otherwise dusty West Texas ranch town. I thought about telling Steve to turn the Airstream around so I could take a picture, but then I contemplated the horrors that might unleash, and I kept my mouth shut.
For the past five hours鈥攚ell, make that 24鈥擨鈥檇 been wondering why on earth we were hauling our derelict Airstream all the way to Texas when we weren鈥檛 even RV people to begin with. The barren scenery out the window wasn鈥檛 doing much to reassure me, and the whole notion of artsy sophisticates migrating all the way from New York to Marfa (closest airport: El Paso) seemed like total lunacy. But I鈥檒l admit it, as shallow as it sounds, at the sight of an international fashion brand鈥攅ven an ironic one鈥擨 started to relax. Maybe Marfa would live up to its hype after all. Maybe, if we were lucky, we wouldn鈥檛 be spending the weekend in an asphalt trailer court.
Marfa, when we got there, was glowing. At five PM, the sun was still high in the sky but the day was drawing in on itself and the prairie grass looked lovely and tawny, not drought-stricken and brown, the way it had just a few miles outside of town. Granted, part of this was probably the Chinati Effect: bathed in the light of a super-chic world-renowned minimalist art hotspot, everything looks cool. But there鈥檚 something genuinely magical about Marfa鈥檚 landscape, too: Though nearly bare of trees, this is not the harsh, cacti-studded desert that dominates New Mexico and points west, but a far gentler, more welcoming prairie. Texas felt like a continent unto itself, and already it was beginning to blow my mind.
Marfa light
The Imperial Palace, one of El Cosmico's restored trailers
Marfa has an impressive number of restaurants for a town so small, but on the Friday night of Easter weekend, the first two places we tried鈥擬exican tacos and Texas BBQ鈥攚ere closed. We wound up at , a converted gas station with an outdoor terrace and, it turned out, a two-hour wait for a pie. What?! Clearly the New York influence hadn鈥檛 rubbed off on Marfa鈥檚 dining scene yet, but we took a table anyway and ordered a couple salads while they managed to rustle up four slices of cheese pizza (thin crust and delicious, and so worth the wait; for speedier eats, we were advised to call our order in by 4 PM next time). At the next table, a family with four blonde boys, ages 2 to 9, had recently arrived from London by way of Manhattan to spend a week in Marfa. They鈥檇 been horseback riding and were planning to spend several days at , about three hours away, but not before they checked into El Cosmico鈥檚 鈥渨igwams鈥� for a couple of nights. 听
Airstreams are, by their very nature, compact. Ours has an interior living space of about 100 square feet, and when we unfolded the cushioned benches into beds, we were left with a few measly feet of leg room. (This is one occasion when traveling with very small children and a large dog with only three legs is actually an advantage.) But rather than feeling claustrophobic, the Airstream was beginning to feel cozy. As a fat Good Friday full moon rose right out our front window, we nixed the baby crib and put both girls to sleep, head to toe, on the front bed. With the Brooklyn cool kids camping at a safe distance in their pup tents, it didn鈥檛 matter how long or loudly our little ones fussed. We closed the door, cracked a couple of beers, and parked ourselves outside in camp chairs in the still-warm evening while the moon rose high over West Texas.
Over the course of the next 36 hours, we transformed our scrappy Airstream into a miniscule mobile home-away-from-home. It wasn鈥檛 hard. Waking in a cushy double bed to the sound of giggling girls a few feet away, cooking eggs and coffee on an actual stove, and sitting down at our own breakfast table with cushioned benches and Bob Dylan on the iPad鈥攖his was luxury compared to our usual camping trips. There were no mountains to climb, nothing remotely strenuous on our agenda (unless you count the drive back鈥攁nd because our PTSD from the drive down was still fresh, we did), nothing to do but bask in the glory of being in Marfa with a vintage trailer all our own.听
Things got even more civilized when we showed up for our two-hour tour of the . The tours, which cost $20, are the biggest game in town, and offer visitors a close-up look the understated works of Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and John Chamberlain. I was skeptical about bringing two kids with the combined attention span of less than our dog, but our tour guide, a bearded, down-to-earth ex-New Yorker in Solomon trail runners, assured us that people did it all the time. 鈥淛ust don鈥檛 let them touch the aluminum boxes,鈥� he warned.
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Please don't touch the boxes
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Grocery shopping at the Get Go [Katie Arnold]
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听We鈥檇 only been in town 12 hours, but already we were starting to recognize people. In a place as small as Marfa, with a draw as big as Chinati, everyone鈥檚 on the same program, more or less. Most visitors hit up a second art tour, of Donald Judd鈥檚 studio and home, each afternoon at 4, but I鈥檇 forgotten to reserve ahead, so we opted for a siesta and a stint at the local playground (north of the railroad tracks, east of the courthouse) instead. By late afternoon, the clouds were building and it looked like Marfa might get its first real rain since October, and as the wind picked up, we headed back to the Chinati Foundation to wander among Judd鈥檚 Untitled Works in Concrete鈥攖he only exhibit on the property that you can visit without a guide. The 15 stalwart rectangular structures were striking, strung out in the blowing grass, but the brooding clouds and stiff spring breeze kicking up dust devils felt like the real deal: true, all-natural, effortless art.听
It did rain for a little while, just enough to wet the dust and bathe El Cosmico in a surreal blue-green light. We didn鈥檛 want to miss a minute, so we stocked up at the local grocery, the Get Go, and whipped up our first dinner in the trailer, while the girls played dirt soccer and did laps on their bikes and pushing the baby stroller. At rest in its field, the horrors of the road mostly behind us, the Silver Minnow was no longer the problem child it had been. It was official: We were falling in love with our little trailer. Contentment in an Airstream (at least one that鈥檚 not disintegrating) comes simple and cheap.
In the morning, after our first annual trailer trash Easter egg hunt, we packed the kids and dog and the trailer, battened down the hatches as tightly as we could, and pointed the truck north toward the Davis Mountains. We鈥檇 decided to bypass El Paso鈥檚 traffic and take the long way home, up a narrow mountain road past the McDonald Observatory, north to , and into New Mexico south of Carlsbad.
Already we were feeling a little melancholy about leaving Marfa and our new minimalist lifestyle behind, but we knew we鈥檇 be back (next time, with three-day detour to Big Bend). But even better, we didn鈥檛 have to say goodbye to our Airstream. It would be there, for better or worse, and hopefully in one piece, all the way back to Santa Fe. And, if all goes according to plan, we won鈥檛 be putting it on Craigslist after all. Because here鈥檚 the best part: Spending quality time together crammed in a trailer didn鈥檛 make us crazy; it brought us closer.
And that, my friends, is what I鈥檇 call a perfect family vacation.听
El Cosmico, camping $12 per night per adult, ; The Chinati Foundation, tours from $10, ; The Judd Foundation, tours $20, .
–Katie Arnold