MARFAlous
Just another WordPress.com weblogArchive for February, 2010
Running
Sunday morning as I was running along Ranch Road 2810 (a.k.a. Pinto Canyon Road) toward the U.S./Mexico border, the sound of nearly nothing was so overwhelming that my shoes slamming against pavement and the blood rushing steadily behind my ears seemed inconceivably loud. “Has the blood in my veins always been so, well, piercing?!”
But I soon realized that I had never run anywhere so quiet, so agreeably lonely. I had never really noticed the racing blood and the plodding shoes (I’m not a very graceful runner, people)–noises that become so distinctly apparent in the utter silence of the Chihuahuan Desert.
It’s so quiet that you start to hear strange things. You start to think strange things.
What you think, at first, is the wind, isn’t the wind at all, but the sound of a car motor maybe two miles away coming from behind. It starts faintly, not seeming to move closer at all. But it, being the only *thing* at all in the empty landscape besides you, gets louder and louder, and you can feel it approaching–now only a mile away.
You start to think that it might be chasing you.
You turn to get a look at it. It looks normal enough, a gray truck like any other gray truck. But what does it want with me? you think. You feel your pocket for the penknife your husband forced you to carry with you. Yeah, the one you protested about. You start to wonder if your cellphone has service way out here, and you even think about a preemptive call for help.
As the truck gets closer, you notice yourself running a little faster and a little faster and a little faster, as if you could outrun it if you needed to. The engine gets louder and louder, and while you expect at any moment it will swoosh past you…it never does. The hum just goes on and on, and you actually start to think you may make it over the hill and into town first. You try to make yourself look bigger (someone told you to do that when you meet a bear on a hike), and you start to run with an attitude…with bravado. Yeah, you can scare them off with your toughness, you think. No problem.
Then, just as your anxiousness reaches its peak, just as you plan your cunning escape camouflaged by the nearest field of grass (even though you’re wearing your ever-so-fashionable bright red Nike running jacket), the truck finally reaches you and, at only mediocre velocity, whooshes past you without so much as a pause. It sends your long, straight hair into a wild frenzy in its innocent wake…and then, just as you begin to let the breath out of your lungs and your clutching fingers off your penknife, a hand, ever-so-faintly from behind the lightly tinted glass of the gray pick-up, reaches up in a friendly wave. A cowboy hat tips toward you. An unseen smile forces your own, and you watch the truck drive into the distance, getting smaller and smaller, quieter and quieter, until it disappears.
Then, the silence returns, and the sound of one foot after another hitting the pavement.
(I lived in Baltimore way too long.)
Stuff to Know About Marfa Before You Move Here!
Last weekend–my first weekend in Marfa–I decided to go for a bike ride around town to see what was what. It was a beautiful day, sunny and about 65, as I stopped for breakfast and coffee and drove up and down Marfa’s streets looking at the neighborhoods.
As I pulled up to the bookstore, I noticed my front bike tire was going flat. So, I found the closest gas station and filled it up with air. No sooner did I get back on to ride away when I noticed the tire was quickly deflating again. I thought I had better start riding home because apparently I had a serious leak. I was riding home with one tire nearly flat, when I felt something strange about the back tire. I looked behind me and, sure enough, the back tire was almost completely flat as well.
“Shit,” I thought.
Well, Marfa is small and no matter where you are, you aren’t far from home. So, I got off the bike and began to walk it…I was only about 5 Marfa-blocks away.
As I walked quietly along, minding my own new-person-in-town business, I heard the yap yap yap of one of those little miniature lap dogs. I looked toward the yapping and out of the yard of an adobe casita ran a teeny Chihuahua, yipping at me as if its little shivering life depended on it.
The funny thing about this creature was that some person, who apparently was lacking constructive things to do, had dressed it up in a pastel striped cowl-necked Liz Claiborne sweater. As the well-dressed Chihuahua was coming at me with all the anger that evolves out of an unsatisfying wardrobe selection, I nearly fell over trying to get back on my busted bike to get away from it.
“Shit,” I thought.
I hobbled back onto my bike thinking what an idiot I must look like trying to pedal away from a dog the size of a handbag, and I took off on the rims of my hopelessly flattened tires as Satan’s own Chihuahua nipped at my ankles. Already drawing the unwanted attention of Marfans standing at their doors pointing and laughing (in my mind, anyway), I had somehow managed to switch into a lower gear. So not only was I pedaling furiously away from a screaming sweater-clad Chihuahua, but I was doing it Ms. Gulch-style on my low-gear bicycle, my legs pumping much faster than I was actually being propelled forward.
The extraordinarily short rotation of each tire forced me to pedal faster and faster until I finally made it home, where I hid behind a locked door and peeked out through a crack in the blinds, paranoid the dog, which in my mind had become a pit bull wearing a leather bomber jacket, had followed me home.
Later that day, while staring at my sad little bike, I remembered passing a small bike repair shop in Alpine, a town about 25 miles east of Marfa. Alpine is bigger than Marfa with a small college, two fairly good-sized groceries, what seems to be a gi-normous hardware store (comparatively), and a Sonic (you know, just in case one needs a pineapple shake). I called the guy who runs the shop–and is known as “Bikeman”–and told him I was new to the area and had two flat tires. He responded knowingly and told me to bring the bike in. When I got there and introduced myself, he disappeared for a minute and reappeared holding a small piece of wood, about 4 inches long by 4 inches wide, on which lay at least a half-dozen tiny artifacts, glued to the surface in random formation.
“These are goatheads,” he said.
Wha?
“Goatheads,” he repeated. They are part of a plant that grows in Far West Texas (and apparently New Mexico) that wreaks havoc on your bike tires. You can read about them here, but they look like little spiky thorns and they don’t care about your bike tires or that you’re going to be chased by a tiny mean Chihuahua. Bikeman told me that the solution is to install some kind of special goo inside the tire (along with a goathead-repellent tire tube) and that should do the trick. Yay Bikeman!
Let’s just add goatheads to the category ”Stuff to know about Marfa before you move here.” Other items in that category include:
1. goo for bike tires
2. sweater-wearing, bike-chasing mean Chihuahuas
3. where to bike/run if you don’t want to be chased by said Chihuahua or other dogs running loose.
I asked around and was directed to the road in the pics below. Not bad, eh?
The New Girl
After my first day of work on Monday, I went to our local gourmet shop, The Get Go, to buy some cheese and make myself feel better about my husband flying back to Birmingham so soon, thereby leaving me alone in this strange land at least for a little while as he wraps things up back at home.
Anyway, I’m at The Get Go buying cheese (okay, and maybe some balsamic vinegar and ginger ice cream…I was really missing Glenn, see.) when a man walks up to me, his arms full with three bottles of wine, and says “You’re new!”
Wow.
“Yes,” I said warily (I’m from the Northeast, and people just don’t do that there. Hell, they don’t even really do that in Birmingham).
“I just moved here,” I continued, picturing this strange man following me home in his grungy pick up.
“Well,” he said, “I’m Pete and my wife is standing over there and I just like to know who’s new to town.”
Really?!
“Oh, okay, well it’s nice to meet you,” and I offered my name.
“Where are you from? Why are you here? What kind of wine do you like? I like Pinots. That’s my wife over there and she’s wonderful. I’m deaf so speak into my left ear.”
Wow.
I answered all his questions and by the time we were finished introducing ourselves I had made what seemed to me at that moment to be my best friend in the whole world.
Honestly, up until that point I had been feeling a little shell shocked. The landscape, the neighborhoods, the whole atmosphere of this place is so different from any other place I’ve ever lived. Moving from Baltimore to Birmingham seemed, at the time, like a minor culture shock; but even then I moved from a city to a city–from an urban area with a large population of people and big grocery stores and Targets and coffee shops to another. Last weekend as Glenn and I drove around Marfa exploring, making sure we knew what hours the *one* tiny grocery store was open, making note of the two coffee shops in town, and planning our trips to El Paso (200 miles away) for things like electronics, car service, and pet supplies, a feeling of discomfort hit me. I knew it would. Because in my mind I was aware of all of these things before I moved here. But the reality of living here full time and weaning myself off of the things that normally make me comfortable (as much as I might not want to admit it) made me feel decidedly anxious.
But there, in the speciality cheese section of this tiny little store where I now knew three out of the four people inside (a coworker was also there), I was happily welcomed into a tiny community of people, recognized as the new girl.
I’m not completely comfortable yet. I’m realizing new things about this place every day that I both like and dislike (like anywhere, of course). It’s incredibly beautiful when it isn’t raining (which is most of the time); it’s god-awful when it is (mud. just…mud). Most of the time you don’t need much heat; but when you do need it, it’s probably broken. There’s no Target; there’s no Target. See?
Off to eat the rest of that ginger ice cream…
