Later in the day we stopped at a road side jewelry shop at the top of a windy mesa. The shop inside was divided in two with a curtain, in the front were cases of jewelry, beaded bags and belts studded with coins. In the back, the two men made jewelry, custom silver plate pieces of thunderbirds and fine scale bead work. By the door was a large box of dried gourds. Outside a little girl played in the red dust, pulling a plastic wagon of plastic toys while her gray cat followed. Back on the road, we drove over the bridge crossing marble canyons that marked the edge of the reservation. Here the fading sun was painting everything rose, purple, smoky gray. A huge plain of desert ran out in the distance. It ended on the cliffs, pink and lavender coated, that looked like castles built on the moon.

We pulled over for dinner at a roadside motel, entirely wood paneled inside. After consulting our waiter, an former train-hopping vagrant with a figure eight tattooed side ways on his throat, then the cook, and then the pizza place located in the grand canyon, we discovered that our campground reservation on the north rim had likely already been taken. So we booked a room for the night and spent the rest of the evening playing rock fetch n the front porch of the inn with a dog named rodeo wearing a red bandanna. A local sat on the porch with us, petting his burmese mountain dog and wolf hybrid named rorschach (named by his original owner, a psychology student). He told us about his previous dog, a coyotes hound mix that lived for 17 years. It liked to chase the neighbor’s horses and nip thier ankles. One day a horse finally got fed up, slammed on the brakes and kicked the dog so hard he tumbled backward several yards leaving a comet of dust behind him. The dog slept four days then got to his feet with bells on his toe, as his owner said. Across the dark, we could see yellow lights on the highway crossing the desert. At that high elevation, the beer acts fast so after begging off another round of fetch with rodeo, we went to bed, the hot desert wind mellowed by our circling ceiling fan.

The next morning we drove to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

We went up to our room, through a hall that was icy cold from ac and into the sultry heat of the bedroom. Air conditioning was apparently reserved for the hallway only. We opened the windows to allow in the wind and any curious flying insects then went into downtown for dinner. After 8pm, they close off the main drag downtown, and large groups of teenagers and almost teenagers gather at the entrance of clubs and under the streetlights. As we walked after dinner, we realized the downtown was closed not for pedestrian enjoyment but to prevent cruising. The streets were flooded with flashy customized cars, trucks with spinning rims and candy colored beds, low riding corvettes and Cadillacs with suicide doors added on. The cars swam though the traffic like sharks, their drivers darting dark heads out the window to catcall. We walked down a street velvety in the night, sticky with the smell of garbage, to a 7-11 where a Luna moth lay placidly dying on the walkway and a woman withered by meth use charged through the parking lot, arms outstretched. We headed back to the hostel, up the cool stairs, tom nodding benevolently to us like a Buddha from his desk, back into the bedroom still hot from the day and filled with curtains waving hellos to us sweetly.

Wouldn’t it be the end-goal of any modern art megalomaniac to create his own damn city? Donald Judd got his wish by simply dreaming that hard about it, that precisely and persuasively. It was once a military barracks for elite ranks of Calvary officers during World War 2. They played polo here, and learned languages, and held dinner banquets for the locals. It was nearly abandoned when Judd arrived and said, “let there be installations.”

And from those art installations have flowered now a small town for creative whites. There is no rational or industrial core purpose to account for the population density and NPR station there, just the art and the other people, making it, in my mind, a genuinely post-modern happening. I completely understand why our mutual friends have contemplated centering utopia there – it’s all raw material, strictly culture, and with scant other theories to disrupt one’s pure and personal view of the future. Feels like you can set up shop by providing any fill in the blank local commodity – say, a food truck, or a skate shop (open territory, far as I know) – and the city might feed you. There are still no more than like 3,000 permanent residents. Actually, who knows how many of them are permanent. Those might be permanent installations, but I can’t say that anything else about Marfa feels permanent.

The first night we rolled into town we took the first bar signage sighting up on its offer and inside I immediately found a friend of mine seated near the door. I lived with David Branch for a few months while he was finishing an internship for his Architecture program at UT. He’s from Virginia, wicked smart and willing to prove it over beers on front porches into the wee hours. I’d say we bonded but I haven’t been in touch for years. Forgot he’s been set up in Marfa, building houses. He was forced to watch me fall upon a plate of road snacks that Margo brought out from the car in lieu of dinner (she’s the BEST). It was really very lucky to find him, he set up our itinerary for the one full day we budgeted for our time in Marfa. Chinati of course, but also we should check out the view from the top floor of the courthouse. Great call, we climbed up while waiting for the morning Chinati tour to begin and found a lovely view of the city.

I wasn’t properly prepared for the immensity of the Chinati tour. We did the abbreviated version, primarily Judd’s aluminum pieces and then Flavin’s rooms. Mother of pearl, man, what an immense wonder of humanity. Both of ’em. We were both moved.

Our guide explained that Flavin’s piece wasn’t installed until after Judd’s death, due to a series of disagreements during their collaboration that ended their friendship. Donald Judd named his daughter after this man then had an art-argument with him and decided to never speak to him again. Or Flavin did, whatever. It was poignant to have view on the better part of these guys’ souls while contemplating what petty, arrogant assholes they must have been. Can we please let a woman create the next post-modern Texan art town? They’ve got next. Actually apparently Judd’s wife persuaded Flavin to come back and finish the piece after Judd was dead, and then after that was done the reviews and money flowed through, so I suppose a woman created Marfa as much as he did.

Ok, when you go, and you should, DO have a Marfa Burrito burrito, DO consider a tent space at El Cosmico, DO climb the courthouse, DO hit Tim’s incredible bookstore, and DO see the Marfa lights.

Guys. WHAT THE FUCK ARE THE MARFA LIGHTS?! And don’t give me that jazz about reflected car headlights. Don’t.

Pretty sure he would scarcely recognize Johnson City today, what with all the galleries and barns painted with pastel murals and repurposed for casual-to-fine-dining experiences. Most of it was closed for lunch though, which was nearly eerie. We found a brewery and I had a delicious flight of local beers.

The smaller the town, the deeper the mark left on it by its brushes with national zeitgeist. I wonder how the local teens feel about the LBJ cardboard cutouts at the local gas station? Should have bought a postcard.

We parked across the street from this imposing Victorian mansion and walked under a faded canvas awning leading onto the front porch. The gate was open but as we stood out in the devastating heat we were totally bummed to find the front doors locked. We pressed our noses to the windows and caught snatches of things promised by the write-up that drew us there – baroque dresses, incredible interior architecture, and a small statue of a frog dressed as a bellhop and holding a serving tray – but no matter how hard I allowed myself to rap on the door glass, we remained locked outside on the porch.

We almost walked back to the car. But I saw a pathway leading around the back of the house and figured we might at least snipe a few more glances inside from anterior windows. The backyard felt weirdly homey and personal and increased the feeling that we were straight up trespassing. But I also saw a walkway at ramped up into a back door and I decided that one more knock was in order. I was a mere foot away when the door swung open. A well dressed older lady with enormous eyes stared me down silently and I felt impelled to apologize. We were obviously encroaching on space not reserved for the public. But she quickly chilled out a bit and said that she must not have heard us at the front and that we should walk back around and she would let us in.

Margaret and I were swept inside and found ourselves alone with our host in the midst of a gigantic and lavishly decorated foyer. It was marvelously air-conditioned. The woman began speaking from an obviously memorized script.

The house was built in the mid-19th century. Twenty five years later the bottom floor was raised up and built into what is now the second and third stories, while the present day bottom floor was built as a giant social space intended for guests. This is the sort of fuck-all creative thinking permitted by mid-century tobacco barons. The chandeliers still burned gas and every surface was gilded and kept with giant cuttings of fresh flowers. Or perhaps they were fake, after a few hours in New Orleans I stopped being able to tell the difference.

A glass cabinet on the first floor served as a display for 2 decadent dresses with big witchy collars and weighed down with, let’s say, 15 lbs. of sequins and beads. A faded photo of a woman dressed in the dress on the right sat on a surface behind the glass. “That’s me,” she said, and Margaret and I were officially headed down the weird vortex of our host’s role in the house’s glory.

The passage way to the stairs on the second floor were camouflaged into the wallpaper. After walking up, we were met with our first real “holy shit” moment. A series of 5 large dollhouses were arranged to our left and right. Her script continued as she bent down to switch a light on that would illuminate dozens of the dollhouse’s rooms.

Oh Christ, the detail. Dollhousery is quite a hobby. But the high level of devotion to detail and the assumed number of hours of labor apparent in these particular houses called for a philosophic kind of clarification on the notion of the word hobby. And she had done them all. Hung every wall lamp, dressed every husband returning from work and hanging his top hat on the door, arranged every dining table’s cutlery. And this was only the first series. We were then taken on a tour of multiple rooms, each one as lavishly decorated as she lobby, and each in possession of another 4 or 5 dollhouse masterworks. I was genuinely mind-fucked by the incredible labor necessary to have created this, and yet I was also compelled to verbalized my admiration in a totally phony manner, in order to match the strange atmosphere of expectation that bookended each scripted spiel.

And yeah, there was a third floor. It was not necessary that there was a third floor. But lo, there was a whole additional level of walleyed what-the-fuckness awaiting us on top of the next flight of stairs. Ms. Broel was also a dressmaker to the stars. Well, to a few stars. The floorspace on the top floor was almost entirely consumed by a clustered display of wedding and parade dresses, each made by hand. Pictures fanned out over the walls, pictures of Ms. Broel wearing her own creations in her youth, pictures of her receiving a hug from Sandra Bullock, pictures of her standing next to a weirdly stiff Tom Hanks. Pictures of Anne Rice layong prone in a promotional booktour coffin from the 90s. She had less to say about he top floor, yet she was obviously most proud of it.

To enter the house of Broel is to be confronted with an undisputedly giant personality, and one who is a bit disappointed that you know nothing of her work. If you’re ever in this neck of the woods, spend an hour here. You’ll never not know her work again.

The whole place is overlaid with crusts of pavement, cement, asphalt and brick. Over that they laid down oyster shells, and mixed into that are dozens of little broken glass shards from beer bottles . These work well for altar offerings. You can’t help but give some of the lonely graves some attention, the ones without any flowers or beads or lipsticks. After a while of wandering and altar decorating, we got restless and hot so we set out into the city. We hadn’t found Marie’s grave but it seemed like, if we hadn’t found it, then it wasn’t meant to be.

Elvis bought this house at a mere 22 years of age for about $100,000 but he was already an international pop star. His parents lived with him and he continued to call it homebase until his death.

There’s a strange contradictory effect in place as you walk around inside his surprisingly small but lavishly decorated house. The estate exists to venerate the myth but an unavoidable effect of preserving his personal effects as frozen in a moment in time where he was overweight, strung out on pills, and prone to riding around his lawn in a golf cart with a pistol in his hand is to provide visitors a kind of sick spectacle of American excess. But after climbing around the inside of a certain corner of his mind for an hour or two, and on his planes and trophy room, I discovered that I basically kind of liked the guy.

RIP, Elvis.

(Definitely check the photos.)

We stopped off around sunset at a state park near Grenada Lake. The inflatable mattress we picked up at Walmart was boxed up without its airplug, so we popped the back hatch, laid some blankets down, and slept in the car with the windows rolled down.

In the morning the park groundskeeper told me that I really ought to invest in a mobile ham radio.

“You’ll never be without friends or help no matter where you are.”

He was a really nice guy.

This Volvo was being sold on a small used car lot called West Way Auto and the rep was far less toothy and slick than your average used car salesman. Dude was about my age and he was sort of awkward about the whole engagement. At one point while explaining the pros and cons of using a Carfax report to assess a car’s condition he caught himself and said, “lord, I sound like a used car salesman.”

This was a 2002 V70 XC (Cross Country edition, I shit you not) with 150k miles on it. They were asking $5,000. It drove smoothly, and most importantly, he was able to give me some straight answers about the timing belt and general condition of the internals.

After the test drive I dropped the keys back in his hand and said, “let’s talk.” His office was lined with cheap wood paneling and consisted of only 2 rooms: waiting room, deal room. Here’s the thing, I actually relish the bargaining process. My dad gave me a 12-tape audio series of Roger Dawson’s Power Negotiating when I was like 11 years old.

I put an envelop full of cash down on the table in front of him and said “here’s $4,000” if you’re ready to call it good right here. He hemmed and hawed and said at 4k he’d be losing money on the deal. “How ’bout forty-five hundred?”

I said I didn’t have that on me and that I’d have to return to Huntsville to think that over. I figured that if was willing to go anywhere south of that he wouldn’t let me walk out of his office. And yet, here we were shaking hands and letting him walk me back outside. My mother had driven me there and I had to pull her aside to catch her up on the deal. She asked me why I didn’t buy at $4,500, and I said that at this point I intended to but that I had to see how far he’d let me push it. So we hopped in the car and drove around long enough to provide cover for a story about having run to the ATM for the extra $500, even though I had it in a separate envelope in the backseat.

Honestly, I was a lot more shady than the dealer.

We drove out to take a picture of this gloriously rainbowed awning outside a general store called Hammer’s that I saw on the test drive, then turned around and parked back on the lot.

We had ourselves a deal.

I called the number left on the dash and set up a test drive. Later that afternoon I met a Jamaican guy back on the lot and he got out of his car while talking on his cell, walked over to me, and dropped the key in my hand without making eye contact or breaking stride in his phone conversation.

I loved the way it drove but noticed a small lurch in the engine while idling. Felt suspiciously like a timing belt issue, which is the absolute very last thing I need to deal with before driving some near 4,000 miles across the country towing a trailer. Asked him what he could tell me about timing belt maintenance and he kept cutting me off saying, “this a good car man!”

PASS