To Marfa, on a Tuesday in December

Writer Dan Keane does it again!: "I am typing now in the young writer's stereotypical cold New York apartment and struggling mightily to keep this feature story from melting into a love letter." Keane's newest article appears in the Austin Chronicle. As usual, he paints a vivid picture of town and the current goings-on balanced with the consequences of such, and the local view. This time Keane expands the discussion with the addition of historical information bj (before Judd), tracking the tenuous security of an isolated town.

"Meanwhile, the town of Marfa was slowly drying up. Its population had peaked during World War II, when an airbase east of town had filled the restaurants, bars, and hotels with flyboys. After the war came a bitter drought that crippled the local ranching industry during the 1950s. There was a memorable summer in 1955, when Liz Taylor and James Dean came to town to film Giant, but as each year came and went, more families left than arrived, and the kids grew up and moved away. The Seventies oil boom drew families up to Midland and Odessa for work. The town's two doctors retired and passed away, the two pharmacists closed up shop. The only dentist committed suicide. For their medical visits local residents crossed the pass to Alpine or drove to El Paso and Midland, and their shopping dollars followed. The Safeway closed, the dry cleaners closed, the drive-in closed.

Glenn Garcia is a Marfa native who hired on at Marfa National Bank as a new college graduate in the late 1970s. At the time, he says, he felt like he got the last job in town. He is now the bank's senior vice-president. "People were not moving in to Marfa. And the young folks, they really had to move out. There wasn't any industry here to sustain them or keep them home," he remembers. "Marfa was really slipping. We were going downhill fast...""

Full article, click here.