"Western Civilization", Dallas Morning News
By MARIANA GREENE / The Dallas Morning News
MARFA, Texas – Emigrés and weekenders bristle at comparisons to Santa Fe, N.M. Not Santa Fe today, but the dusty adobe village at the beginning of its meteoric rise to cool and hot. The handwriting is on the wall, but Marfa's newly arrived gentry won't read it.
Not that there's anything wrong with Santa Fe, except that it's expensive and overrun with tourists and carpetbaggers.
Marfa bears many similarities to Santa Fe 30 years ago: remote location, vintage adobe architecture in various stages of ruin, discovered by artists and writers followed by cosmopolitan people of means. Then there's the rugged natural beauty, an indefinable light, the gentle mountain ranges, celebrities in blue jeans, a boutique hotel, chichi restaurants with odd hours and highbrow art festivals.Except for modern art cognoscenti, even Texans are vague about exactly where Marfa is on the map in their heads. It's a three-hour drive from El Paso or Midland – south of Fort Davis, west of Alpine, north of Big Bend and smack dab in the middle of drug smugglers' dirt routes between Mexico and big cities to the north. But the time it takes to reach Marfa, once you're bewitched, doesn't matter, whether you're from Dallas, Houston, New York, Los Angeles or London.
After a summer such as this one, it's easy to see why Dallasites gravitate here. Although the thermometer does occasionally climb into the upper 90s and higher, the low, low humidity relieves it. Once night falls in the high desert, the temperature plummets 30 degrees.
Like North Texas, Marfa has droughts. But a few days of rain in August turn the modest hills of Wild Rose Pass into a landscape as green as Ireland and the savannah of the Marfa plain gemlike with cactus blossoms.
Marfa's appeal, however, is more than the weather. Confirmed city people come for a long weekend and, to their surprise, start looking at houses for sale. Others think nothing of buying a 288-square-foot adobe whose roof has caved in and spending years' worth of weekends and vacations making it habitable. Those who can, spend their summers here; others look for ways to commute electronically.
For poets, artists and writers, private foundations have rehabbed and furnished bungalows for you to retreat to (should you be so talented or so lucky to be among the chosen) in order to concentrate on your work.
The locals (old ranching families and a majority Mexican-American working class) are friendly. People wave at one another and greet strangers with a smile and . . . full article w/ pictures
MARFA, Texas – Emigrés and weekenders bristle at comparisons to Santa Fe, N.M. Not Santa Fe today, but the dusty adobe village at the beginning of its meteoric rise to cool and hot. The handwriting is on the wall, but Marfa's newly arrived gentry won't read it.
Not that there's anything wrong with Santa Fe, except that it's expensive and overrun with tourists and carpetbaggers.
Marfa bears many similarities to Santa Fe 30 years ago: remote location, vintage adobe architecture in various stages of ruin, discovered by artists and writers followed by cosmopolitan people of means. Then there's the rugged natural beauty, an indefinable light, the gentle mountain ranges, celebrities in blue jeans, a boutique hotel, chichi restaurants with odd hours and highbrow art festivals.Except for modern art cognoscenti, even Texans are vague about exactly where Marfa is on the map in their heads. It's a three-hour drive from El Paso or Midland – south of Fort Davis, west of Alpine, north of Big Bend and smack dab in the middle of drug smugglers' dirt routes between Mexico and big cities to the north. But the time it takes to reach Marfa, once you're bewitched, doesn't matter, whether you're from Dallas, Houston, New York, Los Angeles or London.
After a summer such as this one, it's easy to see why Dallasites gravitate here. Although the thermometer does occasionally climb into the upper 90s and higher, the low, low humidity relieves it. Once night falls in the high desert, the temperature plummets 30 degrees.
Like North Texas, Marfa has droughts. But a few days of rain in August turn the modest hills of Wild Rose Pass into a landscape as green as Ireland and the savannah of the Marfa plain gemlike with cactus blossoms.
Marfa's appeal, however, is more than the weather. Confirmed city people come for a long weekend and, to their surprise, start looking at houses for sale. Others think nothing of buying a 288-square-foot adobe whose roof has caved in and spending years' worth of weekends and vacations making it habitable. Those who can, spend their summers here; others look for ways to commute electronically.
For poets, artists and writers, private foundations have rehabbed and furnished bungalows for you to retreat to (should you be so talented or so lucky to be among the chosen) in order to concentrate on your work.
The locals (old ranching families and a majority Mexican-American working class) are friendly. People wave at one another and greet strangers with a smile and . . . full article w/ pictures
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