Another Day in Marfa

Somewhere in West Texas is an area referred to as The Big Empty. I could google it, I guess, but I’d almost rather not know where The Big Empty starts and where it ends. I just like the idea that it’s out there somewhere.

If you’ve ever spent time in Northern New Mexico, then you know that the sky becomes your focus. Shortly after moving there (from San Francisco), I began to mark the passage of the days and the seasons by the sky. If I woke on a winter night, I could step outside and know how far off the sunrise by the position of Orion.

You find you spend a great deal of each day unconsciously looking at the sky, which can be so achingly blue the back of your eyes feel bruised. Looking at the sky in New Mexico, you come to know the infinite void and you are humbled by it. Friends remark, ‘did you see the sky today at 4? Have you ever seen clouds like that?’ Some baking summer days, clouds form behind the Sangre de Cristo mountains in great roiling billows. You stand awestruck watching them grow. The clear high desert light strikes their forms and they seem to glow from within.

And so what does this have to do with Marfa? The sky. Here it is unbelievably vast and you can feel lost under its expanse from one horizon to the next. A feeling like vergito or agoraphobia sets me reeling as I drive from Marfa east to Alpine. It is a lighter, thinner blue. Yesterday thunder clouds formed in the afternoon, a long series of impossibly large, oblong clouds, all of similar shape, which marched to the horizon, their bellies dark grey, their crowns lit by the setting sun, white and pink and orange. I arrange my furniture so that wherever I sit in my new, strange house, I see the sky.

Over a decade ago, when I still lived in San Francisco, I flew to Albuquerque, got in my rental car and made the drive north on Highway 14 to Santa Fe. I turned on the radio and Rickie Lee Jones was talking about the desert sky, sampled from a radio interview for Orb’s song. She nailed it.

Today I’m thinking about bugs. I’ve got nothing better to do than a house full of paintings to finish and the website projects that keep me afloat….so, bugs.

As I slowly adjust myself to living in a town of 2121 pop., one of the most difficult adjustments is to the downright excessive number of bugs here. (I’m thinking Camille Paglia got it right and that, contrary to arcadian dreams, nature is simply the over-the-top production of slithering, crusty, gooey life, without regard to relevance or necessity.) We have blessedly passed through the great fly and mosquito invasion and now are facing a proverbial plague of grasshoppers. (Why is it no matter where I move, things get downright biblical?) Grasshoppers are actually quite beautiful if you can get past how much they resemble clockwork creatures. We have an all black version, very arty and sophisticated. There are small spring green ‘hoppers with carmine stripes on their legs. Then there are the nuclear-accident sized ‘hoppers, also green, with complex speckled patterning on their backs, like Islamic tilework, in brilliant red and brown.

To step into my yard is to invite a great flurry of jumping, clattering grasshoppers which, in their panic to get out of the way, land in your hair, attach themselves to your pant legs. They can also, like spiders (more about them later) sit very patiently: on the hood of my car, on top of the kitchen faucet, clinging to drapes. And while we’re on the subject of ‘clinging,’ I woke in the middle of the night to visit the bathroom and there waiting for me on the canvas which hides all the boxes I have yet to unpack was a 10-inch long stick bug, slowly waving its head from side to side. My only response was to utter, ‘aw, come on!’ (Yes, I’m a big fan of Arrested Development.)

Now, spiders. My theory about spiders is that they don’t like to be anywhere there is a lot of activity. So my way of trying to rid the house of spiders is to periodically visit anywhere I think they might be hiding and create a ruckus. If this doesn’t work, I get out the vacuum cleaner. My friend, Erika, who was recently visiting me, has a different approach: catch and release.

One night during her stay, I hear her call from the guest bedroom, ‘uh, david. come here.’ Sitting very serenely on the wall was one of the biggest spiders I’ve seen. No way was I getting near it. It took all my willpower to get within six feet of it to verify Erika’s judgment that yes, indeed, this was a big spider, black with thick legs and a sickeningly protuberant body. But Erika very calmly got a glass and a postcard (invitations to gallery openings do have their uses), popped the glass over the spider, slid the postcard between the glass, the spider and the wall, and there you have it: her catch and release method. No doubt much more effective than my method: if I just make a lot of noise and movement they’ll go away.