Yesterday, we drove 628 miles, which I don’t really recommend. We traversed a large swath of Texas, all of Arkansas, crossing the Mississippi into Tennessee just before 9 p.m.
When you travel by car, you are not really “in” the places you pass through. You’re a detached observer, an astronaut hurtling through space, adrift. We only stopped twice the entire drive (if you don’t count our hour-plus detour to turn around and retrieve the laundry we left in Nick and Alison’s dryer!) We had our first-ever Buc-ee’s experience and, y’all, it was CRAZY. For those who don’t know, Buc-ee’s is a chain of gas station/convenience stops that originated near Lake Jackson in Texas and has since spread throughout the South. Buc-ee’s prides itself on its clean bathrooms, which were impressive for a busy way station, to be sure. But what floored me was the sheer scale of the place. The size of several football fields smooshed together, the Buc-ee’s we stopped at, East of Dallas, offered a dizzying smorgasbord: BBQ brisket and pulled pork sandwiches prepared in an open kitchen in the middle of the room; hot chicken nuggets and fries in a box; cut fruit and key lime pie in cups; freshly roasted pecans and cashews; oodles of old-fashioned fudge in every flavor; slushies; and tons and tons of merch bearing the company mascot, a wide-eyed beaver wearing a goofy red cap. Anyways, I was totally overwhelmed but somehow all in, sort of like how I’m now a Costco person. I don’t know what to tell you: I contain multitudes.
Anyway, I digress. I’ve been thinking about spaces—public and private—and how they shape our reality. In Austin, we went for an afternoon swim at Barton Springs, an outdoor spring-fed pool that is free during the winter months and early in the morning and late at night in the summer. It was refreshing, warmer than the Pacific but still cool, perfect for an 84-degree February day! Public bathing spaces are common all over the world, in all kinds of cultures, but they’re not really an American thing. That’s a shame, because there is something beautiful about providing a space for people to plunge and sauna and unwind together. It breeds an almost familial connection between perfect strangers: look, my body is similar to yours—we’re all human animals.
In Marfa, our docent for the “Studio Tour” of Donald Judd’s workspaces was a gentle, bearded young man named Aedan with an art history degree from Dartmouth. He and Owen bonded over their love of Mass MOCA and exchanged numbers so they can get coffee when Aedan is next in town. Aedan had been living in Marfa for a few months and was loving his job, but he lamented that even though he was in the middle of all this open space, surrounded by the jagged peaks and scrub of the Chihuahuan Desert, there was nowhere to wander and hike: everything around, as far as the eye could see, was private ranch land.
It’s a particular kind of hubris: to claim vast expanses of land that were forcibly taken from Indigenous peoples who called the landscape home for centuries as private property. It’s also emblematic of U.S. history and culture. We’re obsessed with ownership and expansion (paging Buc-ee’s).
Public spaces are precious—parks and libraries and public schools. They represent human’s hunger and capacity for connection and shared experience. In Austin, Alison took us to see the gorgeous troll sculpture that resides in a local park, one of a series of built by Danish artist Thomas Dambo for his work Trail of 1,000 Trolls, and I can’t wait to go searching for more of these gentle giants in the future. I’m also looking forward to exploring all the accessible nature around North Adams, to using the free snowshoes that are provided at the trailheads that originate at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown and working at the library that’s just down the street from our new (pink) house.
Appreciating public spaces is a good reminder to not take the business of “making a home” too, too seriously. Yes, my home environment is very important to me and I am, of course, excited about refurbishing and decorating 194 East Main in the faded-elegance style she deserves. I look forward to welcoming people into our home for dinner parties and overnight visits.
But it’s the shared spaces that truly create a sense of belonging to a place, and I hope to participate and get involved in, for example, supporting the local library. As we discovered in the Bay Area, making a home is in large part about getting familiar with the surrounding environment, with the hidden corners and magical offerings and soul-expanding pockets of nature and wildness.
Today, we will go and experience the Civil Rights Museum here in Memphis, maybe thrift, and then go looking for live music. I’m enjoying passing through all these new places and drinking up the newness. But I find I am also looking forward to arriving in Massachusetts. I am excited about discovering and creating a new home.
Hagar Writes 
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