Hagar Writes

Tag: life

  • MASS. MIGRATION

    DAY 9 MARFA > AUSTIN

    (photo of a piece by Narsiso Martinez in Marfa Ballroom)

    Some days—most days, to be exact—pass by in a bit of a blur, like seeing the countryside glide by from the car window.

    Today, we passed the 2,000-mile mark, somewhere just outside of Austin, where we are staying with Alison and Nick and their two awesome boys. The day started early, after a sleepless night for both of us. We fell asleep easily last night, but woke up around three and tossed and turned for many hours. We weren’t unhappy, but we knew we’d be wiped out the next day. I thought about the design of the new kitchen and where to hang the pictures I’d taken down from the gallery wall in the Berkeley living room.

    We finished the Beth’s Dead podcast, which I’d definitely recommend, and listened to a playlist inspired by Trinidad Senolia, a DJ duo out of Los Angeles. We witnessed the lonely Chihuahuan Desert give way to Texas Hill Country with its rolling hills and wineries and oaks, reminiscent of Northern California’s own wine region. I marveled at the infinite cloud formations, and lamented not stopping in Fredericksburg, a touristy town with a serious German vibe and intriguing antique stories and boutiques. When you’re trying to cover this much ground, you have to roll through places you’re curious about without stopping. As discussed in an episode of This American Life we listened to, this might actually be a blessing. Oftentimes, the mystery and intrigue of a thing is much more interesting than the answer or the solution.

    It’s been lovely to be with our Austin family. We got the tour of their ’60s ranch house, had a rooftop margarita, and ate A LOT of delicious barbecue. We sat outside after dinner, on a 70-degree February evening, enjoying the enthusiasm of the boys (and Owen) playing a loosey-goosey version of Dungeons & Dragons. We caught up on friends and work and changes and life.

    Remember that ear worm “Life is a Highway”? Life is a highway/ 
    I wanna ride it all night long    . I’m happy to be staying put with people I love for a couple of nights, but I have always loved traveling and being on the move, winding my way through places I’ve never been before. In fact, though, the song gets it all wrong. Life ISN’T a highway. It doesn’t stretch predictably from point A to B, slicing straight through limestone formations, paved and predictable. Life is a country road, like the ones we drove through in Marfa, potholed and undulating. We don’t actually know where we’re headed or what the Dungeon Master has in store for us—the trick is to stay curious and enjoy the ride.

    [*Disclaimer: written on less than five hours of sleep. Go easy on this tired armchair philosopher.]

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  • DAY 7 MARFA

    We rolled into Marfa last night, after the longest leg of our trip so far—about 511 miles—from the Coronet Cafe in Tucson where we had a lovely parting lunch with Tali all the way to Marfa, with a stop at a medicore Texas steakhouse on the outskirts of El Paso the dining room was decked out with fake, lit-up trees.

    It was dark by the time we rolled into West Texas and we drove past the famous Prada store installation, doing a U-turn to check it out. It was freezing and empty, the storefront lit up like a ghost. The installation was amusing, but much less so than the inky canopy of sky, festooned with stars. West Texas is one of the least light-polluted places on Earth, and it felt that way, disorienting in its emptiness. I was a little rattled after rolling through a Customs and Border Patrol checkpoint and passing several trucks of armed federal officers on the lookout for anyone they didn’t think belonged on this side of the Mexican border. It’s difficult to grasp that there is so much space and so little compassion.

    I have always been curious about Marfa, although what I knew about the place was quite vague. It was an art town in the middle of nowhere, put on the map by an artist I knew very little about: Donald Judd. When Pele came here last year during his school’s Southwest Studies trip, he said it was cool, although he didn’t elaborate , and Margi also encouraged us to make it a stop on our journey.

    I am so glad we’re here. For a variety of reasons, it feels like kismet. (And that’s not just the two artisanal sotol cocktails talking.) We went on two separate tours today: one of Judd’s residence, La Mansana de Chinati, also known as The Block, and later, in the afternoon, of several of his studios. We ended up having a bunch of excellent conversations with our guides and the other guests, some of whom I initially viewed with wariness or suspicion. I found myself repeatedly marveling at the way Judd studiously created a life for himself according to his principles and beliefs and, as we walked around this town of fewer than 1,200 residents with a ridiculously high concentration of hip, stylish stores, cafes, galleries, and restaurants, I felt excited about moving to another town that is being re-enlivened by the arts.

    After the second tour of the day, we popped into the Marfa Public Library to pee. The place was a little slice of heaven, with little kids filling out worksheets that prompted them to write down a food for every letter in the alphabet, the young librarians offering them fruit roll-ups, and two women catching up on the latest in their lives. Around back, there was a barn with books for sale for between one and two dollars and, even though our car is literally bursting at the seams, we couldn’t help but pick up $20 worth of poetry and mysteries and novels. (I am still in awe of Judd’s library which, in addition to containing thousands of books on a galaxy’s worth of topics, housed a few elegant plywood beds where he could curl up with a book whenever the mood struck him.)

    The night ended with Owen and I sitting in a barrel sauna and, once again, geeking out on the night sky, unknowable and unfathomable.

    During our Judd Foundation tours, we befriended a couple from Forth Worth, an architect and a family counselor who is now training to be a death doula. The architect was exasperated with Judd’s obsession with stripping many of the buildings he acquired down to their original adobe skeleton. The material, he lamented, was woefully unstable, a fact borne out by the fact that a large part of the wall surrounding his La Mansana property had collapsed after a powerful windstorm the year before. Adobe, he continued, was impractical, requiring constant upkeep.

    Later, as we were climbing up the stairs to the exquisite, light-filled apartment Judd created above his architecture office shortly before he died, the death doula talked about how traditionally families would come together to fortify and repair their adobe homes every few years, a ritual that reminded me of a village in Japan that we visited where the straw houses were remade collectively by its residents every year. (She also told me about a lady from Tennessee who is brought in to identify the composition of bricks in historical buildings, which she did by licking them. I would LOVE to meet and interview this woman.)

    For obvious reasons, I have been thinking a lot about impermanence, and now I am thinking about adobe. Like so many of us, the Fort Worth architect is concerned with making things last as long as possible. But, as we all know deep down, that’s the very definition of hubris.

    Judd, meanwhile, was fixated on stripping his surroundings down to their bones, eliminating modern comforts like electrical lights and HVAC systems from the buildings he acquired. He wasn’t interested in shielding himself from the elements, from the storms and the heat and the cold. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for his children growing up in those spaces, but I also think it must have been a gift to become comfortable with discomfort.

    Metaphorically, we are all living in adobe houses, whether we like it or not.

  • DAY 5 ENCINITAS > TUCSON

    We left California today. About three hours into our drive, we crossed into Arizona. Borders are arbitrary, especially in this part of the world, where Indigenous peoples made their homes in vast landscapes, often migrating with the seasons and their sources of food. Nevertheless, we crossed into a state whose Latin motto, Ditat Deus (God Enriches) bulldozes over the fact that almost three hundred thousand Native American peoples live here, speaking more than a dozen Indigenous languages. We made a pit stop in Dateland, where we bought a date shake and a bag of honey dates to give as a gift to our friends in Tucson, pointedly ignoring the bedazzled Trump hats and obnoxious bumper stickers.

    It was helpful to listen to Krista Tippett’s interview with Ocean Vuong and to be reminded that our the words we use have the power to shape the world for better or for worse. The future is in your mouth is how he said it. As soon as we got back in the car, I replaced the FUCK YOU in my head with Wow, look at all the magical saguaros and the purple flowers whizzing by. Look at all this unexpected beauty.

    I know that I have the ability to frame this unknown future I’m driving toward. I want to choose the words I use carefully. I want to talk about hope and adventure and opportunity rather than focusing on words like loneliness and fucking-freezing. I don’t want to gloss over everything that’s hard about this moment or broken in this world. But I do believe it’s important to speak hope and wonder into existence.

    Anyway, another day, another visit with a beloved friend. After staying near San Diego for one night with Jessica—the first friend I made in New York, where we were both interns at Ms. Magazine—we are spending tonight with Tali, who left the Bay Area about eight months before us and is now living in a GORGEOUS home in Tucson. We walked the dog, chased the sunset, ate a delicious dinner out with her daughter, talked about life, the good and bad. After bedtime, we’ll talk some more.

    Saguaros, Tali explained as we stood at the Gates Pass viewpoint looking out at the darkening Sonoran Desert, expand and contract depending on how much water is in the soil. How amazing.

    Life contracts, then it expands. Over and over and over.

    There is so much to learn, so much to see, so much to be curious about. There is so much I’ll never know. Oh to be mysterious and humble. Oh, to be like a saguaro.