[Photo by Jae Song]

Jae and I decided to spend Christmas Day exploring the country around Marfa.  We drove down to Big Bend National Park and through its many splendors, often following the course of the Rio Grande.

Jae stopped often to take photographs.  He got obsessed with the windmills used to haul up water from deep wells.

We passed through Terlingua, a ghost town at the site of what used to be a cinnabar mine — cinnabar is the mineral from which mercury is extracted.  There were ruins of old adobe structures and rusted machinery, dating as far back as the 1880s, spread out over the landscape.  Wim Wenders used the location in Paris, Texas.  The place had a mournful air.

In general, though, the countryside we saw was exhilarating.

When we got back to Marfa we discovered that even Padre’s was not serving food, which meant we had to race to the local gas station convenience store before it closed (at 7pm) to find something to eat.  It was literally the only choice.

We picked up some spicy chicken nuggets and some burritos which we heated in the motel microwave.  It was not the extravagant Christmas dinner we had envisioned, but it was just fine.  When there’s no food at the inn, you make do as you can.

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I’d brought along a few Christmas presents so Jae and I could have something to open on Christmas morning.  The rest I left at home to be opened upon our return.

Below Jae poses outside our motel rooms with my gift to him — a book of full-size reproductions of Winsor McCay’s Liittle Nemo Sunday pages:

It’s a book almost as big as Texas.  Jae gave me something even more impressive — two nearly pristine albums of 78s by Bing Crosby:

I’ve ordered a special cartridge and stylus from Japan in order to be able to play them on my turntable.

My sister Lee and her family gave me a stunning Taschen book with reproductions of pages from various illuminated manuscripts:

Cotty Chubb gave me a set of Thelonious Monk’s complete recordings for Prestige — lots of jazz magic to be discovered therein:

All in all, it was a cheerful and slightly surreal start to Christmas Day.

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I had an idea that it would be fun to spend Christmas in Marfa, Texas.  Jae and I drove there from Tombstone on Christmas Eve.  I had somehow gotten the notion that Marfa was the sort of tourist destination that would attract holiday revelers from distant places and welcome them festively.  I could not have been more wrong.

It was pretty much dead.  The cool restaurants were closed for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  The bar and grill at the fancy hotel in Marfa — the El Paisano, where the cast of Giant stayed when filming nearby — was closed.  The uncool restaurants were closed, too.  Even the Dairy Queen was closed, and when a town’s Dairy Queen is closed, that town is existentially closed.

Jae and I managed to find a bar called Padre’s that was serving food, simple fare but good, and it had a small but attractive selection of beers on tap.  The bar was located in a big room with a stage and a dance floor, but there was only a tiny crowd in attendance on Christmas Eve — there was no live music and nobody was dancing.

The place had no heat working whatsoever — it was like hanging out in a cold storage locker.  The bartenders wore heavy coats as they went about their work — the patrons were dressed in warm-weather clothes.  Is this a Texas thing — freezing in bars?

We stuck around until the chattering of our teeth became distracting then headed back to our motel.  Marfa is a charming little place, but it’s not a place you want to find yourself at Christmas as an out-of-town visitor.

Jae and I motored into Tombstone, Arizona on the morning of our second day on the road.

Tombstone is a remarkably well-preserved late 19th-Century frontier town but every inch of it has been commercialized in the cheapest and ugliest ways imaginable.  If you squint you can get a clear sense of the scale and architecture of the old town, but the glare of tacky commerce is otherwise blinding.

The O. K. Corral, near which the legendary gunfight occurred, has been enclosed within a big shed-like building, so the owners can charge for the privilege of standing on the famously blood-stained spot. We declined to do so.

Tombstone used to be a wide-open town, and it still has its share of frontier-themed saloons, but they shut down early these days, and of course you can’t smoke in them.  All you can do is drink a few beers and imagine what the joints were like in more rambunctious times.

The whole town pretty much closes for business after 9pm.  When the streets are dark you have another opportunity to imagine the town as it used to be, physically at least — though the saloons stayed open around the clock once upon a time.  The town in its heyday was never as dark as it is today at 10pm.

We visited the legendary Boothill Graveyard on the edge of town, with its wry inscriptions on the grave markers, invariably detailing some violent form of death.

We had some very bad, disgracefully bad, food for lunch in a small cafe, and some acceptable food for dinner at Big Nose Kate’s Saloon, where a big cowboy band played decent music.

Kate was a prostitute and sometime companion of Doc Holliday.  She never owned a saloon — the one that bears her name now used to be The Grand Hotel.

My favorite moment on our visit to Tombstone occurred outside Big Nose Kate’s.  I’d stepped out to have a smoke and saw two very old locals, a man and woman, in cowboy hats doing the same.  The woman said to the man, “Well, Bill, we’ve made it to another Christmas.”

“Yep,” he said.  “That’s a good thing.”

She said, “It’s the first step towards making it to the next one.”

The Crystal Palace Saloon, outside of which Virgil Earp was shot and disabled, had a terrific band doing rock covers but it played so loud for the handful of patrons in the cavernous room that we had to flee after a few songs.

Tombstone is an interesting place to have seen — its Bird Cage Theatre, a mostly intact Old West low-life variety venue, is particularly evocative — but I won’t be going back to the town any time soon.

[Panoramic photos by Jae Song]

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