Marfa to Maine

Henry and I were hitching a ride to El Paso Airport with Sean and his two children. BB was staying another day in Marfa then flying to Cincinnati for a shoot. She drove us to Sean's house. The truck windshield was lacquered with hard slick ice and the morning sky was black and desert-cold. At Sean's we stowed bags in his 1985 Mercedes diesel wagon, then set off--2 fathers, 3 children--across the desert as the light came up, clear dawn. A pale sky at first. The highway unspooled an endless ribbon of ice, white as the gleam on a hockey rink.

It looked like a frozen river. After an hour the sky was deep blue and cloudless, except for a single spun cloud, just north of Valentine. No traffic but we passed hulks that had careened off the highway during the night and were hung in ditches or crumpled in the yellow fields.

Sean was quiet at the wheel, focused on the treachery of ice. One of the children was quietly and thoroughly car-sick, while the other two were absorbed by a car-race game, Asphalt 8: Airborne .

At Van Horn, there were options: the dreary & depressing truck-stop or the crowded, filthy truck-stop. We went for dreary & depressing. I got coffee, the little girl used the restroom and the boys pleaded for snacks. A herd of eighteen-wheelers, stranded all night, were rumbling back to life as we slipped through and joined the Interstate, which was dry and clear. We passed the town of Sierra Blanca which seen from the highway at 75 mph always looks to me like poverty written on a landscape. I-10 is one of those massive engineered "defense highways" that seem imposed on the country. It handles the stark, meagre West Texas landscape ruthlessly, like a conqueror would; like an imperial master. We had rejoined the careening, mainline of American life. Everything was faster now and had an aspect of danger and nothing was fresh.

Sean got us to ELP in plenty of time. Henry and I pulled our bags and said goodbye to our friends who had a couple hours before their flight and were heading to the H&H Carwash, the best place in town for Tex-Mex, and we wished we could join them.

Instead we headed into the hectic terminal and an argument. Before we left Marfa, United Airlines had texted me that our flight was delayed 90 minutes, without mentioning that our bags still needed to be checked in an hour before our original flight time.
Now the agent at the counter was insisting she couldn't put our bags on the flight, which wasn't leaving for an hour and fifteen minutes. And regulations meant we had to travel with our bags, but we wouldn't be able to get on another flight out of El Paso for three days, since everything was overbooked.
I like to think it was because I was calm, polite, and persistent that she relented at last, but maybe it was Henry looking so bewildered and concerned that wore her down. At the last moment she grabbed our bags, heaved them on the conveyor belt, and shouted at us to 'run for the gate!'. We did, and made our flight to Houston. We were worried we would miss the connection to Chicago, but that was delayed too, and at Houston we had time to check out the statue of George H. Bush. He's in a pose that was de rigeur for candidates of the era: suit jacket slung over one shoulder, sleeves rolled up, tie blowing in the wind, a tousled look. I believe it all originates in images of Bobby Kennedy in '68.
                  It's a weird statue. As weird as anything in Marfa, certainly.

Our flight from Chicago to Portland was delayed but we had a couple of United Club passes so spent a not-bad three hours lounging in leather chairs, trying unsuccessfully to download Asphalt 8 to my iPhone. The kid-friendly barman whipped up multicolored juice drinks for Henry, topped off with little plastic swords stuck with blood-red maraschino cherries. Our flight into Maine was rough and bouncy and it was snowing as we landed. The plane sat out on the runway 45 minutes before they plowed enough snow so that we could approach the gate. Then the jet-bridge wouldn't work--by then it was freezing rain--and that took another twenty minutes to resolve. We were glad to get off the plane at last and very happy to see our two bags dropping out of the chute. We retrieved the car in the parking garage and drove an empty white snow-blown highway the rest of the way home, arriving at 3:20 AM. It was hard to get to sleep, somehow.