#102 / 2009 Tour 5 Spring: Marathon, Texas

GAGE HOTEL, MARATHON, TEXAS

#102

We pulled out of Las Cruces with aching hearts as we said goodbye to so many good friends, made the poetry reading at El Palacio on Tuesday night, and hit the road on Wednesday.

It was a great drive picking up Highway 90 out of Van Horn. I saw a red-headed buzzard, something I've never seen before, and a herd of some weird looking antelope/deer sort of creatures. There were so many in a herd, about 30, that I wonder if someone is raising them like cattle. Don't know.

We made it to Marathon, about 250 miles, in six hours or so. The Gage Hotel there is a great place, a former mansion of some cattle baron, now a swank yet still rustic hotel. What is so great is you can go into the lobby, hang a quick right past the receptionist, and enjoy the TV room with those great overstuffed leather couches and chairs, with a hugh wagon wheel type chandelier overhead. Cable TV. When you get lucky there is no one in there and it's a great place to watch TV. We caught some late night antics last night between Jon Stewart and Keith Oberman.

We took a walk past the old mansions in the area and came upon this really original place called Eve's Garden and B&B. I quote from there website:

Eve’s Garden is an organic Bed and Breakfast and Ecology Resource Center, located in the beautiful high mountain desert of West Texas, at the gateway to Big Bend National Park, in Marathon, Texas. Eve’s Garden is a research level organic gardening demonstration site and an urban hacienda, combining to provide a comfortable Bed and Breakfast environment and a conversational forum to address issues regarding the ecology we live in.

Every effort has been made to combine elements of “art”, “architecture”, and “ecology” in the layout and construction of this unusually progressive piece of work. A large amount of recycled content, strawbale buildings, paper adobe/fiber cement buildings, high Mexican contemporary color treatments, and a focus on locally produced food, conspire to create an aura of thoughtfulness.

“Thoughtfulness” — this is our goal — to motivate our guests to pursue the projects they have in their minds, and recognize that they can make a difference.

Well the site and lot are certainly different. It looks like a movie set with all these podlike structures like so many big mushrooms in various stages of completion, and painted garishly in bright colors to look like crayola mosques. In the back of the lot are enormous stacks of drying concrete blocks, building materials, cement mixers, and about a dozen projects going on simultaneously. It's quite a site in this tiny little town.

The van is running like a dream, the strongest it's ever been. I just can't believe my good fortune. I'll have to do 250 miles every day to get to the Jazz Fest in New Orleans. That might not happen, but the trip will be great regardless. I am going to report on my return to the old mansion I used to work in when it was renovated into a hostel. It was in the Ninth Ward, the Bywater diststrict, near the canal.

I'm told the Bywater area didn't get hit as bad as the Ninth Ward on the other side of the canal. We'll find out. There is a tease of rain in the air and clouds today. Can't remember the last time I got rained on. And I don't think I'm going to be cold anymore. We slept on top of the covers last night at our urban campsite across from the Gage Hotel.