A Brief History of Doing Nothing in Marfa

We h

ave spent the better part of the last hundred years making everything faster.

We have spent the better part of the last hundred years making everything faster.

Cars got faster. Computers got faster. Coffee got faster. We can have dinner delivered without speaking to another human, listen to almost every song ever recorded without leaving the couch, and send a photograph across the planet before the person standing next to us has seen it.

We have become remarkably good at saving time.

Then, for reasons that are difficult to explain, we get in a car and drive seven hours to Marfa so we can waste some of it.

Beautifully.

A Short and Entirely Unofficial History

Nobody knows exactly when people started doing nothing in Marfa.

Maybe it began when the railroad arrived in the 1880s and somebody had to stand around waiting for the next train.

Donald Judd certainly helped. It's difficult to hurry through acres of art that seem completely unconcerned with whether you understand them.

The Marfa Lights contributed by refusing to appear on demand.

And at some point, somebody sat outside with a drink, watched the sun disappear into the desert, and decided whatever they were supposed to be doing next could wait.

The tradition continues today.

First, You Have to Get Here

Marfa doesn't make doing nothing particularly easy.

Before you can slow down, you have to get here.

From our home in North Texas, it's roughly a seven-hour drive. I've made that drive more times

than I can count now.

And I actually like it.

Of course, seven hours is our path to Marfa. Yours might start in Austin or San Antonio. Maybe you're flying into El Paso and driving east through Valentine. Or landing in Midland and coming down through Fort Davis.

What's your path to Marfa? We wrote about some of the most popular ways to get here, including where to fly, common driving routes, and a few things we've learned from making those drives ourselves.

However you get here, there's a point when the landscape starts changing.

The towns get smaller. The spaces between them get longer. Cell service gets a little less confident.

Eventually the horizon seems to move farther away.

For me, that's usually when Marfa starts.

Not when I pass the city-limit sign.

Before that.

The drive itself creates a kind of transition between wherever I've been and wherever I'm going. By the time I arrive, something has already slowed down.

That might be Marfa's first trick.

Marfa Is Not Particularly Interested in Your Schedule

People arrive in Marfa with plans.

Coffee at 9.

Chinati at 10.

Lunch at noon.

Galleries at 1.

Prada Marfa at 4.

Dinner at 7.

Marfa Lights at 9.

This is completely reasonable.

Marfa finds it adorable.

The restaurant you wanted to visit may be closed. The gallery hours might not line up. Lunch may take longer than expected. Someone you meet over coffee tells you about something you hadn't planned to see.

Then the weather changes.

So you change your plans.

We've even written a 36 Hours in Marfa guide, although one of the central ideas behind it is that you probably shouldn't treat those 36 hours like a hostage negotiation.

Have a plan.

Just don't become emotionally attached to it.

On a recent trip, rain rolled into Marfa and wiped out whatever we thought we were going to do that day.

So we looked east.

It wasn't raining in Alpine.

We changed plans, headed over to Newberry Ranch, and ended up spending a few hours riding quads across roughly 8,000 acres of West Texas ranch-land.

What started as a rainy-day pivot turned into an afternoon of seemingly endless roads, trails and places to explore.

None of it had been on the itinerary that morning.

That was probably the best part.

Sometimes the thing that replaced the plan becomes the thing you remember.

The Ancient Marfa Tradition of Staring at Things

For a town with an international reputation, an impressive amount of the Marfa experience consists of standing around looking at things.

We look at art.

We look at old buildings.

We look down long roads.

We look across the desert.

We look at sunsets.

We drive east of town, stand at the Marfa Lights viewing area, and stare into darkness hoping some mysterious lights decide tonight is our night.

Then we look up.

Marfa sits beneath remarkably dark West Texas skies. On the right night, the Milky Way doesn't

require a telescope, an app or much explanation.

You just need to stand there long enough for your eyes to adjust.

Go outside.

Turn off the lights.

Wait.

Waiting is an increasingly unusual activity.

Marfa is unusually good at it.

We Accidentally Built a House Full of Inefficient Things

When Becca and I created The Milky WayFarer, we weren't sitting around a conference table developing an "analog hospitality strategy."

We were building a place we wanted to spend time in.

Somewhere along the way, we filled it with wonderfully inefficient things.

A record player and a growing collection of vinyl.

Books.

Postcards.

Cruiser bikes.

Mölkky.

Coffee you can weigh, grind and slowly pour water over.

Nearly everything has a faster alternative.

Spotify is faster than vinyl. A text is faster than a postcard. A car is faster than a cruiser bike. And pushing a button is certainly faster than making a pour-over.

But faster isn't always the point.

There's something about participating in a small ritual that makes us remember it.

That's part of why we created Desert Drip, our own coffee for the house, and why there's a take-a-book, leave-a-book library in the living room.

The coffee matters, but so does making it.

The book matters, but so does slowing down long enough to read it.

And maybe this wasn't entirely accidental.

We've written before about being imperfect by design the idea that a place doesn't have to be polished into sameness to feel considered.

Looking back, I think some of that started with Marfa itself.

Some of This Is Personal

I've spent most of my professional life around technology.

Technology is very good at removing friction.

That's often the point.

We build systems so things happen faster. We automate repetitive work. We reduce latency. We eliminate waiting.

I've spent a good part of my career thinking about exactly those kinds of problems.

Which might help explain why I've become fascinated by a place that seems completely uninterested in optimization.

Marfa has friction.

It's far away.

Things close.

Plans change.

The weather changes.

The train comes through town whether you're sleeping or not.

The desert gets dusty.

The stars operate on their own schedule.

And somehow those aren't always bugs.

Sometimes they're features.

My first trip to Marfa was in 2012, although the idea of Marfa had been sitting in my head for years before that. I'd first read about this strange little town in an inflight magazine and filed it away as somewhere I wanted to see someday.

Eventually, someday happened.

I came with my family, including my two sons, who were three and ten at the time. And if you asked me now what happened on that first trip that made Marfa stick, I couldn't give you one answer.

Because it wasn't one thing.

It was a feeling.

There was the art, but not only the kind hanging inside galleries. There were massive works sitting outside in the landscape, human-made objects occupying an almost absurd amount of space, with the desert and mountains stretching out behind them.

There was the food.

There were the people.

There was the light.

The contours of the mountains.

The desert landscape.

And those enormous West Texas skies that seem to make everything underneath them look a little smaller.

But there was something else I didn't have a name for then.

Imperfection.

Marfa felt human-made.

Not polished into sameness. Not designed to remove every rough edge. Old adobe showed its age. Things weathered. Paint faded. Buildings had stories written on them. Art could be enormous and important and still sit outside collecting dust.

The natural and human-made things didn't seem to compete with one another.

They became part of the same landscape.

I think that's what stayed with me.

Not a particular restaurant. Not one piece of art. Not a photograph I took.

A sense of place.

I left.

But Marfa didn't entirely leave with me.

Years later, I came back.

And then I kept coming back.

Eventually Becca and I got married here.

Eventually we built a house here.

And somewhere along the way, Marfa stopped being somewhere we visited and became part of the rhythm of our lives.

Looking back, I don't think that happened because there was so much to do.

I think it happened because Marfa gave me enough space to notice how it felt.

Boredom Used to Be Normal

There was a time when an empty ten minutes was simply an empty ten minutes.

You waited for someone.

You sat on a porch.

You looked out a window.

You drank coffee.

You listened to an entire side of a record partly because changing the song required standing up.

Now we carry something in our pocket specifically designed to make sure an empty ten minutes never happens again.

I'm not particularly nostalgic about this.

I like technology.

I like having every song ever recorded in my pocket. I like GPS. I like knowing whether the restaurant I'm walking toward is actually open.

And after seven hours in the car, I very much appreciate knowing exactly where I'm going.

But I wonder whether we've gotten so good at eliminating empty moments that we occasionally eliminate the possibility of something filling them naturally.

Marfa has a way of putting some of that empty space back.

Not through a wellness retreat.

Not because someone confiscated your phone.

Mostly because there's a very large desert outside and, for once, you don't have anywhere you absolutely need to be.

The Most Underrated Amenity in Marfa

Time.

Not another gallery.

Not another restaurant.

Not another attraction.

Time.

A morning when breakfast can take an hour.

An afternoon when you ride a bike without really deciding where you're going.

Twenty minutes sitting outside because the temperature is perfect.

Reading fifty pages instead of five.

Listening to the second side.

Making another cup of coffee.

Watching your kids attempt to rope a plastic steer in the backyard.

Every once in a while, I'll actually book The Milky WayFarer for ourselves.

One of my favorite things to do when we're there is sit outside on the red gliding bench with a cup of Desert Drip and watch the morning light move across Marfa.

That's pretty much the entire activity.

But if the timing and the wind are right, there's a bonus.

Across the road, Bordo will be baking bread in their outdoor wood-fired oven. Eventually the wind picks up the smell of baking bread and wood smoke and carries it across the road toward the house.

So I sit there.

Coffee in hand.

Morning light.

Bread baking somewhere across the road.

Nothing particularly happening.

And nowhere I need to be.

You won't find that on a list of the ten best things to do in Marfa.

You can't really schedule it, either.

The bread has to be baking.

The wind has to cooperate.

And you have to be sitting there long enough to notice.

That's probably why it's one of my favorite things.

None of this sounds particularly impressive when you put it on an itinerary.

That's probably why it works.

Doing Nothing Is Still Doing Something

Maybe we've mislabeled all of this.

Sitting outside isn't nothing.

Reading isn't nothing.

Making coffee isn't nothing.

Walking without a destination isn't nothing.

Talking for an hour isn't nothing.

Looking at stars isn't nothing.

They're only "nothing" if the measurement is what you accomplished.

Marfa doesn't seem particularly interested in that measurement.

Maybe doing nothing isn't the absence of an experience.

Maybe it's finally leaving enough room for one to happen.

That's something we've tried to carry into The Milky WayFarer itself.

Not by giving guests less to do.

Quite the opposite.

There are bikes to ride. Games to play. Records to listen to. Books to read. Coffee to make. Art to see. Restaurants to visit. Mountains to drive toward.

But none of them are particularly urgent.

They're there when you want them.

And if you spend an entire afternoon sitting outside instead?

Good.

Leave a Little White Space

Come to Marfa with a list.

There's nothing wrong with having plans.

See the art.

Eat well.

Drive out to the lights.

Look at the stars.

Take the picture in front of Prada.

Do the things you came all this way to do.

Just leave a little white space.

An afternoon without somewhere to be.

A morning without an alarm.

Twenty minutes on a porch when you could be doing something else.

Put on a record.

Make the coffee the unnecessarily complicated way.

Ride the bike instead of driving.

Look up.

Marfa will figure out what to do with the rest.

Until next time, Becca and Rob.