Tomahawk — Field Notes — craig davidson

**Marfa, Texas** :: Image – Google Earth

I’ve never been to Texas. My wife has visited Texas a few times, her parents lived there decades ago, our daughter has a good friend outside Dallas, and I know someone who spends half the year somewhere in the state. I’ve only heard stories about it, or watched movies and television shows based there. I’ve seen a lot of images over the years too, horrifying and soothing. I’ve read articles about Austin, and I used to watch Austin City Limits frequently. When I see pictures of Marfa’s main streets though, it feels like a bunch of small Montana towns I know — Dutton, Havre, and Big Timber — some with a few hundred people, and some with a couple of thousand.

I was listening to a podcast and the show’s celebrity guest mentioned Marfa, Texas. He’d been there recently and spoke about how much it’s changed from when he visited a few decades ago. It’s become a remote outpost for artists and galleries, initiated by Donald Judd in the 1970’s, who moved in and shifted its energy. Even with that kind of contemporary change, I still wonder how anything can be sustained in towns that size. Then I remember that most small towns didn’t begin because of retail opportunities for the residents, or tourists like me, unless they have a Corn Palace, or a giant truck stop near the highway. They exist because it’s a place for the people who live nearby to drop off crops, buy propane, and replenish their water supply — they’re literal weigh stations. If you look to the edges of the towns, there’s usually a cluster of silos, and depending on the size, maybe even a few clusters of silos. Sometimes the smallest towns only include a hardware store, a small tavern, maybe a cafe, and a couple of gas pumps. If it’s larger, there might be a post office, a bank, a courthouse, a Chinese, or Mexican restaurant, with surprisingly great food, and an insurance agent who occupies a vacant storefront one day a week because they travel from town to town.

If a local farmer, or rancher, drives through and decides to see if anybody they know is there, they rarely need to go inside anywhere to check who’s there. They know just by identifying the trucks parked out front. People often work alone when they live in isolated places like this, so conversation is welcome, even craved sometimes. You might see two trucks parked in the middle of main street next to each other, facing opposite directions, without their engines running, while the occupants talk. Conversations that last awhile and typically revolve around the weather, commodity prices, their families, and updates on the repairs each of them has been making to their equipment. It’s hard to keep everything that’s on their minds to themselves. It’s hard for their spouse, or their kids too, to be burdened with the same worries and frustrations day after day, so, they drive through town looking for others to talk with.

So, I can imagine what Marfa might feel like without visiting it. The air might be thicker and smell different than in Dutton. The color of the soil might differ, construction materials and building silhouettes might be different too because it’s Texas, not Montana. Except for all of the painted stars, cement stars attached to exterior walls, and forged steel stars hanging from mobiles around Marfa, I think its heartbeat is just like Dutton’s.

Songs :: Transcendental Blues by Steve Earle, Out of Touch by Hall and Oates, My Hometown by Bruce Springsteen, All My Days by Alexi Murdoch, and On The Nature Of Daylight by Max Richter

Tomah Train Station :: Photographer Unknown — **Tomah Train Station** :: Photographer Unknown

When the train approached the station thirty-seven years ago I was excited. I was at most of the stops we made crossing the country because I’d never been to any of those places. We were in Wisconsin and I missed the conductor’s announcement, but I saw the station sign next to the tracks a half mile out and it said Tomah. I thought the sign was wrong even though I only saw it through part of a moving train window. I assumed it was supposed to read Tomahawk, with the ‘awk’ letters missing. My grandmother, Florence Scott, grew up in Tomahawk, Wisconsin, and I wanted it to be Tomahawk. I even started an ink drawing about it the next day titled Tomah while we where in Ohio en route to Rhode Island. Eight years later I drove by the Interstate 94 exit sign to Tomah on my way to Chicago from Minneapolis. I’d been mistaken for years. If laptops, Wi-Fi and Google had existed while I was on the train in 1983, I might have discovered my assumption was wrong, but those things didn’t exist then.

Whenever I imagine her hometown and her childhood with her sisters Georgia and Belle, it’s mostly fiction. I don’t remember most of her history there, but I know what Wisconsin feels like because we live near it and spend time there. I know what a small town with a lake nearby feels like too because I’ve lived in similar towns and watched TV shows like The Walton’s and the opening to the Andy Griffith Show when I was a kid. Maybe she had experiences like that. My parents told me that she was strong, direct, and didn’t suffer fools. I remember her hospitality and grace, like when she made me poached eggs for breakfast, how she managed family during holiday dinners and Easter egg hunts, and when my cousin and I picked apples from her tree on Saturday and were rewarded with root beer floats from A&W. I remember other moments too, but never how my grandmother felt, or how her childhood and teen years shaped her.

She visited me in a dream when I was an adult and long after she died. She wore a distinctive blue and white floral-patterned dress that I remembered from my childhood. When I told my mom about the dream, she remembered that dress too. My grandmother and I were in a small dimly lit room. We looked at each other and after a minute, she walked over and gently touched my arm. I can still feel her hand and and remember how the hazy light warmed and brightened slightly when she told me “everything is going to be alright.”

Songs :: Tell Me All the Things You Do and The Way I Feel by Fleetwood Mac, White Lily by Laurie Anderson and Here by David Byrne