Daughter — 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

I was on a road trip a few years ago that took me west through the entire state of Iowa where I discovered the state is divided into two horizontal stripes. The bottom half is green, and the top half is blue, with occasional dark shapes and textures interrupting the horizon like cattle, trees, and farm building silhouettes. Two-track dirt roads intersected with the narrow county highway that passed through the small town I was in. It included a two-pump gas station, one unleaded, one diesel, a small general store where I bought a green and yellow t-shirt that said ‘kiss a corn grower today’, a garage structure servicing large trucks and farm machinery, a huge pile of irrigation equipment that was disappearing into tall grass, and a blacksmith shop. I could hear a sledgehammer banging iron and saw an orange glow with occasional sparks flying out of the door. Much of the ground surrounding these places was packed dirt, stained with oil, gasoline, and other industrial fluids.

After refueling, I took one of the two-track roads out into a field with all my windows open. I stopped, got out and was surrounded by late summer corn way over my head. It was unsettling, like when I get lost in a maze and think I’ll never find my way out, or when I can’t immediately locate the car in a multilevel parking ramp because I forgot where I parked. I imagined Iris Dement singing Our Town, or Leaning on the Everlasting Arm because the melancholy was thick. I thought about home and my family, but they weren’t anywhere near me, so I got back in the car and tried to drive away from the discomfort, but couldn’t because then I thought about the painting American Gothic.

My knowledge of Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic has been incorrect from the start. I never bothered to learn the full story behind the painting. My American Art history professor must have spoken about it, but I don’t remember what he said, and I’ve made huge assumptions about what I thought the painting depicted. I assumed Wood somehow discovered this married couple on their farm one day while out exploring and asked them if he could sketch them. They agreed to pose for him, but he’d have to come back later. So, he showed up to sketch them at the specified time but had to wait. He probably sat on their front porch until they were finished with their afternoon bible study at the kitchen table. It was hot, humid, and quiet except for the cicadas and the mumbling he could hear through the screen door.

None of that happened though. It isn’t a portrait of a husband and wife at all, it depicts a father and daughter. Wood came across this house randomly with a fellow artist and felt moved to draw it. Then later asked his family dentist and his sister to pose for him. They weren’t even in the same room. They were sketched separately. That’s how he constructed his painting. He wasn't documenting an existing situation. He assembled separate elements and combined them to form this open-ended story about fictional people in Iowa.

Regardless of Grant Woods intent, or my assumptions, the painting makes me uncomfortable. Maybe it’s because the pitchfork automatically implies poking, or stabbing. It also makes me think of ‘children of the corn’ and these two look like they could be involved somehow, controlling the children without words, just coded eye movements—sending out the ‘corn’ herds to track down trespassers that stray into their fields. Someone might have pulled over, gotten out to stretch their legs and entered the rows of corn to find shade one hot summer afternoon. They thought they were far enough away from the farmhouse that they wouldn’t be noticed, but they miscalculated how easy it is to see movement in the distance on most Iowa farms. The children were summoned and they congregated quickly and rushed from the barn into the fields almost like a single organism. Locating the unaware intruders without even making their presence known, they stopped abruptly like a roadrunner. They quietly encircled their prey and emerged from the corn in slow motion, blinking simultaneously and silent.

Songs :: Our Town and Leaning on the Everlasting Arm by Iris DeMent, and Revelator by Gillian Welch