Some of my fondest memories of my time here in Marfa have taken place underground.
When I first came to town as a radio intern just over a decade ago, I had a handful of side jobs: busboy, taco cook, recycling sorter and a very short-lived role as T-Shirt Screen Printer for the Marfa Book Company.
The bookstore and the radio station used to be neighbors on a block of Marfa’s main courthouse road where the Hotel Saint George is now. In my early days here, I spent most of my waking hours on that block, but little did I know, until working for the Marfa Book Company, that a hidden world lay just beneath my boots.
Under the Saint George building lies a sprawling, cavernous, dimly-lit basement. The bookstore job entailed spending hours down there alone, stamping prints onto t-shirts in silence, casually approaching something of a zen state.
And it turns out Marfa is full of basements. This amuses me because Marfa has become, for better or worse, an encapsulation of a specific mythic ideal of Texas - i.e., what out-of-state visitors think Texas is supposed to look like - but basements are not really that common in Texas.
There’s one under the Judd Foundation’s Print Building, one under a corner commercial building across from the Hotel Paisano, another under the lovely red brick building that’s home to Mira Marfa.
Peter Stanley, Director of Operations and Preservation for the Judd Foundation, recently showed me around the archives basement. It’s an unassuming, comfortingly sterile space with rows of metal storage shelves, aging grayish-blue carpet and neatly organized boxes of documents. Think Wes Anderson meets the TV show Severance.
Then there are the decidedly pre-Judd elements of the basement - an ornate vault door, the frame above it bearing the name of the mercantile store that was first built on that block around 1887, and notably, a U.S. government-approved “FALLOUT SHELTER” sign.
Stanley chuckled at the Cold War-era concept of a fallout shelter and its inherently naive take on the implications of all-out nuclear war.
“It’s strangely optimistic,” he said. “Like, ‘Oh yea, we can survive this.’”
It’s not just a downtown thing. Basements and designated fallout shelters lie beneath homes and properties all over town.
“I was surprised the first time I saw a basement in Marfa,” Lauren Meader Fowlkes, a local real estate agent with Kuper Sotheby’s International Realty, told me.
Fowlkes said she knows of at least five stand-alone fallout shelters across town - precast concrete structures, by her estimation built by the same company - and many more standard basements. One of her earlier listings - now off the market - was a luxurious northwest side home with a bomb shelter.
Some basements, she said, appear to be the result of people digging up the ground to build their homes out of adobe, then walling off the leftover pit. Others, including one at her parent’s home, date to the era of burning coal for heating.
“So you would’ve had a steam radiator system throughout the house for heat, and those would’ve been run by a coal-fired furnace underneath the house,” she said.
Near the county courthouse, Clark Childers and Adam Walton have turned a backyard fallout shelter at their “The Lincoln” rental property into a sleekly decorated Airbnb unit.
There is something profound to be said about a space rooted in nuclear paranoia being turned into a chic desert getaway, but I don’t know what it is.
Sadly, there is a notable shortage of formally trained Basement Historians here in rural West Texas, so definitive history about why basements have such a widespread presence in Marfa is hard to come by. Until someone takes up the mantle, consider this your guide to Marfa’s hidden world.
Caló
Pos - This word has appeared in many previous episodes under the assumption that it was so self-evident it didn’t need translation. We’re now going to unpack this tiny word’s expansive meaning. It comes from the Spanish word pués, which is a contraction of después (after or then), that means so, then, well or therefore, as in getting to or asking for the dots to be connected or the conclusion or motive to be stated.
Examples in English are “well, you gonna do it or not?” or simply “so what?” Pos in Caló goes further and connects the dots under the assumption, stretched or not, that the conclusion or motive is known to all the interested parties. Pos nada. Pos don’t eat so much chile next time, ese. Pos you know.
Caló is a borderland dialect. You can find more episodes here.
Other recent programming:
The Odessa City Council approved a multimillion dollar investment to update and repair the community’s water system. On Tuesday, the council allocated $25 million to replace major water lines and valves across the city in response to major leaks and citywide water outages. “We have an aging water infrastructure in Odessa that we’ve neglected for decades,” said Odessa Mayor Javier Joven in a press release. “Not taking action simply isn’t an option.” Mitch Borden has more on that here.
Midland officials have approved an agreement between the cities of Abilene and San Angelo that local leaders say will help secure the city’s water supply for a century. The Midland City Council approved a memorandum of understanding with the two West Texas cities to begin developing the infrastructure to tap into a water source outside of Fort Stockton. Mitch Borden has the story here.
On this week’s episode of Nature Notes, learn about the unexpected wonders of a mysterious cave south of Marfa: the San Esteban Rockshelter. Archeologists began digging the cave for evidence of the Big Bend’s earliest people, its Ice Age inhabitants. But the excavation has yielded vivid glimpses into the full sweep of human life here. Find out more here.
High Five
Every Thursday from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m., Lisa Kettyle brings you tunes from around West Texas on her show From The Porch. While she doesn't have any basement specific songs, but she has many for hanging above ground on the porch, waiting for the sun to go down. But, she says they would probably be great for a cozy basement hang, too.
- Corazon - Radio la Chusma
- Gardenia Dreams - Estereoromance
- Summer Sun - Plains
- Amor Eterno - Primo y Beebe
- Drive - Marijuana Sweet Tooth Family Band
You can find archived From the Porch shows and all of our music programming on our Mixcloud.
PSAs
The Tierra Grande Chapter, a non-profit, volunteer organization dedicated to the management of natural park resources within the greater Big Bend Region, is now accepting registrations for the 2024 Texas Master Naturalist Training Course.
The training consists of six Saturday sessions starting in August. Upon completion, participants will receive certification as Texas Master Naturalists.
For more information or to register online, visit TXMN.org/Tierra.
If you have PSAs you want on the air or in this newsletter, head to www.marfapublicradio.org/psa.
