Emvergeoning

Who’s up for a little surprise road trip? I know I always am… sometimes maybe just a little too much surprise and not enough road trip, but hey.. So I approached Ed Saavedra Saturday night with a plan.. I needed to go out to the area around Marfa and the big bend region to do some shooting for a piece in my upcoming solo show “invisible houses,” at i2i gallery in March. As it turns out he was up for the trip. We decided to leave on Monday and come back sometime on Weds… soo traverse yourself along down old I-10 for about 6 hours and you hit the beautiful hole in the ground called Balmorhea . heres a photo.

this place was amazing. check out the waters.

i mean.. wow. the springs keep the pool at 73 degrees year round. just cold enough to be cold in the summer and just warm enough to be inviting in the winter. poor us, we didnt have towels of any kind and the sun was setting, so drip drying was out of the question as the winds started kicking up. Saying goodbye to the inviting waters we traveled onward to the Davis Mtns where we would camp for the night.. (click link below for the rest of the story)

We made our way into the Davis Mountains national park right as the sun was setting, finding the most remote camping spot possible that we could back a car up to, we pitched our tent, got out the portable record player, and started a fire.

proof:

we even cooked (i mean warmed up) cookies on the grill.

this is where our story gets weird.. after about an hour or so of gathering little broken twigs around our site to keep the fire burning and listening to old Willie Nelson records.. we were approached.. not by a man, park ranger, or giraffe, but by a deer. With really big ears, and no obvious fear of humans. It circled around us for nearly 20 minutes before getting within ten feet of us and we decided it was beginning to feel a bit threatening. I started trying to photograph it with my flash, surprisingly, my camera would not focus on the deer, nor did it make it any less forward in its approach to us. Beginning to get worried we calmly asked the deer to leave, that one of us, or it was going to get in trouble. somehow. It just didn’t seem right for us to hang out in this current political climate. After another 5 minutes or so the deer hung its head low and walked away dejected. We felt bad, but were happy to know it wasn’t going to get in trouble with headquarters. heres the one blurry photo i was able to get off with my camera. After the experience we tenderly looked upon him as our “spirit deer” trying to guide us.

Once in Marfa we had been sent on a scavenger hunt to take a photo of an old friend of Andy Benavides, a man by the name of Brian Bosworth, aka Camp. Knowing only that he lived in an old church and that it was in Marfa somewhere we decided it couldn’t be to hard to find him. Asking the first person we met (Jonathan @ Ballroom Marfa) yielded a yes, i know him, and a vague reference to where his building was (about a block from ballroom Marfa) .. It didn’t take us long to find the church with a giant orange horseshoe out front of it. After a tentative knock, we were greeted by Camp, and subsequently invited into his happy and unusual studio/home he shares with his wife Buck. After a little while of exchanging stories and talking about life in Marfa they invited me and Ed to sleep in the Church that night instead of out in the cold wind and predicted rain. heres a photo of the church :

Shortly after packing our stuff into the old church chapel, we heard the sound of a trombone/horn being honked 3 ways to Sunday.. lo and behold we walked outside and met this guy :

This vehicle had 4 maybe 5 maybe 6 horns built into it somehow, all playing different notes from a compressed air tank strapped in the back seat and a compressor plugged into the dashboard. Check him out:

a shot from inside the church in the morning..

alright soo.. we had lots of fun, lots of tequila (thanks Camp!) and we met a bunch of great people. I also finished a big part of my upcoming show at the i2i gallery. Those images are super secret, and will blow you away. but you must wait. like willow. or robin hood. wait. patience is a virtue. heres a bunch of pretty brightly colored lichen on some rocks in the davis mountains to tide you over.

Good night and Good luck.

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