Based on the recommendation from my tour guide earlier in the day I head to the Lost Horse Saloon. He told me it’s where the locals go.

I order a beer from the young bartender who seems a little standoffish. I’m  accompanied at the bar by a guy wearing a cutoff tshirt and a braided  ponytail and two dogs who seem bored with the clientele. I notice the bar has tshirts for sale with a mediocre drawing of a cowboy wearing an eyepatch and Marfa, TX written below. Seconds after taking my first sip of La Frontera IPA, said cowboy wearing a patch over his right eye wanders in and pours himself a healthy glass of Jameson from behind the bar. In a perfect deep raspy cowboy voice he says to the gentleman with the ponytail “there’s a young lady out front with her truck broke down, you headed back to Alpine tonight?” The arrangements to get her home safely are solidified, he downs his Jameson and exits the bar.

Before I can engage with my questions about the cowboy, I ask the bartender where I might be able to grab a bite to eat. She succinctly  replies “there is a fancy place or Dairy Queen.” I head for the fancy place only to find that the kitchen closed an hour ago. The generous manager offers to fix me a box of “what they have left” and refuses to take payment. “I know how it is in this town” he tells me. What a nice guy.

I return to the barstool I left minutes ago with my takeout container. It turns out he handed off a generous helping of delicious quinoa and stewed tomatoes.

While I eat my fancy food in the local watering hole, I ask the bartender about her story. She makes it very clear that Judd is not why she is here and that her family has a ranch just outside of town. A fascinating conversation unfolds. She clarifies for me the underlying love/hate relationship the locals have with the tourists who visit Marfa to see art. “There are times when we can’t use our town” she points out. “People come here thinking we are some metropolitan art capital, when really there are only a handful of local establishments to support all of the traffic.” As she describes the situation in Marfa, it becomes clear to me that locals don’t see the art-crazed tourists as the source of their economy, they see them as an annoyance. She describes the French tourists who get aggressively angry with her over the lack of dining options in town. “They get mad at me that they came all this way and there is nothing here.” She then makes a very astute hypothesis that the continued influx is due in large part to social media “We are very far from anywhere, you don’t happen to come to Marfa. Once you’ve traveled this far, you’re not going to post on facebook or instagram that Marfa is a tiny town with nothing to offer other than a bunch of sculptures. People are not honest about what this place really is.”

I ask her about the one-eyed cowboy on the tshirts who had made an earlier appearance. She tells me that he is the bar owner and the eyepatch is from an accident he suffered while serving on the military base now occupied by Judd sculptures. The tshirts are a ploy her and a friend came up with to take money from tourists. “We realized that there is a real lack of places in this town for tourists to throw their money away, so we figured we would help them out. At twenty-five dollars a piece they sell like hotcakes.”

I think the sentiment I had earlier in the day that the locals are impartial or oblivious to their proximity to world class art is wrong. It’s deeper than that. There seems to be an underlying resentment that they are left in Judd’s wake to deal with people who don’t want to engage with the town, but come to consume the cultural artifacts which he created. When the expectations of the art consumers aren’t met, they hold it against the locals for not catering to their tastes. The inherent conflict between local and visitor ensues.

I didn’t buy a tshirt.