Page 2 - Marfa Road Trip_ Thelma and Louise, With a Happier Ending - The New York Times

1/26/2018 Marfa Road Trip: Thelma and Louise, With a Happier Ending - The New York Times
Marfa Road Trip: Thelma and Louise, With a

Happier Ending

When you escape your life at 45, as in a Thelma and Louise-level escape, you
go on a road trip. The writer and her best friends of 25 years picked Marfa,
the artist hub in the middle of the West Texas desert, as their destination.

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By Hayley Krischer Jan. 22, 2018

When you escape your life at 45, as in a Thelma and Louise-level escape, you go
to the desert. My best friends of 25 years joined me. We were all leaving behind

something. Beth and Miriam were leaving their young children behind. Sara had
just recovered from breast cancer; her mastectomy was fresh, just under a year.
I was taking a break from kids, my husband and my 80-pound incessantly
barking dog.

We picked Marfa, the artist hub in the middle of the West Texas desert as the

destination of our road trip last winter. We had been traveling together for 15
years. The quirky art community was part of the reason we landed on Marfa. We
wanted to fade into the weirdness of the town, with our identities washing away

into the artist Donald Judd’s concrete blocks
(https://www.chinati.org/collection/donaldjudd2), the dry landscape and the big
sky. We knew it would be the kind of place you might forget to call your family.

(Indeed, it was.)

If we were lucky, we’d get some much needed refueling, maybe a chance to
scream in the middle of the road, or, like Thelma and Louise, innocently flirt with
a Brad Pitt type of cowboy. And even though GPS would never allow any of us to

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