Alpine — Blink and You Miss It
Alpine is one of those towns I’ve passed through so many times that it almost stopped existing to me. Not because it lacked charm or character, but because it lived in the shadow of somewhere else. For me, Alpine was always the thing before Marfa or the thing after Big Bend. A marker on the map. A fuel stop. A place to stretch my legs, grab bad coffee, check my tires, then keep moving west or east depending on what kind of mood I was in.
I knew the curves in the road leading into town better than I knew the town itself.
That’s the funny thing about road-tripping. You can pass through a place fifty times and still never actually see it.
I’ve probably driven through Alpine several dozen times over the years, maybe more. But I rarely stopped. The road always seemed to be pulling me somewhere else. Marfa with its art-school mystique and desert coolness. Big Bend with its vastness and silence and cinematic scale. Alpine just sat quietly between them, like the middle child nobody pays enough attention to.
Except once.
The first night of the COVID lockdown, years ago, I ended up sleeping in my car in the parking lot of the Oyo Hotel in Alpine. Everything felt eerie and uncertain back then. Empty roads. Empty restaurants. Empty skies. The world had suddenly become suspicious of itself. I remember lying there in the front seat, looking out the windshield, wondering what the hell was happening to humanity. Not philosophically. Literally. What the hell is happening.
I didn’t experience Alpine that night. I merely hid there.
This last trip was different. I wasn’t hiding anymore.
For whatever reason, maybe age, maybe timing, maybe fatigue from too many miles and too many days alone with my own thoughts, I decided to spend the night (Oyo Hotel) and actually look around a little. No agenda. No destination pressure. No “get there before dark” urgency hanging over my head.
And honestly, Alpine surprised me. It was lovely.
Not in some dramatic, life-changing sort of way. It’s still a small West Texas town. Still quiet. Still dusty around the edges. Still the kind of place you could easily blow through without giving it a second thought. But underneath that surface was a vibe I wasn’t expecting. A creative undercurrent. A little funky. A little artsy. A little worn out in all the right ways.
It felt human. Ahhhh. I see you. I notice you. I honor you.
Not polished. Not curated. Not trying too hard.
Just human.
There’s something comforting about places that don’t scream for your attention. Places that aren’t obsessed with branding themselves into existence. Places that seem perfectly content being overlooked.
I relate to that more now than I used to.
Walking around Alpine with my camera for a few hours, I found myself drifting backward into memories I hadn’t thought about in years. Specifically, high school. Or more accurately, all the times I skipped high school.
Back then, I used to ditch classes and drive up to Rockport or Gloucester for the day. Just me, a cheap car, a pack of smokes, enough change in my pocket for gas and coffee, and almost always a nickel bag of weed somewhere nearby to help pass the time. I wasn’t running toward anything profound. I wasn’t searching for enlightenment or trying to “find myself,” as people like to romantically frame these things later in life.
I just wanted out.
Out of the noise. Out of the expectations. Out of being noticed. Out of the feeling that everybody already had me figured out before I even opened my mouth.
Those coastal towns gave me breathing room. The harbors. The old fishermen. The salt air. The gulls screaming over parking lots. None of those places cared who I was supposed to become. Nobody there expected anything from me. I could disappear into those environments for a few hours and simply observe the world instead of constantly feeling observed by it.
That mattered more than I understood at the time.
Psychologically speaking, there has always been something deeply comforting to me about small, unnoticeable places. Places that exist quietly. Places people bypass on their way to somewhere more important. Maybe because, deep down, I often felt like one of those places myself.
Growing up, I was noticed a lot. But mostly for the wrong reasons. Not wrong in some tragic or abusive sense. More like misaligned. People saw things in me that never quite matched how I saw myself. Expectations got projected onto me early. Sports. Masculinity. Performance. Personality. Identity. The usual post-war American male blueprint.
Competitive. Outgoing. Certain.
I never fully fit the mold.
Or maybe I did outwardly while inwardly feeling like a complete fraud.
Even today, at seventy-two, I still think part of me feels more comfortable on the edges of things than in the center of them. I’m suspicious of too much attention. Suspicious of loud certainty. Suspicious of people who desperately need to be seen all the time. And who always need to be right.
Which may explain why Alpine hit me the way it did.
Because Alpine doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t wave its arms around demanding admiration. It simply sits there under that enormous West Texas sky, quiet and weathered and mostly unnoticed unless you deliberately slow down long enough to pay attention.
And that’s exactly what I did.
For a few hours, I wandered around with my iPhone camera noticing the kinds of things most people miss entirely. Faded paint on old storefronts. Sunlight hitting cracked sidewalks. Graffiti. Murals. Interesting compositions. Light. Shadow play. Handmade signs. Rusted trucks. A bicycle leaning against a brick wall. Tiny gestures of life tucked quietly into corners nobody photographs.
The unremarkable.
The overlooked.
The blink-and-you-miss-it stuff.
And somewhere in the middle of all that noticing, I realized something that probably should have been obvious decades ago: maybe my entire photographic life has been about giving attention to the kinds of things I once feared I was becoming.
Small. Quiet. Unnoticed.
Only now, instead of fearing those qualities, I’m drawn toward them.
Maybe because age changes your relationship with visibility. When you’re young, you ache to be seen. You want recognition. Validation. Applause. Proof that your existence matters. But eventually, if you’re lucky, you start understanding that constant visibility is exhausting. Performing yourself for the world becomes tiring. The older I get, the more I appreciate things that simply exist without demanding acknowledgment.
That’s Alpine.
And honestly, that’s probably me too.
A blink-and-you-miss-it kind of guy wandering through blink-and-you-miss-it towns with a camera, quietly noticing the unnoticeable.
Click.
Jack
