You may drive through Vega and feel like it doesn’t have much to offer.
Or does it?
I’ve been thinking about that little town for three months. About what Valerie Doshier did there.
About the contribution of art.
When we moved our son to Montana we saw places like Cheyenne and Laramie, Wyoming. The Battle of the Little Bighorn site. Palisade Falls. Historic downtown Bozeman. Big Sky. Montana State University. Hiking through the Gallatin Range in August in sixty degrees.
But my mind returns to Vega, Texas. The seat of Oldham County.
We escaped a hot July in the cool shade of trees surrounding the courthouse. Made a few memories.
History tells of Bat Masterson and Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett walking these streets.
A banner announces the Oldham County Round Up. A celebration for the farming and ranching community. The second Saturday in August. A parade and a softball tournament follow the 5k Saturday morning. Free bar-b-que lunch at noon. Then a traditional Texas Saturday night dance.
Locals come together in the far reaches of the Texas panhandle to celebrate co-existence.
Joe Dan works the public library, a small brick structure off the square, boasting 11,000 volumes. He gave me free information, and gave my daughters free candy. Made sure we didn’t leave without looking at the two murals off old Route 66 right there in town.
“It was two young people. Sad, though. The woman died a few years after they painted ‘em,” Joe Dan said.
Montana was a long way off, so we only had time to look at one of their two works.
A white buffalo. A blue sky streaked with gray clouds. The desert. The bison springs from the wasteland’s floor in a surge of power.
Truculent.
Or inspirational?
It’s art. You choose.
Her name was Valerie Doshier. Val, to those close to her. She and Josh Finley, her art partner, painted the mural in 2014.
Valerie grew up there in the wind and sun and plains of the Texas panhandle. Her childhood included ranch work. She was a lot of things. A star athlete. A graduate of Stephen F. Austin University. A commissioned artist.
A fighter in the war against mediocrity.
You can read her journey in a biography called Nowhere Near the Middle.
One line of her obituary from 2016 said she traveled the world and made new friends. Another says she would often give homeless people all the money in her wallet.
There’s much more scattered around the world proving that Valerie was here with all of us, if only for a while.
Only Valerie and Josh could recount who painted what there under the Texas sky. Having painted a handful of murals myself to help support my family through law school, I can relate to the process.
You envision something. You sketch it. Then you blow it up. Take measurements and proportions and make gridlines. Make sure all the hard work makes sense.
Up close, a mural is one color of nothing. A few feet back you see more colors, more definition. Ten feet back, your vision clears. Twenty feet more, the life of the work has a heartbeat. From fifty feet, it is a living, breathing thing that speaks to you.
Complete.
A life from thirty thousand feet.
How did this process work between Valerie and Josh? What I offer here is a guess, and nothing more.
I imagine brush strokes, banter, and maybe a quiet radio. Perhaps a rooster crows. An occasional car passes. A loud 18-wheeler now and then disrupts the vibe creation requires. The smell of paint and coffee and the damp morning streets of a small town. A shout and a wave from a friendly local.
If the project took days, perhaps some were cloudy. Others might have required a tent, a hat, some form of shade.
Rain delays.
Valerie dips her brush into paint or pulls the trigger on an airbrush. I don’t know which. Josh cracks a joke and she laughs. Cracks her own joke back. A disagreement over this or that. A wiped brow smudges paint across the living skin of her young face.
The buffalo comes alive.
It rises from dust and dirt and nothingness.
The animal leaves their imaginations and becomes a fixture for every passerby or traveler to see for decades to come.
How long will it breathe there? Will Vega, Texas, keep the mural alive with fresh paint after Josh is also gone? Or will it fade into time? I don’t know if Valerie or Josh painted the buffalo. It doesn’t matter. What they created in that little town so far from my home lives rent free in my mind.
Josh is still painting murals. He’s a talented and prolific artist.
Valerie is gone; her portfolio is complete.
But she’s still here. She’s very much here.
After all, she left seven years ago and I’m writing about her. I never met her. Never knew her. And I’m not the only writer to see her work and be inspired.
I coexisted, just for a moment, with her art.
How long does art live in that place where you tuck it away? Your favorite photo. Your favorite music, book, movie. Your favorite painting.
These works. Their creators. Alive in you when you need them.
I imagine folks leaving the Oldham County Round Up decades from now. A little girl holds her daddy’s hand on one side, and grips a sucker on the other, dripping sugar down her chin to her t-shirt. Her cowboy boots, too big for her little feet, clomp along the street. A pink bandana, also drenched, circles her neck. Her cowboy hat covers her ears and hair. Music and laughter fade as they walk to their vehicle.
She sees the sun-bleached white buffalo. The sky above it a barely visible blue. A crack in the mural sports a tuft of dead weeds. The signature is no longer legible. Some of the work has chipped away.
The girl squints and gasps and laughs and points her sucker-covered hand toward the buffalo. Her parents stop, and for a moment, they, too, are happy to notice.
How long will Valerie Doshier’s contribution bring new life to Vega, Texas?
A while, I hope.
