So Far From Care

A Whole Other Country is a new podcast from the award-winning Marfa Public Radio Studios. Back in the ‘90s, in an off-the-grid neighborhood in the mountains of Far West Texas, a wannabe vintner started his own Wild West nation. Reporter and host Zoe Kurland drives up the long, bumpy roads of the Davis Mountains to talk to a cast of neighbors and onlookers who watched the story of the standoff unfo...

This series began with a question: what does abortion access look like in Far West Texas? But what about when the struggle isn’t to end a pregnancy — it’s to start one? Kathleen Shafer and David Branch decided they wanted to have a baby not long after they got married. In the years since, that’s meant countless drives from Marfa to Austin for fertility treatments, so far without success. In the fi...

They say it takes a village to raise a child. And in Far West Texas, we have that, literally. But when it comes to finding formal childcare out here, you might be out of luck. In Marfa, “daycare” can look like bringing your toddler to your restaurant job — or counting on a web of friends and family. Yasmine Guevara’s son was born when she was 21, and she’s not sure what she would’ve done without h...

Kelon Crawford spent a decade building a life down by Big Bend National Park: guiding river trips, doing conservation work, and building an off-grid house. But when she got pregnant, she and her husband decided to give up their adventure and move to Alpine to give their daughter the best possible home. Then, after uprooting their lives to become parents, Kelon and her husband found themselves faci...

In rural Far West Texas, it’s a baseline expectation that you often have to rely on yourself. And for Stephanie Winston, that wasn’t intimidating— it was the point. At least, at first. Stephanie and her family moved off-the-grid to see what they were capable of — and in a converted shed way out in the desert, she found maternal care that made her feel safe, and supported. But as she navigated life...

In Far West Texas, there’s only one hospital, serving a region of 12,000 square miles. That means lots of long drives: people here have even given birth on the side of the road because the delivery room was just too far away. But when Brissa Ledezma went into labor last year, she found herself on a journey even more dramatic than what we’ve gotten used to — an odyssey spanning hundreds of miles, t...

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, people around the country have found themselves having to drive long distances to access abortion. But in Far West Texas, long drives to care have long been a reality. And as reporter Annie Rosenthal learned soon after she moved to Marfa, that’s not just the case for abortion, but for most everything in the reproductive realm. Last year, Annie put out a...

Living in a small town in West Texas can feel magical. And part of that magic is how isolated we are: hours and hours down a desert highway from everything else. But when it comes to accessing reproductive healthcare, that remoteness can also be terrifying. In the Big Bend, the idea of “choice” was complicated long before Roe v. Wade was overturned. Out here, you can’t legally get an abortion — bu...