If Sam Stavinoha were a religious man, you might say the decision to buy a small-town grocery was his come-to-Jesus moment. He cried a lot, as if mourning a loss, though he couldn’t name it. This was in 2019, when the 29-year-old software engineer had a cushy job working remotely out of a San Antonio suburb for a New York cloud computing firm. He made good money. Yet something felt amiss.On a trip to Big Bend National Park, Stavinoha and his then-girlfriend stopped in Marathon, an unincorporated town of four hundred about forty miles north of the park, and stayed at the tourist-friendly Gage Hotel. Walking around town, they wandered into the gallery of the photographer James H. Evans (whose work has appeared in this…