Marfa, Marfa, Marfa

The artsy West Texas town known for its Mystery Lights might be the strangest place I've ever been

by

“Marfa is the biggest contradiction in the world. This isn’t Texas, this is New York. This is like I’m gonna get a stick stuck in my eye, and I can’t wait to get it, because it’s good for me.” —George Rodrigue

A lot of West Texas towns welcome you with warm drawls, cowboy hats. Not Marfa, which pops up like a nearly-forgotten film set from the expansive Chihuahuan Desert, around sixty miles from the Mexican border. Marfa doesn’t pretend to owe you a thing. Which begs the question—that perhaps gets answered, but on the other hand maybe not, beneath that big sky over all that red dirt—what brought you all the way out here, anyway? If you drove all this way thinking Marfa was going to put on a show for you, or even a smile, well, that’s your own fault.

Marfa feels a little like Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City—or maybe Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City feels a little inspired by Marfa. They’re both disorientingly-aesthetic little towns with sci-fi bents, way out there in the desert. And drawn by curiosity, by art, and mostly by the intrigue of the famous “Marfa Mystery Lights,” we had to see it for ourselves.

“Marfa is the biggest contradiction in the world. This isn’t Texas, this is New York. This is like I’m gonna get a stick stuck in my eye, and I can’t wait to get it, because it’s good for me.” —George Rodrigue

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Driving into Presidio County at dusk, in the middle of an electrical storm, we quickly sensed that there is something distinctly different about the atmosphere in the desert surrounding Marfa. Hoping to catch sight of Marfa’s famous “mystery lights,” our attention was already more-than-usually attuned to the sky—and this one was particularly vast and dark above the remote stretch of Highway 90. Occasionally, it would alight in a flash of the most vivid, multi-pronged lightning we’d ever seen, painting everything electric purple and illuminating the Chinati Mountains in the distance. At one point our headlights landed on a family of javelinas, and we slowed to pass the stout and scraggly wild pig-like creatures as they patiently waited in the opposite lane, as if to give us the right-of-way.

That’s as warm of a welcome as we got from Marfa.

A few miles east of town, we stopped at the Marfa Lights Viewing Area, which was built in 2003 to provide benches, binoculars, and restrooms to the thousands of visitors who travel here from around the globe each year, hoping like we were to get a glimpse of the unexplained moving lights in the sky. Texas Monthly writer Michael Hall called the Marfa Lights Viewing Area, “one of the oddest roadside monuments in the state.” I only saw it at night, but it was indeed a strange place, all alone on this lonely highway, to imagine the state and federal governments investing in. I sat on a bench next to my fiancé, Sam, surrounded by strangers also staring at the sky, pointing out tiny moving orbs of light and whispering theories to each other. The Marfa Mystery Lights are the area’s largest attraction, after all, having generated spectators and theorists and imaginers for decades.

"Hoping to catch sight of Marfa’s famous 'mystery lights,' our attention was already more-than-usually attuned to the sky—and this one was particularly vast and dark above the remote stretch of Highway 90. Occasionally, it would alight in a flash of the most vivid, multi-pronged lightning we’d ever seen, painting everything electric purple and illuminating the Chinati Mountains in the distance."

According to Cecilia Thompson's book History of Marfa and Presidio County, the moving lights were first reported by a cattle hand in 1883, who thought the flickers in the sky might be attributed to Apache campfires.  More reports from locals followed  in 1885. Hall somewhat debunks these early sources in his article by reaching out to the writers’ descendants, who are unable to find the cited references to the lights in the original sources (though the granddaughter of the ranch hand does recall her grandfather telling her family about seeing the lights). Reports continued to increase in frequency through the decades, and monitoring stations were installed to keep up with the activity in 2003.

Besides extraterrestrial or supernatural phenomena, there are of course plenty of theories attempting to explain the sporadically-moving, orb-like, multicolored lights that have allegedly been reported for a century and a half. The main postulations are atmospheric changes in temperature resulting in a mirage, and reflections of headlights from cars traveling on Highway 67. Some speculate that the lights come from phosphine and methane, sometimes called “swamp gases,” known to cause glowing lights in the swamp when they have certain reactions with oxygen. By that logic, could the feufollet of Louisiana folklore and Marfa’s mystery lights have the same source? Even if that perfectly logical scientific rationale explains both wonders—and I’m not saying it does—there’d be some magic in that, too, I think.

Sitting on the metal bench in the dark, shivering and squinting up at the partially-overcast sky, we didn’t see much that first night. We had planned to stay in the area for three nights for this reason exactly—accounting for potential bad weather. After maybe seeing a couple of strange blips of light between the clouds—it’s hard to know for sure if we saw them, or just desperately wanted to after that long day of driving—we headed into town to check into the Hotel Paisano.

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The lingering presences of Liz Taylor and James Dean are enough to add a veil of romance to any location, but approaching the Hotel Paisano at night would have felt cinematic to us even if the pair hadn’t stayed there when filming Giant in 1955. Before Taylor and Dean and that whole Warner Bros film crew came through and raised the place’s profile, primary visitors to El Paso architect Henry Trost’s Spanish-style 1930 building were mostly cattle ranchers and tourists seeking the perceived health benefits of the desert air.

"The lingering presences of Liz Taylor and James Dean are enough to add a veil of romance to any location, but approaching the Hotel Paisano at night would have felt cinematic to us even if the pair hadn’t stayed there when filming Giant in 1955."

I wasn’t there in the ‘50s or prior, but I imagine it’s changed little since—and kind of like the existence of the lights, I choose to believe that’s the case. The design is a hearty blend of West Texas and old Hollywood; its Spanish-inspired stuccoed rooms each have balconies overlooking a courtyard dotted with café tables and a tiered fountain in the center. Arriving after dark, we were greeted by white string lights and the glowing red neon sign bearing the hotel’s name. The fountain babbled loudly in the quiet night, and conjured the feeling of oasis. The lobby, with its red earth-colored geometric tiles, mounted longhorn heads, leather furniture, and faux-wooden beams, begged to tell southwestern tales of the cowboys and movie stars who have sought a little pocket of luxury tucked there in the desert. Black and white photographs taken during the filming of Giant line the hallways and stairwell, winking at more stories.

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The following morning, we greeted the little town in the daylight, stepping onto our balcony and reveling in the dry air. Seemingly the only people on the streets, we walked less than a block past more structures that weren’t part of a film set, but could’ve been, to the regal, pale-coral Presidio County Courthouse at the end of Highland Street. Even though it was a Monday morning, the building was relatively quiet, and we worried that someone might stop us from climbing the broad, creaking steps to the rotunda. But no one did.

Once up there we were rewarded by a 360-degree view of all of Marfa and surrounding Presidio county, all the way south to Mexico. It was a beautiful view, with the town’s squat adobe buildings, art deco storefronts, and watertower thinning out to desert—the Davis and Chinati mountains rising up in the distance beyond. The birds-eye view from the rotunda revealed the town’s smallness more clearly for me than the map and the population statistics I’d looked at before, and I chuckled to myself thinking about how we drove all that way across Texas. We felt accomplished, like we were on top of the world (or at least the world of Marfa), then we climbed back down from the sun-filled room and headed towards Marfa Burrito.

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Inside the little white building, which was covered inside and out in handwritten notes and signatures, we got a better pulse on the locals than we have anywhere else in town—largely because there were actually people there—around four, chatting in Spanish and laughing with the ladies in the kitchen. The cash-only shop is owned and helmed by Ramona Tejada, known locally as “the Burrito Queen of Marfa,” who smiles in a photo on the wall with Anthony Bourdain. Tejada makes all of the tortillas, spiced meats, and bright, spicy green salsa in-house. We shared a massive chorizo, egg, and potato burrito; I considered ordering another to prolong the savory satisfaction of biting through the fluffy tortilla into the dense, spicy center.

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Back out on the dusty street, we set our sights on coffee. It wasn’t long before we saw the familiar green Starbucks logo, “COMING SOON” ominously promised beneath it. “Not here too!” I balked at Sam, lamenting the downfall of small-town coffee shops. “That’s borderline offensive!”

We walked into the small attached bookstore, and glancing up from his book, the spectacled thirty-something owner calmly asked, “I’ve offended you?”

“Oh, no, we’re just horrified they’re putting in a Starbucks,” we explained.

“It’s a joke,” he tells us, deadpan. “It’s always ‘coming soon’”.

We burst into laughter, feeling silly for missing it initially, and bought some locally-made stationary and a used book about social justice to smooth over the awkwardness. We asked how long he’d been in Marfa and how he liked it—he’d only moved there around a month ago, from Connecticut. We never found out if he liked it. He did insist we check out Planet Marfa, where he bartends, telling us matter-of-factly “it’s the coolest bar in town”.

Another shop we poked our heads into and thoroughly enjoyed was Esperanza Vintage & Art, which lured us in with artist Richard Kurtz’s vibrant and primitive-looking canvas paintings of aliens. We made a comment to his friendly wife behind the counter about enjoying Marfa so far, to which she replied that she was eager to return to California and get out of “backwards” Texas. We still hadn’t encountered anyone who seemed particularly happy to be in Marfa.

Still seeking coffee, we approached the Sentinel, the only actual coffee shop that was open while we were there. But as I scanned the offerings besides the scones and lists of latte options on the counter, including copies of the local paper and “PRINT IS NOT DEAD” baseball hats, I realized our coffee hunt had brought us into the publishing house for the local weekly paper, The Big Bend Sentinel, which covers Marfa and the surrounding small towns in Far West Texas. I added a copy of that week’s paper and a hat to my lavender latte order, and sat down on a leather couch in the high-ceilinged former train station to tuck into the local news. Truly a small town paper, individual college graduations and admissions were listed in that June issue, as were obituaries and other local goings-on.

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Sufficiently caffeinated, we strolled past more art deco storefronts and succulent-abundant yards to the Judd Foundation, and procured our tickets for the next tour of Judd’s downtown studio spaces. Late New York minimalist artist Donald Judd is largely responsible for  Marfa’s renown as an unlikely destination for artists and “art people”; an NPR writer once called the town “nothing less than an arts world station of the cross”. Professing his disdain for New York City’s art world, in 1977 Judd moved to Marfa and set out buying adobe structures and desert property, eventually filling them (but only minimally) with his cement sculptures, stripped-down furniture, early paintings, and other designs. He also founded the Chinati Foundation, which also holds multiple buildings and stretches of land that house permanent art installations.

We greeted our tour guide, a very beautiful and very apathetic young woman in a “PROTECT INDIGENOUS LIVES'' t-shirt from down the highway in Valentine, and she gave a brief and emotionless spiel about Judd’s philosophy of permanent installation—he disagreed with the usual way museums and galleries cycle in different artists and exhibitions, stressing the importance of an artist having control over the context in which their work is presented. She explained that Judd died before he was able to complete the spaces we’re about to see, and that his foundation has changed or altered very little about them since, to preserve his original vision.

Walking through each bare room in the unassuming adobe buildings—some with Judd’s early paintings containing a single-colored stripe, some completely empty except for a single  piece of minimalist furniture or an antique whose simple design he’d latched onto—I’m somehow amused, fascinated, and almost a little angry. Art is subjective, of course, and I began to wonder if my inability to connect with the installations signified a lack of culture on my part—perhaps I should have my art editor card revoked. But despite my efforts to always maintain an open and curious mind, I simply could not bring myself to feel particularly moved staring down at that simpler-than-Ikea iron bed frame, or anything else on the tour. If Judd was the reason Marfa is placed on a pedestal as an art destination and for the resulting real estate hikes, well, I feel like we’ve all been a bit duped.

I liked that our tour guide gave credit to Judd’s girlfriend for certain designs normally attributed to him, like a large rotating wooden door, and was candid about the fact that his wife hated Marfa and never wanted to live there. These moments were some of the only times I thought, just maybe, her lips hinted at curling into a smile at the edges. When the tour was over, we tipped her $20, and asked for her recommendation for lunch. Without hesitation she pointed us to Bordo, a handcrafted Italian sandwich place nearby. She also told us about a metal show that night at El Cosmico, the hip campground we had reservations to stay in the following night.

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Tucked on the edge of the desert, Bordo was, like so many things, not what we expected to find in Marfa. The small shop smelled of home-baked bread, all of which is made with stone-ground, heirloom flours. We ordered a sandwich with smooth and nutty mortadella, creamy stracciatella, a pistachio spread, parmesan, lemon, and basil; cradled by the crusty, rustic bread. For a side, we tried the Patatas Stronzetta (the star), crispy new potatoes doused in calabrian chili aioli, lemon, parsley, parmesan, and crispy breadcrumbs; and we we sipped on a made-in-house pistachio cream soda, all to be chased with a cup of creamy and cinnamon-forward horchata gelato. The meal was far from the Tex-Mex we’d been anticipating, but there would be plenty of time for that. We puzzled over Judd’s lingering legacy between bites.

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One of Marfa’s weirdest landmarks is Prada Marfa, which isn’t actually a Prada store nor is it in Marfa, but is an art installation designed to look like a Prada storefront on a completely remote stretch of highway, technically just north of the practical ghost town of Valentine. Cattle ranches, lingering signage for no-longer-standing motels, and long-defunct gas stations occasionally broke up the drive; then, there it was: Prada Marfa, a tongue-in-cheek mirage of consumerism, rising from the dust alongside the blacktop.

As remote as it is, when we pulled up, two very fashionably-dressed Korean women were in front, taking each other's photos in a variety of serious, editorial-looking poses. I snapped a few of both of them with their phone before they left, and we proceeded to conduct a little photoshoot of our own; the only reason anyone drives out there, anyway.

We started the drive back into town, the gas light on my Prius indicating its emptiness with increasing urgency. Passing the only gas station on the stretch, which looked to have not been active in decades, we laughed at our own stupidity, feeling like we were in a satirical short film by some too-hip film student, and preemptively made a call to AAA, trying in vain to explain to the receptionist where we were with no other landmarks to point a tow truck to us besides the occasional ranch. Then my phone service gave out. Thankfully we learned that day that Priuses can cover a substantial amount of ground on “empty”.  I wonder if Marfa, and its gas station, has ever seemed like such a beacon of civilization to anyone as it was to us.

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That evening, we headed to Planet Marfa, which the bookstore (not future Starbucks) owner had told us was the “coolest bar in town”. It was a really cool bar, with a distinctly Marfan aesthetic drawn from a bunch of artful-looking, hodge-podged structures like a teepee and old school bus in a dirt yard surrounding an outdoor bar which, like everything else, appeared to be made from reclaimed materials. We said “hi” to the bookstore owner, who seemed like he didn’t remember that encounter, or maybe just didn’t want to be associated with us tourists.

For dinner, we headed to a hole-in-the-wall little place on the edge of town (though they kind of all felt that way), called Angel’s. We ordered some Tex-Mex staples, and that close to New Mexico, I couldn’t resist getting something doused in green chile cream sauce—in this case, a gristly chicken-fried steak. After eating more than we should and encountering some of the friendliest service we would experience our whole time in Marfa, we headed to El Cosmico for some metal music.

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At the campground, we sat at a picnic table and listened to a raucous, high-energy metal band from Austin called Rickshaw Billie’s Burger Patrol, and watched the diverse myriad of locals chat and mosh to the music. We saw our tour guide from earlier and tried to catch her eye and wave, but she was talking with the bassist from the opening band and ignored us, too. Looking at the vibrant-haired, aggressively-artsy crowd, it was clear to us that Marfa wasn’t just thought of as an art town back in the ‘70s, nor did it stop being an art town in 2015 when Huffington Post published an article with the sub-head “I Went To Marfa, Texas, And All I Got Was This Lousy Case Study In Gentrification”. At least to these young locals, who no doubt came from New York or California or in a few cases towns like Valentine just down the road, Marfa was an art town—they were making it that way. I wondered if they ever rolled their eyes at Donald Judd, or if they’d agree with that Huffington Post writer that the influx of people like them and tourists like us have killed the place’s original artful mystique. There’s a lot to wonder about in Marfa.

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Once it got dark, we left the bustling campsite to head back out of town, hopeful that this time we’d get a real look at the reason we came: the Marfa Lights. The sky was much clearer that night, and within a few minutes of tilting our faces up toward the stars, we began to identify balls of light that weren’t stars at all. We knew because of their movements—the first I clocked I thought might be an airplane, until it abruptly changed its course, zipping back in the opposite direction, then up, then back down, almost in a zig-zag pattern. We struggled to point them out to each other, but there were so many of them, we eventually just settled for watching whichever we found, and would follow them as they sporadically traveled across the darkness until they trailed off or we moved onto another, brighter than the last, and more chaotic.

Before we arrived, I’d been pretty thoroughly convinced that a study by the University of Texas at Dallas students had reached the most convincing conclusion: that the “mystery lights” were really just reflections of car headlamps. But after watching those bizarrely-moving lights until our necks were sore, I was no longer convinced. “They aren’t headlights,” I whispered to Sam in the dark, eyes locked on a moving orb. “I don’t know what they are, but they don’t look or act like headlights.” And maybe it was wishful thinking, but their patterns of movement, colors, and shapes, really did seem too far removed from something so mundane. When we eventually pulled ourselves away, we felt accomplished: we had seen the Marfa Mystery Lights. And even better, we’d lost any conviction about what causes them. We got to experience the lights, and the mystery.

"When we eventually pulled ourselves away, we felt accomplished: we had seen the Marfa Mystery Lights. And even better, we’d lost any conviction about what causes them. We got to experience the lights, and the mystery."

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The next day, we got out of Marfa, heading to the nearby mountain town of Fort Davis to hike Mount Davis’s modest-yet-rewarding summit, high above the desert. After the relatively brief but strenuous hike, we enjoyed a victory meal doused in more chile sauce at a casual joint called Poco Mexico, then drove up to McDonald Observatory, where the University of Texas records their syndicated StarDate radio program, which airs on NPR.

After ogling the massive telescope, and a bit more marveling at the vastness and strangeness of the universe, we drove back toward Marfa, stopping on our way at a tiny green caboose called Hebert’s for a cone of Blue Bell ice cream. We were amused when the girl working there confirmed that yes, the owners are Cajun, and it’s pronounced as such. Back in Marfa, we had another surprisingly good Italian-ish meal at the Waterstop for dinner: a summer vegetable and pancetta pasta dish with a feta-heavy salad and lovely, balanced cocktails.

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That night, we checked into a colorful yurt at El Cosmico—the receptionist didn’t even glance up when I approached the front desk, let alone smile or say hello, confirming again that any trappings of Southern hospitality that bleed into Texas do not make it this far west. I bought an overpriced "I SAW THE MARFA MYSTERY LIGHTS" t-shirt from the gift shop, anyway. After passing the hip smattering of airstream trailers, teepees, safari tents, and other aesthetic lodging options, we had a strange but restful night, listening to a storm slapping the material of the yurt. We were grateful that we’d seen the Marfa lights the night before when the sky was clear.

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Our last morning in Marfa, after grabbing another lavender latte at The Sentinel, we gave Judd one last shot, peeking in the windows of one of his closed Chinati Foundation buildings. We’d hoped there we might find some local artwork, perhaps by Native or Hispanic artists, but instead saw a permanent installation of large, crumpled metal abstract expressionist sculptures that resembled compounded cars by John Chamberlain, a late friend of Judd’s from New York. We also made a stop by the Chinati Foundation fields that house Judd’s minimalist cement block sculptures, though decided not to pay the hefty admission, since we’d already paid substantially for the Judd Foundation tour and we weren’t sure what any of the money went towards, anyway. We could see the simple rows of concrete blocks in the fields in the distance, which reminded us of the construction supplies gathered back on our street at home in New Orleans, and felt like that was as close as we needed to get. If we go back to Marfa, we'll prioritize seeking out work by current local artists, if we can find it.

As we headed back to the car, a lady in a nearby house told us off for trespassing, which was fair even if we hadn’t realized we were. On our way out of town, we stopped in the Marfa Visitors’ Center to pick up some stickers from the thematically unbothered tourism directors there (I’d had a brief phone call with one of them before the trip, explaining I was a journalist and requesting some information—after I sent an email follow-up, I’d still never heard back). We got pulled over by Marfa police leaving town for going four miles per hour over the speed limit, and burst into laughter at how appropriate that goodbye felt, as the town of Marfa became smaller behind us.

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