I Saw The Light

In continuing with my jumping around, last week I was in the tiny West Texas Town of Marfa. It takes about 5 minutes to drive through it. Seven if you don’t want to have a chat with the plentiful Highway Patrol Officers. In the 5 minutes, you would never know that you are in a thriving hub of the minimalist art movement, known the world over by those in the know. In fact, it looks like every other farming town you might drive through out west. Strolling around town and peeking into the weathered buildings looking for a happy hour beer revealed some pretty amazing minimalist styled galleries and shops.  There are two nice hotels in town which of course I didn’t stay at but did have a beer in each.

It was a Monday night. A night for getting things done since Mondays are usually at the bottom of the list of days that have a good ratio of money spent on beer to amount of fun you are going to have.

The Jett Grill in the historic Hotel Paisano

The Lobby Bar in the Hotel Saint George

The downside of traveling as a lifestyle is that there are a lot of days to fill between the weekends when most of the fun happens. I landed in Marfa On a Monday.  the calendar of things to do in Marfa doesn’t even have a Monday. Other than a Dairy Queen and the hotel restaurants, I could find only one open cafe. A little Mom and Pop Mexican restaurant. The clouds were getting thick and black and the wind was picking up so I decided that cooking dinner back at camp was not worth the risk of getting soaked doing so.

It was perfectly fine Mexican food and I sat down just in time to beat the downpour.  Since it was the only open reasonably priced restaurant in town, everyone else in Marfa who didn’t feel like cooking was there too.

I was worried that the weather was going to settle in for the night. That would have defeated my main reason for being in Marfa. Minimalist Art is fine but by definition, it doesn’t take all that long to see it all. I was there to see the mysterious Marfa lights. All I knew of them was a short blurb on a travel channel so didn’t know what it was going to take to see them or if they were even a common occurrence. I did a quick Wikipedia search while waiting for dinner and got it figured out. By the time I finished my burrito, the rain had let up and only lighting flashes in the distance were left. 

I had unhooked the trailer and filled up the gas tank in anticipation of some deep desert four wheeling terrain. Unnecessary. Marfa built a viewing stand on the side of the main highway out of town with a nice big parking lot. A new moon and the now clear skies made for a great view of the Milky Way regardless of my luck with the lights.

A little about the lights if you haven’t heard of them. And a little is all there is. Supposedly, no one knows what they are but I think that the Marfa Chamber of Commerce keeps a tight lid on the any answers that may come up. They have a really nice visitor’s center to pay off.

Out in the distance of the desert south of Marfa, The lights move, twinkle, change color, split and join back up again.  Like a rainbow, you can only see them from a distance. The early settlers reported them over a hundred years ago and Indian lore from before that talks about them.

I have been lucky enough to see the Northern Lights on this trip. I had little hope that my luck would hold for the Mystery Lights too. Didn’t really matter, when I walked out onto the deck, the Milky Way was shining brightly to the south and the lightning bolts were lighting up the storm clouds in the North.

But there they were, in the pitch black desert distance. At first there was just one, then that went away and a little later another popped up nearby, then 2 more than they split up and anther one lit up.  I watched for about an hour. Before it started getting chilly and I was getting tired.  It was way easier than I thought but I am kind of glad it was. I wasn’t looking forward to an off-road drive under a moonless sky after a soaking thunderstorm in my new (to me) car.