Roadside Attraction

In the 1920s, due to the newfound accessibility of cars, long-distance driving became an option for Americans looking to travel. Suddenly, more people were careening down long highways, bored, with nothing to do but look out the window, and entrepreneurs got to work, building roadside structures constructed in fantastical shapes: restaurants that looked like hats, water towers shaped like teacups, souvenir shops inside of a dinosaur’s belly, and more. There’s a surreality to elongated car travel—punch-drunk exhaustion lends itself to odd visions, and it feels perfectly natural to say why yes, of course, let’s stop and eat inside of this goose.There are roadside attractions that fall into the category of “The World’s Largest”: the world’s largest chair, duck, teapot, ball of stamps, ball of twine, etc. A friend recently sent me a photo of herself with my personal favorite roadside attraction: The Biggest Pistachio, located in Alamogordo, New Mexico. “Found you on the road,” she wrote, “a big nut.”Other roadside attractions fall in the paranormal or illusory vein—the famed Mystery Spot near Santa Cruz, California, a tilted house fit for a witch. And then there are the sci-fi curiosities, like The Thing? along I-10 in Arizona—marked by what appears to be upwards of 200 billboards running from Tucson to El Paso, beckoning you into a small museum to see a small, dusty, supposedly extra terrestrial body.The Marfa Lights Viewing Center is distinct in that it doesn’t fit cleanly into the usual roadside attraction categories; it is neither the “world’s largest” or a paranormal Thing-like spectacle. Unlike the other photogenic roadside stops you’ll find on your way to Marfa—a lone Prada store set against the vast desert or the large painted wooden cutouts of actors from the movie Giant—the Marfa Lights Viewing Center is entirely unassuming. Marked by a standard highway sign, the center is so simple, low-slung, and earthy, that you could drive right past it if you’re not paying attention. It’s a raised structure rendered in shades of tan, and is surrounded by short red-rock walls, blending into the desert.

From the road, the center’s most prominent feature is a small cylindrical building—about the size of a castle turret—dotted with a neat row of square windows. These are the bathrooms. The actual lights viewing area consists of a deck shaded by slatted roofing, with a few sets of tourist binoculars on tall metal poles, trained on the landscape beyond, called Mitchell Flat—an expanse of dry, brushy grasses, branches, tumbleweeds, discarded Dairy Queen cups and plants that look like they don’t want to be touched. Standing on the deck feels like being at the edge of an empty picture frame, or on a stage upon which a show might be performed—or might not be, depending on your luck. The center is a waiting room for those hoping for an appointment with strange and illusive Marfa lights, which makes it more like an open-air church than a traditional roadside attraction.  The Marfa Lights go by many names: mystery lights, strange lights, weird lights, ghost lights, or, for the cynics among us, “car lights.” According to those who’ve seen the lights, they’re roughly the size of basketballs, appearing in shades of white, blue, yellow, and sometimes red, hovering, merging, twinkling, splitting, flickering, floating, or skittering across Mitchell Flat in the dark.According to the Texas State Historical Association, the lights were first spotted in 1883, long before there were headlights out in West Texas. A young cowhand named Robert Reed Ellison saw a faraway flicker of light while he was driving cattle between Marfa and the neighboring town of Alpine. He thought it may have been an Apache campfire in the distance. He spoke about this with other settlers, and it turned out many of them had spotted the distant shimmer too, but when they had investigated, there was no campsite to be found. There are other myths that lean more towards the supernatural: the lights are the spirits of Apache warriors killed by white settlers, delivered back to their beloved land in the afterlife. Or, in line with other Southwestern tales of atomic testing, the lights might be remnants of laser fusion weapons experiments gone awry—tests which knocked holes into space.

They say the holes attract the lost—people who have disappeared in the area are thought to have fallen through them into some liminal zone, floating forever in another dimension.For a while, the monument to the Marfa Lights was just a plaque on the side of the road, a viewing “area” where guests could stop and gaze out at Mitchell Flat and decide what was real or not. It was an eighth grade class that first suggested the creation of a viewing center. At the Marfa Museum, on East San Antonio, they have the original documents printed in big font on computer paper, worn thin and kept in a big blue bin with a host of newspaper clippings and blueprints from the Texas Department of Transportation. A giant laminated poster made by the class reads, “The M in Marfa stands for mystery.”“Our conceptual plan for the center would blend into the native rangeland and not take away from the landscape,” the students wrote to the congressman overseeing the project. “It is not our intention to distract in any way from our Marfa highlands.” The center, as such, has been absorbed into the ecosystem of this region. It’s weathered in the way that many West Texas things are—sunbleached, dry, and dusty—but somehow largely unchanged, eternally sturdy, as much a regular fixture as the mountains out in the distance. The fluorescent bathroom lights are always on. The binoculars never weather. Even a laminated poster, clinging to a wall, remains the same amount of faded and crimped every time I see it. In its austere design philosophy, the Marfa Lights Viewing Center understands something about the desert and the road itself—what might look like “nothing,” is, in fact, something.In the early aughts, a group of students came out to the center with traffic volume-monitoring equipment, video cameras, binoculars, and chase cars to solve the mystery of the lights. After extensive testing, the students determined the lights were just the headlights of faraway vehicles. Despite that tangible proof, most people seem to disagree—they think the lights are an atmospheric disturbance, Fata Morgana, orbs of gas and moonbeams. Others think they’re supernatural—ghosts or UFO communications from the beyond. Ultimately, no one can say exactly what they are, just that they are. “Have you seen the Marfa Lights?”

asked Paul. I was 21 when I first came out to Marfa, Texas; I didn’t know who I was but I knew I liked Paul, a ranch hand who laid irrigation pipe and herded cattle. He was sweet with the cows, cooing and clicking, guiding them almost messianically, with large callused hands and a low whistle. He was the romantic ideal of the Texas Man, fit with a giant grin, crinkled eyes, and dirty hands. He looked like a charity calendar for a local fire department, and to me, a person who’d tumbled out of a liberal arts college of delicate waif boys, paramours with dark circles and rubber band limbs, Paul looked like what I’ll forever deem a Real Man, even though he was just a few years older than me. Marfa sits at an altitude of 4,685 feet. It’s physically brighter where we are, so close to the sun that every inch of land is illuminated to its ends. We don’t have any movie theaters here, no box-like clubs or bars, no dark spaces where you can go to reliably disappear. Head to any restaurant in town and you’re sure to run into someone you know at the next table. My morbid joke is that walking into a bar in Marfa is like walking into your own funeral— you’ll see everyone you’ve ever known in your entire life, and it feels like they’re all there to see you. The viewing center, a notorious tourist spot, is perhaps the most private place in town.At the Marfa Lights Viewing Center, Paul held my hand. The center was empty other than a lone traveler asleep on a bench, backlit by the fluorescent light streaming from the bathroom. We walked out onto the deck. I looked through the binoculars. “Anything?” he asked. “Nothing,” I said. The metal was cool against my palms. He placed his hands on mine, and spun me around. He was my first kiss at the Marfa Lights Viewing Center.◆My mom grew up in Brooklyn and remembers the first time she saw the West. She recalls the landscape of California as the film strips from the 70s depict it: high contrast, grainy, warm, and otherworldly. Tanned people in tan places, hip bones jutting out of bikinis, sharp and honed like sheathed knives.

Back in her neighborhood, everyone was pale and nature was an occasion. Here, the people were just outside, living, and they looked better for it. She says it felt like Mars. When I was younger, she kept a stack of national park books on her bedside table. She’d flip through them before going to bed, as if trying to train her dreams. When I’d go to say goodnight, I’d usually find her in the middle of a new place, eyes on a waterfall or an unfathomable tree, but the most well-worn pages in her books were the craggy dry places: Death Valley, Joshua Tree, Zion, and the Grand Canyon. We became a road trip family, due to the dual benefits of cost and accessibility. My mom spearheaded every trip, my dad and my brother and I singing show tunes in the car, an annoying chorus of hanger-ons, trilling as she whipped out the map to make sure we’d turned onto the right road. Thanks to her, I developed an early love of the desert—Joshua Tree with its defiant bulky life forms spiking out of the earth; Death Valley, its warning of a name, and drives which took us to miles of crystalline salt flats and up along the ridges of muted pastel peaks. You learn quickly that your voice abstracts to nothing, that sound itself is some kind of weird construct, and that wind will break you apart. The town of Marfa in Far West Texas is beautiful like that. I moved here for a reporting job at the local radio station, a job for which I drive miles to talk to people on wide stretches of land about their lives and desires, package them into sound waves, and send those transmissions into some unspecified beyond. One afternoon, I found myself at the center of a 20,000 acre ranch, having driven hours through the starkness of the Big Bend to get there. Microphone in hand, I stood in a clearing with two strangers, gazing upon rows of hay bales, quiet, muted green, and still in the shadow of a nearby hill. I was there to report on a crop of luxury ranch short-term rentals—gigantic, historic houses in the middle of nowhere, rented out to guests for upwards of $4,000 a night.