GoKawiilIn 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.”
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